How to Cope When it All Goes Right

Understanding the roots of success, is as important as dissecting the causes of failure.

It was a stable, moonlit winter’s night as we cruised high over the cloud tops. A fleecy ocean of stratus cloud hid the countryside, some five thousand feet below, dimly reflecting the moon’s light back up to us. Through occasional gaps in that ethereal pale white shroud, we caught momentary glimpses of village lights, or of a single lonely farmhouse - diamonds of light sprinkled on the dark land underneath. Overhead, the stars glittered with pinpoint brilliance in the black sky.

The engines’ low rumble thrummed reassuringly into the warm cabin while my CPL student Tom fine-tuned synchronisation of the propellors, subtly nudging the blue control levers on this, his first cross-country IFR journey at night. We had previously flown the route during daytime, and also virtually in the “sim” once or twice. Now the time had come to see how he would perform in the real world, during such a high-workload flight. The plan was to track to an airport about 100 miles from our base, to conduct some procedural instrument approaches there, and then to return home. Tom had estimated the detail would last about two and a half hours. Before setting off he had calculated six hours of fuel endurance, and visually checked the contents of the tanks.

He was continuing his cruise check when he nudged me and pointed to the oil pressure gauge for the left hand engine. The needle read a shade lower than its companion on the other side, but still comfortably within the normal range. However they had been in identical positions earlier in the flight, so we noted the deviation and agreed to monitor the indications regularly, for any further changes. Check complete, Tom proposed to self-brief our intended VOR approach, a different, and in some ways more demanding, procedure than the ILS approach specified in the ATIS broadcast which we had listened to a few minutes earlier. I nodded in agreement, with some quiet satisfaction at how he was staying well “ahead of the airplane” in getting the comm and nav radios set up correctly, inputting the airport QNH, and fixing in his mind the required flightpath, headings, levels and visual minima required by the published chart for the approach. The procedure demanded joining a fix overhead the field, then routing outbound and descending for a base turn to join final approach. From there we would proceed downhill at a calculated rate of descent, in order to maintain the correct gradient until making a decision to touch-and-go, or to go around, as per our company’s stabilised-approach-and-landing criteria. This would be a fine test of Tom's ability to manage our flightpath in a relatively unfamiliar, dynamic series of manoeuvres which would require his total, continuing attention.

Just as he had finished the briefing, ATC called on the radio with a weather update: the cloudbase had lowered. It was now some 200 feet above minimum descent altitude. Still a comfortable enough margin, I thought, and not too surprising. Over the years I had experienced more than a few rapid changes in conditions at our coastal destination. There was surely fog lurking a few miles offshore too, I mused to myself. “Probably a bit of fog out at sea, too”, Tom said, without prompting, “let’s be mentally ready for a go around!” I could only agree.

A minute later, another call from ATC. This time, a slight change of plan. To facilitate faster, bigger, (and undoubtedly, in their eyes, more important) traffic somewhere behind us, we would have to postpone the procedure for a while and enter holding. However, if we were ready to accept immediate descent and vectors, directly to final approach, they could get us in first. Before I had finished making my own mental calculation on the feasibility of this plan, I heard Tom utter a crisp “Affirm” to the controller, and watched him write down the initial vector and target altitude on his kneepad. Within moments we were turning to the new heading, descending after the correct checks had been made, and soon enough, following the appropriate twists and turns in the sky, we were handed over on final approach to the tower controller, who cleared us to land.

While Tom managed the descending flightpath according to the rate he had calculated, cross-checking the desired altitudes at successive DME ranges, I glanced from time to time at the ILS glidepath indicator. Its radiated gradient was coincident with that required by our non-precision approach, and I had hidden it from his view so he could focus on using VOR and DME guidance alone. Even as we left the clear black skies to plunge into the top of the cloud layer, his attention was unwavering, and the path was precise. It was as if he was flying the ILS itself, the glidepath needle barely budging, I observed, from its central position. Soon we were rewarded with the appearance, in flashes through the cloud at first, and then in full splendour, of the “Christmas tree” of approach lights to the long runway. Tempting thought it might have been, for Tom to glance up immediately this festival of lights hit his peripheral vision, he remained focused on the instruments, diligently adjusting our trajectory with ever smaller corrections. Just before MDA he looked up, confirmed our landing criteria, and announced “Decision - land”. After a smooth touch-and-go, some more approaches, and an uneventful return flight to home base, we came back to the office to debrief the flight.

Hold on a moment!, you might be saying. What about the lowering cloudbase, the dodgy oil pressure, the demands of the workload on a first-time night approach in a complex aircraft? Surely there is a moment in the story when a critical error was made, when fuel leaked, when a crisis erupted, from which we had a lucky escape, but lived to tell the tale and “learned about flying from that”? But that is not how it happened, and in our debrief there were few faults, if any (none, to be honest), to be chewed over.

You might think that set the scene for a short conversation, but actually the opposite was the case, once we had decided to review the good bits in depth. “Take me through the flight and tell me why it went so well”, I challenged Tom. “OK, first, I had a great night’s sleep last night!” he chuckled, and so we were off to a positive beginning in our surprisingly lengthy examination of the causes of success. When you start to list them, you realise how many there are. From making sure he was unfatigued and had eaten properly, to arriving in good time to prepare for a punctual departure; his excellent cockpit organisation - charts and checklists sorted in proper sequence and ready at hand; listening to the ATIS while en route and not leaving it until the last minute; briefing the approach early while in straight and level flight so as to develop an accurate mental model of the required flightpath; putting “minutes in the bank” by getting tasks out of the way in timely but unhurried succession. His alertness to our engine indications, the  fluent dialogue with ATC, his readiness to develop alternative courses in the event of deteriorating weather - numerous other small actions, thoughts and decisions which, taken as a whole, added up to a safe mission, well flown. He told me how in recent days he had been mentally practicing the precise attitude and power changes required to achieve certain rates of descent, to wean himself off the typical early-day student tendency of overreacting to instantaneous VSI indications. He had been rehearsing, like an actor, verbal exchanges with ATC, so as to hone his technique on the radio.  All of these positives and more, we itemised and discussed.

As students and instructors we can sometimes focus too exclusively on the faults emerging in any given training exercise, at the expense of evaluating our accomplishments. We rummage through catalogues of wrongdoing: the wanderings from altitude and heading, the missed radio calls, the mismanaged airspeeds and more, and we analyse their causes and make promises to ourselves never to repeat these errors. In focusing entirely on our lapses, however, we imply that the good parts are a “given”. But in fact they are not given. Each correct, successful outcome is as much influenced by decisions, actions, knowledge, attitudes and experience, as are our failures to meet the required levels of attainment. If we don’t understand these good inputs and how they affect our performance, then we are destined, sooner to later, to over-estimate our abilities and to be given a short, sharp surprise or two.

A useful category in the Threat and Error Management conceptual model, is that of Undesired Aircraft State (UAS), defined as ‘flight crew-induced aircraft position or speed deviations, misapplication of flight controls, or incorrect systems configuration, associated with a reduction in margins of safety”. In analysing incidents and accidents, or in actual flying to operational or manufacturers’ norms, we can match achieved performance against such ideals. But perhaps we should also consider the notion of (let’s call it) Desired Aircraft State - DAS? -  in similar depth after each flight, and congratulate ourselves - not too effusively - when we have achieved it, but more important, seeking to discern how, and why, we made that happen.

We can never know too much about the faults in our flying - we should leave ample room for understanding our achievements, too.

-o0o-

A version of this article was first published in "Flight Training News" magazine (U.K.), November 2015