This week we discuss the subtle dangers associated with deviating from procedure in an aircraft.
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00:01
Behind the Prop Intro
Clear prop 773 Cherokee number two following. Flynn traffic three mile final makes for. In Runway two five going four miles.
00:10
Nick Alan
This is behind the prop with United Flight Systems owner and licensed pilot Bobby Doss and his co host, major airline captain and designated pilot examiner Wally Mulhern. Now let's go behind the prop.
00:24
Bobby Doss
What's up, Wally?
00:25
Wally Mulhern
Hey Bobby, how are you?
00:27
Bobby Doss
I am fantastic as always this week. Over the last few weeks we've been talking about a topic that we decided to make a show. It's how this magic happens, people. But we've seen a number of things at the fly school, check rides, just our own flying and watching people that made us think we're gonna do this show this week on normalization of deviation. And we've talked about this, I know it on a couple of shows. But going to break down a number of things that Wally has seen lately on checkrides that I've seen at the flight school, we've talked about at safety meetings and just make sure that everybody out there is doing the right thing to make sure that you're not normalizing deviation as pilot in command and being a better pilot. What do you think, Wally?
01:15
Bobby Doss
Tell us a little bit about your thoughts and then you can jump into your first most recent example on a check ride.
01:23
Wally Mulhern
Well, yeah, you know, in flying airplanes is a lot like life. It's nothing more than a bunch of risk analysis. I'm in a hotel right now out in Honolulu, Hawaii. I'm in a room on the sixth floor. And so this morning I left my room, I got in an elevator, I went down to the lobby, I walked across to a coffee place in the lobby. I bought a cup of coffee and something to eat from people who I don't know. And I came back, got back in the elevator, came to my room and I ate it and drank my coffee. So did I take some risks by doing that? Absolutely I did. I got in an elevator, I could, you know, the elevator could get stuck. It could have, I guess, fallen.
02:11
Wally Mulhern
I went, I bought food from people and drink from people who, I don't know. I mean it could have been laced with bad stuff. But I took a risk. I analyzed the risk. I was hungry, I was thirsty, I needed my coffee. I went and did it. I came back and I did that and I'm okay, thank goodness. And we do that in airplanes. And I will say to people on a checkride, I'll say, if your loved one said to you this morning, I want you to guarantee Me that we're not in an airplane crash today. Could you do that? And a lot of times they'd say, no, I couldn't do that. I'd say, well, sure you could. And a lot of times they'll say, well, we'll be real careful. We'll check everything twice and we'll do all this.
03:05
Wally Mulhern
And I said, well, that still doesn't guarantee it, really. The way, the only way we can guarantee it is to not go fly. Okay, so we could do that. So we've already accepted the risk that we are taking a risk, albeit a very, very minute risk, but we are taking a risk. And what tends to happen is, you know, as we fly, you know, it's like driving down the road. Well, okay, the, you know, as a new driver, you're probably gonna, you know, if the speed limit's 50, you're probably going to drive 35 or 40. And then as you get a little bit more confident, then you're going to ease up to 50. And then as you get complacent, you're going to go to 55 and then 60 and then 80 and then 90. And that's when we start deviating.
04:04
Wally Mulhern
I, I rented a car a few weeks ago that was a really nice car, and it was so smooth that driving down this toll road in the city I was in, I'd looked down, I was doing 85 because the car was just so smooth. And I'm thinking, whoa, this is not good. I've. I've got to pay attention a little bit more because that's way over the speed limit and, you know, way dangerous. So slow it down. So what we find in air, in flying, is that, you know, we. I'm going to use the word complacent, but we do get complacent with things. We get confident. And you know, something as easy as taxing on the taxi line, well, you know, there's a little fudge factor built in, so I can be a little bit to the right.
05:02
Wally Mulhern
Okay, so today I'm a foot to the right. Well, now tomorrow I'm a foot to the right of that foot to the right. So now we're two feet to the right. Well, tomorrow. Now I'm one foot to the right of a foot to the right. Now we're three feet. So we're inching closer and closer to those that hanger on the right side or the. Or the. Whatever is over on the right side, because that taxiing line was. Was painted there for a reason. So that's what we find ourselves doing. And we find ourselves. You know, we've got. We've got several examples of instances to talk about, but we got to get back to being on that line. We got to move back to the left and stay on that line. You know, there's a taxi line there for a reason.
05:53
Wally Mulhern
Taxi on it, gosh darn it.
05:57
Bobby Doss
Yeah, but, Wally, there's a car coming. Like, what. I mean, I. I got to move over, let the car go by.
06:04
Wally Mulhern
Well, yeah, that. That's a tough call. I mean, we. We fly out of a little general aviation airport, and there's. There's a lot of cars and fuel trucks and all kinds of things moving around, so. Yeah, I mean, are there times where getting off that taxi line is appropriate? Yes, there are there. But let's not make that the norm. Let's make that the exception of the rule. Hey, I'm going to get off this taxi line because of this one. One thing I find that at a particular airport is as we're taxing out there's some cars parked over to the left. And what the applicants tend to want to do is they want to move to the right to stay away from those cars on the left. And. Okay, I understand their logic.
07:00
Wally Mulhern
I still believe that if they stayed on the taxi line, there would be plenty of clearance. But having said that, the irony of it is when we move to the right of the taxi line, their eyes are over to the left where the cars are. So we're moving right of the center line, but we're looking left. You know, if I'm moving right, I want to look right, because maybe there's something over there to the right that we want to avoid as well, since we're moving to the right of the center line. Yeah.
07:32
Bobby Doss
And then I would bet if there were no cars there, you could go out there or put a camera out there, and they would still deviate from the center line because they've just built. We've. We've. It inadvertently built this habit of moving right in that space on that taxiway.
07:49
Wally Mulhern
Yeah, exactly.
07:53
Bobby Doss
We talk, and it's easy to pick and be. Be the podcast pilots and critique everyone. We're not trying to do that. We're trying to make everybody safer. But you've had a couple of examples on checkrides lately that we've. We've shared and discussed. That is really the. It could. It could create a normalization of deviation that could really get somebody hurt. And we Talk about it. People in the last few weeks have talked about your top five things in my office. What are the top five most important things that you must have when you're flying an aircraft, Wally? Well, you can go slow for. You can go slow for everybody.
08:31
Wally Mulhern
Yeah, you might want to write this down because this is important. Number one is fuel. Number two is fuel. Number three is fuel. And if you're seeing a trend here, you can go ahead and put number four and five down. But number four is fuel, and number five is fuel. You know, another list that I've come up with. And, and I've started saying this to people on checkrides. If anybody out there has recently had a checkride with me, you've probably heard me say this. I'll tell the applicant that we have. Usually this is when we're about to get in the airplane and go fly. I'll say we have three goals today. Our number one goal is to not die. Our number two goal is to complete a checkride, and our number three goal is to maybe have a little bit of fun.
09:29
Wally Mulhern
And I'll say if we hit all three of them, it's been an absolute great day. If we get two of them, it's been a pretty good day. And if we get one of them, at least we come back to do it another day. Now, that's an oversimplification. We could have a, you know, we could throw in there. Let's not violate any airspace. Let's not violate any fars. Let's not break any airplanes. We could, you know, we could expand that list a little bit, but, you know, that's our ultimate goal, is to come back safely on any flight. That's, that's our first goal. So that's really what we're trying to make it. You know, that's the message we're trying to make with this podcast. We're not trying to teach people how to pass check rides.
10:24
Wally Mulhern
You know, if that comes in there along the way, that's great. But ultimately, we want to make safer pilots.
10:34
Bobby Doss
So you're taxing out on a recent check ride, and you see something that maybe the applicant doesn't see, and it's a big deal. What was that?
10:46
Wally Mulhern
Yeah, this particular airplane had a, a, an engine monitor in it, which within the engine monitor basically had a fuel calculator, if you will, a fuel totalizer, whatever you want to call it. But the, some of the airplanes have these, and in this airplane, it the brand of the engine monitor was a JPI830 which is what the FAA calls secondary. In other words, it cannot be used to replace all the engine instruments. So this airplane still had fuel gauges, it had oil pressure tachometer and all that stuff. But all this information is displayed on this JPI830 + a lot more stuff. And so when you start up the engine, the JPI asks you if you refueled and all you got to do is say yes. And then it will just confirm the total amount of fuel.
11:59
Wally Mulhern
And this one is set as a default to full fuel. So all you got to do is hit yes again. I think it's yes or confirm, I don't know. But it's two button pushes. And now this little computer that we now have in the airplane that the JPI 830 knows how much fuel you have on board, or it, I should say it knows how much you told it is on board. So in this particular case, full fuel and it has a fuel flow indicator and it starts subtracting. So you have a very nice digital readout of how much fuel is on board. And I say how much fuel is on board?
12:42
Wally Mulhern
What I should say is how much fuel is that is calculated to be on board because it knows the number that you told it was in the airplane and then it measures fuel flow and it subtracts it. So if there's a fuel leak, this little instrument will not know about it and it will give you an unusually false high reading. So you still got to use the fuel gauges. You can't just rely on this totally. But the applicant never reset it or he never told the airplane how much fuel it was on board. So we taxi out and we get in the run up area and you know, it says fuel on board zero. And it said fuel used 56 gallons. And this was in an airplane that does not hold 56 gallons. And I'm just looking at that and it's flashing at us.
13:50
Wally Mulhern
It's, you know, it's red and it's flashing, but we're just totally ignoring it. And he finally looked over and saw it and finally did something about it. But, you know, and we debriefed it in depth. And the point was, why was this not part of your initial, you know, when we start up, you know, we need to reach over and rectify this situation right now. The fact that, you know, we're taxiing out in an airplane that says we've got zero fuel is a little concerning to me. Now, obviously we didn't have zero fuel because the engine was running. And his fault, his thought was, well, I just pre flighted, I just got up on the wing and I looked in there and I saw both tanks were full.
14:45
Wally Mulhern
So the point is we have this safety piece of equipment in our airplane and we're totally ignoring it. If you went to the hospital to visit a loved one who is intensive care and you went in their room and on the monitor machine that hooked up to your loved one, if the blood pressure was going beep, beep and it was flashing red, I think you would go to the nurse's station and say, hey, Uncle Bob's blood pressure is too low, come do something about it. And I would like to think the medical professionals wouldn't just say, Uncle Bob's fine. I would like to think they would do something about it. But in airplanes we sometimes just ignore that stuff.
15:44
Bobby Doss
Yeah, I think we do, unfortunately, and we have many other examples we're going to talk through here. You've shared a story. It's been a long time and it's worth revisiting. And we had one at our flight school where two pilots, two professional pilots at the flight school and your daughter are professional pilots. And there's some consequences that two pilot pre flight in both cases created issues. I'll share mine. First, there was a chief and an assistant chief doing some night operations and they were going to go fly and do a few things and they're not free and clear from making mistakes either.
16:26
Bobby Doss
And they went and did some flying and when they got to about, I would say, half of their original destination, they realized that the fuel gauges were on the right side, were much lower than on the left and did what they did in the cockpit to do some troubleshooting and went ahead and diverted and landed at a close airport just to make sure there weren't, wasn't an issue. And lo and behold, they had left the fuel cap off. And they're both pretty confident that they checked that fuel cap. But they recognize, I think after that happened that maybe they both thought the other one checked that fuel cap. Right. It's a, it's almost a trust factor that it would be very susceptible to fall into if I was going to fly with you, Wally, and in your Saratoga.
17:16
Bobby Doss
I don't know much about the Saratoga and you pre flight it. And I'm kind of following you around. But I'm going to probably trust everything you do. But based on my knowledge, I'm probably going to still check the fuel, put my eyeballs on it and ask to see the oil or something. I'm not going to just believe everything, but it would be easy to get sucked into that. It's your plane, you know what it's doing. You know it better than me. I might trust you. I tell everybody no one around here should trust another pilot. It's not because we're intentionally going to make a. Make a mistake. But you just shouldn't trust the pilot. If they say they check the fuel, check it again. What's that, what's that minute gonna really cost you in the grand scheme of things?
17:59
Bobby Doss
You never know if there's too many opportunities for mistakes. You and your daughter had a recent incident, maybe a year now. But talk about what the pre flight by two professional pilots did for you guys.
18:15
Wally Mulhern
Yeah, we, my youngest daughter and I were going up to Monroe, Louisiana to pick up some patients and bring them back to Houston with an organization that we fly for. And so went out to the airport here in Houston and we got to the airplane and we did kind of the way we always have done it. We started attacking the airplane. And I don't mean literally, but between the two of us, we do the pre flight and you know, it's in a hangar, we got to pull it out of the hangar. You know, usually I go look at the oil just because I'm taller and it's easier for me to take care of the oil. Maybe I added a cord, I don't really remember. But between the two of us we kind of did a pre flight and maybe it wasn't extremely well organized.
19:23
Wally Mulhern
Anyway, we get in the airplane and went to start it up and it was, we had a real difficult time starting the airplane. And I don't ever have trouble starting the airplane, especially with a cold engine. Usually starts right up. But anyway, this particular day it was, she just didn't want to start. We finally got her going and we took off and we flew the hour and 15 minute flight to Monroe and we called for fuel. The fueler came down and fueled it. And I was inside saying hello to the patients and my daughter was out pre flighting the airplane and I came out, she goes, dad, there was a lot of water in the left tank.
20:19
Wally Mulhern
And the guy that was kind of the, that ran the organization that were flying for immediately got on the phone to the FBO that had just filled the airplane up and really read the Mariah act, that they had just put a bunch of water in our airplane. Anyway, we sumped it and sumped it, and were both convinced that there was no more water in the airplane. Now, the right side, I mean, they put fuel in both sides, but there was no water in the right side. It was just in the left tank. So anyway, so we take off. We're heading back to Houston, and about halfway back, it occurred to me that maybe that water in that tank was there in Houston, and maybe that's what was causing us to have issues starting the engine.
21:16
Wally Mulhern
We were trying to start it with water rather than gas. And so I muted the folks in the back of the airplane. I asked my daughter, I said, hey, did you sump the tanks in Houston? And she said, no, I thought you did. And we just kind of looked at each other and went, oh my gosh. So we never sunk the tanks. And as I look back on it, I believe we had water in the tanks in Houston and we took off. And obviously the outcome was, you know, we completed the flight successfully. And, you know, usually when there's water in there, it's not a whole bunch. So in this case, obviously didn't cause the engine to quit running. But that was a big eye opener for me.
22:10
Wally Mulhern
And you know, at the time, my daughter was experienced, I think she was a CFI at that point, but for sure a commercial pilot. And you know, I've got lots of experience, so it can happen. And there's an example of two pilot in commands, kind of thinking the other one had something taken care of and we didn't.
22:38
Bobby Doss
Well, I think my parents always used to joke about dropping my sister. Similarly, they both thought they had a hold of her and they dropped her, but maybe that was me. I don't remember. But similar things happen, right?
22:50
Wally Mulhern
Right.
22:50
Bobby Doss
And I think that's just one of those things where you just can't take those chances. And it's never going to be intentional. We, we talk about the guy who ran out of gas or the person that had something bad happen. They didn't start the day thinking, I want to run out of gas. There's something that led to those experiences. Recently you spoke at one of our safety meetings, and we kind of put together a pseudo skit before that. And you asked me to ask you if I got the notam or the notifications of the left Runway being, or the Runway being closed at Hooks Airport. Did you want to talk about that? Notam.
23:28
Wally Mulhern
Yeah, I, I, I started out a safety meeting by, I said, bobby, did you tell the CFIs about the Runway closure? Notam. And Bobby was, you know, we had set this up, and he said, no, I forgot to tell him about this. So as all the CFIs are sitting there, about 20 of them, I said, yeah, the Runway one seven right at hooks is going to be closed from August 25th through the 28th for resurfacing. And you see all the CFIs just jumping into panic mode. I mean, they're all pulling out their schedules, whether it's on their phone or whatever, and they're looking to see how many flights they're going to have to cancel because of the Runway closure that's coming up that they didn't know about.
24:23
Wally Mulhern
And some of them, I think we're actually beginning to text students and tell them, hey, we're not going to be all fly next week. And then I said to him, I said, the good news is that the Runway is only going to be closed for four days. It was originally going to be closed for eight days because it's being closed to be resurfaced. And they only need to resurface the left side of the Runway because nobody lands on the right side of the Runway or nobody lands in the middle of the Runway. So wheels never touch the right side of the Runway. And they all looked like they didn't unders. They didn't know if I was kidding or what at this point. And then I, I did say, yeah, I'm kidding. The Runway is really not going to be closed. Everything's good.
25:07
Wally Mulhern
But my point is, we're teaching that, you know, that center line is just a suggestion, and that center line is not a suggestion. We need to land the, you know, the airplane needs to land on top of the center line. And, and that's just the right thing to do because now when we move over to that other Runway that's only 35ft wide, if we're putting the airplane on the center line, much better chance of a successful outcome on a, you know, a not so wide Runway. Yeah.
25:47
Bobby Doss
And it's a little left. Turning tendencies, it could be a little bit left. The prevailing winds, it could be a lot of little things, but it is that I had it, I had a syndrome where I was always a little left. Right. And it became the norm. I was hoping maybe my right tire caught the center line. But it does make a huge difference. When you go from a hundred foot wide Runway to a 35 foot wide Runway, it definitely changes things. And that's where you don't want to normalize that deviation from that center line. For sure.
26:22
Wally Mulhern
Yeah, I mean 100.
26:25
Bobby Doss
Go ahead.
26:27
Wally Mulhern
You know, I was going to say, you just do the math. 100 foot wide Runway. If, if we're lead, we're now landing left by 10ft. Well, you can say, well, there's 40ft over there. Okay, now a 35 foot Runway. You know, there's only 17 and a half feet on each side. We land 10ft left. Well, there's only 7ft now over there. And how far out does that left main gear go? You know, there's a few feet right there. So now you're only maybe 2, 3ft from the weeds.
27:05
Bobby Doss
Yep, that'll sneak up and bite you. I was gonna say we've had Paul Craig on the show a number of times. He's the author of the Killing Zone and has done a lot to help me help the school and I think help aviation. The Killing Zone was a great book. If you haven't listened that episode, go listen to it. But we both reviewed an article in Flying magazine this past week, dated August 22, 2023, called Winter Pilots the most Dangerous. And a lot of the topics in this article kind of point back to the same thing. So we won't dissect the article, but it's a lot about, you know, how a private pilot is really good at landing when they graduate their private pilot checkride.
27:51
Bobby Doss
But as I go to instrument training and I go missed and go miss that, you know, Maybe I'm landing 1, 1 50th of the time that I was landing while I was practicing as a private pilot. And it's just your skills are going to erode. So you got to make sure you stay on top of those things. I think that while it may be not normalization of deviation, it is actually intended deviation. That pilots just don't recognize that skill is something you got to keep up and you got to keep practicing it. Anything else from that article that you want to highlight there, Wally?
28:25
Wally Mulhern
No, you know, I, I compare it to riding a bicycle. You know, when you learn, if you go back and look at the statistics, there are very few crashes of student pilots soloing. There are very, you know, there are very few. They're just, there aren't that many, but there are a bunch of crashes, of people after they get their private pilot certificate. And it's like, you know when you're learning to ride a bicycle, probably some adult is out in the street with you, going up and down the street with you and you know, you might fall down and skin your knee, but it's nothing catastrophic.
29:07
Wally Mulhern
You know, when you become dangerous as a five year old learning to ride a bike, however you are, however old you are, when you learn to ride a two wheel bike, I mean it's not out in front of the house with the parents watching you that you're probably going to get hurt. It's when you go down the street and your friends go out in the woods and maybe the helmets come off and someone builds a ramp and it seems like a good idea to take that bicycle over that ramp. Well, that's when people start getting hurt. And same thing with flying airplanes.
29:47
Bobby Doss
Do kids play outside anymore? I didn't think that. I didn't think those existed. And yeah, the good old days. From a couple of 50 plus guys on the podcast remembering what it was like to be a kid back when you played outside.
30:03
Wally Mulhern
Right.
30:03
Bobby Doss
And did fun things. Well, I think that's a pretty good show there. As you fly yourself, as you fly with other flight instructors. And if you're a flight instructor, make sure you don't normalize deviation. It will sneak up and bite you or your students or both. Make sure those pre flights are complete and not shared responsibilities that you miss or forget about. And as always, fly safely and stay behind the prop.
30:33
Nick Alan
Thanks for checking out the behind the Prop podcast. Be sure to click subscribe and check us out online@bravetheprop.com behind the Prop is recorded in Houston, Texas. Creator and host is Bobby Doss. Co host is Wally Mulhern. The show is for entertainment purposes only and is not meant to replace actual flight instruction. Thanks for listening and remember, fly safe.