Abnormal

Time pressures, real or imagined, can lead to careless oversights, so I paused to clear my head. I scanned the checklist one last time and reached for the seatbelt when something caught my eye: A stray cable dangled between the rudder pedals at my feet. I pressed on the right pedal, and the rudder swung right. Left foot, left rudder. It gave me some solace that I hadn’t just stumbled on a primary flight control failure, but I didn’t care to take off with a mystery connector that didn’t connect. I called AOPA’s staff airframe and powerplant mechanic, Carlo Cilliers, who said a cotter key likely had worked loose on the parking brake. I texted him a photo to confirm, and within minutes he was wedged under the panel reconnecting the cable.

The preflight inspection had served its purpose. This methodical check of the airplane is designed to uncover any airworthiness issues before startup and to assess mechanical anomalies that could affect the flight. A preflight can turn up anything from a bird’s nest in the tail cone to water in the fuel. More often, it adds relatively benign squawks to the list for the mechanic, like a dented fairing or a missing inspection panel screw. Evaluating each anomaly—often with the help of a CFI or mechanic—refines our understanding of what the airplane needs to fly safely and legally.

At the start of my training, I read each line of the preflight checklist with no real sense of what to look for. Aileron…yep, that’s this one. Stall warning opening…open? Each lesson, my understanding grew as I talked through the steps with my instructor. Is the fuel free of contaminants? Do the flight controls move freely and as expected? Is the pitot tube clear? My check became more intentional.

I’ve learned the most from the preflights that didn’t go as expected. At first, that was most of them. I questioned the cracks at the wing tips and learned about stop-drilling to prevent the progression of cracking; I flagged a flat spot on the tire and learned it could still lose a bit more tread. As I developed a better understanding of the mechanics of the airplane, I began to pay extra attention to the parts that move, the bolts that attach, and sweated the cosmetics less.

In the air, too, we tend to learn the most when things don’t turn out as intended. There’s nothing like runaway trim to refresh your knowledge of ways to disconnect the autopilot, and the sound of a rough-running engine will renew your respect for conditions conducive to carburetor ice. Mechanical abnormalities challenge our systems knowledge and problem solving and engrave lessons on our memories that may have seemed like an abstraction in ground school.

Sometimes we create abnormal situations for ourselves. If we’re lucky, it happens in front of an instructor who seizes the opportunity to fill in our gaps in knowledge. On a recent instrument currency flight with an instructor, I loaded an approach to a nearby airport into the GPS navigator. The approach chart showed a hold at the initial approach fix to reverse course when arriving from the north and “NoPT”—don’t fly the course reversal—when arriving from the south as we were. My instructor gave me a mock clearance to the initial approach fix and instructed me to fly the hold, so I selected the fix on the flight plan page of the GPS and activated the approach. When I quickly toggled back to the map page, she stopped me.

What had I done wrong? She sent me back to the flight plan page, where I saw no hold was loaded in the approach sequence. Of course, the GPS unit didn’t know I’d been cleared for anything other than the published approach. My instructor reminded me to always review an approach before leaving the flight plan screen and showed me how to load the hold.

In the debrief later, the CFI remarked that it’s always good when something goes wrong on a training flight because it gives her a chance to teach the pilot something new. No one’s seeking out emergencies for the fun of it, but glitches and gaffes are more valuable for learning than flights where all goes as planned. And no ground school study can replace the real-life pop quiz of that doesn’t seem right. FT

Share your lessons learned from flights that didn’t go as planned with “Flight Lesson” submissions to [email protected].