How Do You Eat An Elephant? (Part Deux)

Congratulations! You made it through Ground School with an exam score of 100, so now it's time to go learn to fly whatever new airplane your company has put you in. Remember - you can do this. One bite at a time.

This is the time that pilots who are doing their first type, first multiengine turboprop or jet, and/or first crewed cockpit head to the simulator portion of their training and really start to hyperventilate. Don’t! Just realize it all comes together in an (actually) pretty logical manner. But first let's discuss a couple of concepts. These are not hard and fast rules, but they are good rules of thumb. By and large the following words comprise good practices in how you fly your new airplane.

If you read Part 1 of this series of articles, we discussed preparation for Ground School and Beyond. So let's move on to another new concept for pilots going through their first initial type rating. But first a repeat of a few ground rules -

1. This IS an attempt to lay out various parts of initial training and how all of these areas of study works in the 2-pilot cockpit.

2. This IS one way of doing things, and not THE way.

3. This IS NOT necessarily for pilots who have healthy background in 121 or 135 flying, or have many hours of 2-pilot operations.

4. This IS NOT meant to supersede manufacturer, CAE/FSI, or your company’s policies or procedures.

5. This IS NOT the only way to do things.

---

The Departure Brief - I know I've heard the term, but what does it really look like?

One of the very first things on the checklist of your new airplane is going to be the Departure Brief. So let’s get that out of the way. You may have never flown in a crewed aircraft before, but the Departure Brief is where you get every one on the same page. Some companies like to use the Acronym AWARE for this Brief. That stands for -

A - Airport conditions

W - Weather considerations

A - Aircraft condition/Abort considerations\

R - Runway considerations

E - Everything else that needs to be discussed

The company at which I spent the majority of my flying career used the acronym WARTS to do this brief. I still use it to this day. (Old habits die hard) -

W - Weather

A - Aborts and Abnormals

R - Runway

T - Terrain

S - SIDS/Special Pages/Special Procedures

Let me give you a mythical brief and show you how I like to do this. Maybe you can use this as an example. Here goes -

“Weather. The weather this morning is pretty crummy. Current RVR is 1200. So that means we cannot come back in here in the event of an emergency so we need to have a takeoff alternate in mind. My takeoff alternate for today is _________. How does that sound to you?

Aborts and Abnormals. Either one of us can call for an abort if we see something, but let me explain what my thought processes are. I will pretty much stop for anything below 70 knots. Above 70 knots I will stop for engine failure indication, fire indication, loss of directional control , or if I don’t think we’re capable of flying. If we are within 5 knots of V1, I will only stop if I don’t think we’re capable of flying. By the time we see anything else and respond to it, we will have exceeded V1 and I don’t want to abort at that point. But if we do abort prior to that, I will say in a loud voice “aborting!”, I will pull the thrust levers to idle and use the brakes to their maximum effectiveness. It is your job to call the ground spoilers up or not up and whether or not we are decelerating. Once we get stopped, you can call the tower, tell them that we have aborted, and ask them if they see any smoke or flame, if appropriate. If able, we will clear the runway and determine where we go, and what we do next. In the event of an abnormal the pilot flying, me, will continue to fly. The pilot monitoring, you, will do any appropriate memory items and pull out the QRH. At that point I will take the radios and continue to fly, and you will run the appropriate checklist. We will then determine where we go and what we do. Any questions?

Runway. We are expecting to depart on runway ___ today and it is raining out so we used wet numbers for our performance numbers. As I just said, we expect to be using Runway . It is ____ feet long and our Takeoff data says we will need _____ feet, so performance looks good.

Terrain. Terrain is not a factor today as the MSA is only 2500 feet all around the airport. (Or I might note that we are in Seattle today and the lowest MSA is to the west and the highest MSA is to the east so if we have a problem we will go out over the water to the west, stay away from the terrain to the east and run our checklists).

SIDS/Special Pages/Special Procedures. We are flight planned to do the _______ departure. It has no speed restrictions (or brief any that are on the SID). There is a climb gradient of ___fpm that we need to be aware of. Any questions?”

That took less than 2 minutes to set the tone for the flight and discuss the pertinent issues of the day. The Examiner on check ride day is going to be looking for a good brief, and truthfully, you need to set the tone for the conduct of the flight as the Pilot Flying. In my opinion, this is where you do it. So learn how to do this.

You can use AWARE or WARTS, or whatever checklist briefing acronym your company uses, but sit at home before your sim periods start and go through this until the Departure Brief becomes second nature. You're going to be doing a Departure Brief for the rest of your professional flying career, so get used to doing it now. The point is to develop a brief that covers the conduct of the flight. You can use the format above or something similar. But do it.

Let’s stop there for today. That’s probably enough for you to chew on. We’ve got a lot more fish to fry, and we'll do that on subsequent articles. As I said before, if you have questions about what I’ve been discussing, please feel free to post comments, or message me directly. I am happy to help.