This episode of Behind the Prop examines how cockpit distractions—both old and new—continue to threaten pilot safety across all levels of aviation. Bobby and Wally revisit major airline accidents and modern GA incidents to show how even minor issues can escalate when pilots lose focus on flying the airplane. They break down today’s top distraction sources, from overreliance on iPads and automation to casual cockpit conversation during critical phases of flight. The hosts also clarify misunderstood scenarios like open doors on takeoff and discuss why proper training, sterile cockpit discipline, and error recognition are essential defenses. The episode ultimately reinforces that great pilots aren’t distraction-free—they’re the ones who catch distractions early and stay committed to aviate, navigate, communicate.
In this episode of Behind the Prop, Bobby Doss and Wally Mulhern unpack one of the most persistent and underestimated threats in aviation: cockpit distraction. Drawing from both historical airline accidents and modern general aviation trends, they explore how small lapses in attention can escalate into major safety events. The hosts revisit the tragedies of Eastern Airlines Flight 401 and United Flight 173, where professional crews became so focused on minor gear-indicator issues that they stopped flying the airplane—proving that distraction, not mechanical failure, can be the true killer. With the NTSB attributing 15–20% of GA accidents to distraction, the need for proactive management has never been clearer.
The conversation moves into the cockpit realities of today’s pilots, where heavy reliance on iPads, automation, and touchscreen avionics often leads to excessive head-down time. Bobby and Wally share recent examples from training flights where pilots missed radio calls, misprogrammed GPS units, or became task-saturated simply because tech drew their attention away from flying. They emphasize the importance of preparing devices and routes before takeoff, and using automation deliberately rather than reactively. A key takeaway is that pilots must be willing to self-identify errors, speak up immediately, and assume the mistake is theirs until proven otherwise—a mindset that dramatically improves safety margins.
The episode also highlights the critical role of the sterile cockpit, with Bobby advocating its use below 2,500 feet in GA. The hosts explain how nonessential chatter during taxi, takeoff, or climb dilutes situational awareness and can overwhelm newer pilots. They encourage instructors to reduce excessive talking as students advance, creating the “intentional silence” needed for real concentration and independent decision-making.
Finally, Bobby and Wally address a commonly misunderstood distraction: open doors during takeoff or initial climb. They explain why an open door is typically benign, why rejecting a takeoff is often riskier, and why pilots must train for these scenarios before facing them unexpectedly.
The episode closes with a call to action—pilots should openly discuss distractions, log them, review them, and build habits that keep them anchored to the core principle of aviation: aviate, navigate, communicate.
00:01
Behind the Prop Intro
Clear prop 773 Cherokee number two following twin traffic three mile final clear. Touch one Charlie Bravo Raceford in Runway two five join four mile final.
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.
00:26
Bobby Doss
What's up, Wally?
00:27
Wally Mulhern
Hey Bobby, how are you?
00:29
Bobby Doss
I am fantastic as always. We are now in the month of December. It's becoming the holiday season. Weather's getting cold. And this is going to be one of those kind of lesson learned shows that we talk through. We're going to talk a little bit about a silent killer and it's all about managing distractions in the cockpit. We've talked about a lot of stuff, Wally, but I don't think we've ever covered this subject thoroughly. You're a professional pilot. Any shocking stories where professional pilots got distracted?
01:01
Wally Mulhern
Yeah, there are quite a few of them. There are, there are two that really come to light and one of them was Eastern Airlines. Back in the day. This probably took ply, I don't even know the date of this, but I want to say in the 70s. And Eastern Airlines L1011, which. Is airliner made by Lockheed. And it looked a little bit like a DC10. It was a trijet, had three engines, one on each wing and one mounted in the tail. But I think Delta and Eastern were the two main US airlines that flew them. So it was a wide body airplane, a big jet, and had three pilots with a flight engineer, two pilots and a flight engineer.
01:54
Wally Mulhern
I don't know where they were coming from, but they were attempting to land in Miami and they put the gear down and they did not get three green lights. So they went out and they held over the Everglades west of Miami Airport and they're trying to troubleshoot this gear problem. Now at this point they didn't know if they really thought. I think they thought that one of the gears was not down because they didn't get a green light. And. They were out troubleshooting the situation. And I really don't know what exactly they did, but at the end of the day, what was wrong with the airplane was it was a light bulb, a 39 cent light bulb had burned out and they got distracted. All three pilots were focused on the problem at hand rather than someone flying the airplane.
03:01
Wally Mulhern
Somehow, I guess the autopilot clicked off and they flew the airplane into the Everglades. A perfectly good airplane. They flew in The Everglades and killed quite a few people. There was another situation, this one hits home a little bit closer. Well, both my parents worked for Eastern Airlines back in the day. Not they were long gone by the time this, that accident had happened. But another one was. United airlines. Flew a DC8 into. Well, actually they flamed out all four engines on a DC8 up in Portland, Oregon because they were out troubleshooting an issue. And I believe it was the same sort of thing. They had a light bulb with a gear indication and as they're out there troubleshooting the situation, they ran out of fuel and they crashed up there as well.
04:03
Wally Mulhern
So, you know, we can sit here and it's really easy to Monday morning quarterback everything. I mean we can go back and we can, you know, look at lots of accidents and it's real easy to sit here and say, my gosh, how could this happen? In both of these cases they were three pilot crews. And. Distractions happened and there's a lot of dead people because of it. It's still a problem today, I believe if I'm looking at. The NTSB data. The NTSB says that in 15 to 20% of general aviation accidents list a distraction as a contributing factor. So I think there's. You take a two pronged approach to this. A, you try not to get distracted. But B, you realize that if you are distracted, you've got to learn how to manage it. And that's kind of.
05:16
Wally Mulhern
What we want to talk about here.
05:19
Bobby Doss
Yeah, it's kind of crazy. While you're talking, I'm doing a little bit more research. The Eastern Airlines Accident happened on December 29, 1972 and the United Airlines Flight 173 happened on December 28, 1978. Very eerie that those both happened on the 28th and 29th of December. Six years apart from one another. But it is. And I've had distractions. We talked about some distractions. But the meat of what we want to get down tonight is really how do you manage the distraction? And we talk a lot about aviate, navigate, communicate.
06:00
Wally Mulhern
But.
06:00
Bobby Doss
But what are some real world practices that we can talk about? We've all heard the Swiss cheese model. We've had a number of pros on this show talk about Paul Craig from the Killing Zone and many others talk about. It's not just the dropping a pin or something happening in the cockpit that starts this. How do three professional pilots get so distracted by a 39 cent light bulb that they all perish? I think it's human nature. I mean, we're humans, right? Is that not a big part of it?
06:36
Wally Mulhern
I think so. I think if we look at everyday life, so we both have kids who are young adults and so when you first handed your car keys to either your son or your daughter and said, here you go somewhere. What was the thing that scared you the most? That's a rhetorical question. I know when I did that the thing that scared me the most was texting and driving. And we are all so attached to our phones. I think we all see accidents. We see maybe a head on collision. Used to be that the first thing that you kind of that came to mind was somebody was under the influence of alcohol. Probably nowadays, I think, I don't know, maybe I'm in the minority.
07:36
Wally Mulhern
But I think the first thing that we think about is gee, I wonder if one of the drivers was texting and driving and got distracted. So. It'S not just in flying airplanes, it's in that as well. Yeah.
07:55
Bobby Doss
I am an ex police officer, so I think I was more worried about the other drivers. I think they were probably going to be at their best the first time they went around the neighborhood. But yes, as they got a little bit more time under their belt, I still worry about texting and driving. My son Snapchats me and I know he's on the freeway. I'm like, what are you doing? You can't send me a picture of yourself when you're on the freeway. It is. I think we're so used to having our phones in our hand as it relates to cars and other stuff, unfortunately that we don't think it's ever going to bite us. But that's probably exactly what the other person thought that perished in a car accident. In a plane we're just as susceptible.
08:36
Bobby Doss
But you know, in a plane, for me there's like 800 other things going on that we need to be paying attention to. When was the last time, I can't remember this, but when was the last time you looked down to see what your RPM setting was or if you were getting some fluctuation in your RPM setting in a car?
08:56
Wally Mulhern
Yeah, it's been a long time.
08:58
Bobby Doss
Yeah, it's been a long time. And so in a plane we're looking at a voltmeter, an amp meter, an RPM gauge, a airspeed gauge, vertical speed indicator. Oh, bazillion little things. Vacuum indicator in some cases. There's a lot of other things we're paying attention to and any one of those things can distract us and Create this Swiss cheese model that is the light bulb what killed those people. The light bulb didn't kill those people. The distraction of the light bulb killed those people in Eastern. And we don't want to dwell on it because it's just a story to hook the listener at this point. How do we prevent all the other things and we just need to talk about what's in the cockpit that does distract us and create that Swiss cheese model. I, I would agree with you.
09:49
Bobby Doss
It's texting, it's the electronic flight bag. I flew with a really good friend recently and I was shocked how little they looked outside the cockpit in the pattern. We've, we flew eight laps in the pattern. I was in the co pilot seat and was nervous wreck by the way, not being in control of the airplane. But the amount of time spent inside the cockpit looking at screens in the traffic pattern was mind blowing to me. I was actually shocked. You see a lot of applicants, you see a lot of good pilots, you see a lot of bad pilots, I'm sure. What do you see that's distracting us on a regular basis?
10:33
Wally Mulhern
Well, it's not just the screen in the iPad, it's sometimes just the screens in the airplane itself.
10:43
Bobby Doss
Oh, that's what I'm talking about. He never looked up from his cockpit.
10:47
Wally Mulhern
Yeah, it's not unusual for. And the cross countries that I give my applicants, you either go from Houston to Atlanta or Houston to El Paso, depending on the day. So. You know, if we take off, let's say we take off from hooks on the 1 7, right. So we're heading south, we're going to, let's say it's an El Paso day, we're going to go right. And maybe they're, you know, their flight has us going over the Navasota vor or maybe it's just a straight line to El Paso or usually somewhere else for a fuel stop. It's not unusual for at about, I don't know, 6, 800, 900ft to them to start plugging in direct to whatever airport we're going to into. Whether it's a 430, a 530, a G1000 or whatever. But A, we could have done that on the ground.
11:54
Wally Mulhern
But B, Maybe at 4,500ft when we get up to our cruise altitude might be a better use of our time rather than playing around with this at 500ft, no question.
12:10
Bobby Doss
So what are some of those things that we deal with that we shouldn't be dealing with, okay, we got iPads.
12:19
Wally Mulhern
And.
12:22
Bobby Doss
I don't even use my iPad that often anymore. I think I use a notepad and what the cockpit's giving me. There's definitely a use for my iPad, but I don't have a strapped to my leg anymore. I don't have a yoke mount anymore. I think I know what the plane's capable of and what I'm doing in the plane. So I'm not using that technology the same way I did early on. But if I've got the iPad and I'm in Houston, it's probably going to die of heat exhaustion long before I want it to, which is a huge distraction. If I'm depending solely on that, I'm in a lot of trouble. How many people do you see stop and not get the right radio frequency tuned in and just can't imagine there's no one else talking to me at Navasota. That's weird.
13:13
Bobby Doss
There's four planes in the pattern. No one's talking. I keep making my radio calls and just keep flying. And we know it's happening, right? I'm the one who's wrong, but I'm assuming everybody else is wrong.
13:24
Wally Mulhern
It's really interesting you say that, because I just had, two days ago, had that exact thing happen. Same Airport, Navasota, 122.9. And the applicant had put in 122.95. And he caught it. He said, he goes, man, I see another airplane coming in here. It looks like they're coming into land. He saw it on his iPad because he had a ADSB in, and. He actually called him. He says, aircraft approaching Navasota from the southeast. State your intentions, I think is what he said. They didn't answer, and I just sat there. And then he finally, he caught it. And I said, okay, good way of mitigating a mistake. And we flipped over to 122.9. And guess who was talking? The other airplane.
14:21
Bobby Doss
You know, he was asking y', all, what are y' all doing? What are y' all doing there? What are you gonna, what's your intentions?
14:26
Wally Mulhern
Yeah, you know, I, I, I think one thing that we learn as more mature pilots is when something's not going right, the first place I look is in the mirror, and. I'll tell on myself. We were starting a 777. This was two, three weeks ago. And it's the job of the first officer to start the engine. He starts the engine all by himself. Because while this is going on, we might being pushed Back, but I'm talking to the people on the ground. I'm disconnecting headsets. I'm doing light signals to the marshaller out front. So it's kind of a divided cockpit sort of. We do back each other up a little bit, but anyway, so the first thing we do is we put the start switches to the start position, and then we flip the fuel switches to the run position.
15:26
Wally Mulhern
So you've got ignition, you've got fuel, and the engine is supposed to start. Well, the first officer, he. Probably got distracted from something. He did not put the fuel switches to run. So we all know from that high school chemistry class, we need three things for a fire. We need oxygen, we need ignition, and we need fuel. We had two of the three. We did not have fuel. And. As I'm talking to the ground person, he says to me, he says, we're not getting a light off. And I immediately go to the engine instruments, and he was correct. We were not getting a rise in egt. And my initial thought was, what are we messing up? It wasn't, oh, my gosh, this airplane. There's something wrong with this airplane. My initial thought was, oh, man. Was maintenance working on this airplane?
16:25
Wally Mulhern
Did they pull circuit breakers? Are we not getting ignition? We were getting rotation, but weren't getting. Getting. You know, weren't getting the light off. So we just continued to start. And before we made that radio call to maintenance, I said to him, I said, okay, let's look at us. What did we miss? And then he goes, oh, God. And he probably said, oh, expletive. I didn't get the fuel on. I go, oh, well, that'll do it. Let's try it again. So we try it again. Guess what? Two good starts. The engine started just as they were supposed to. So we have, you know, I have learned that when something's going wrong, it's probably us. It's probably me and. And kudos to that guy just a couple days ago, I mean, he. Right off the bat, he said, wait, this might be me.
17:16
Wally Mulhern
And he caught it.
17:20
Bobby Doss
Yeah, I still think texting is probably a problem. I probably sent my own picture to. To my family, and my wife would probably say, don't fly, and text slightly different. But you got to stay in the cockpit. You got to stay on the game that you're. You're executing here. I think automation has got to be one of the things that distracts people nowadays more than it ever did for me. I never had near the automation that some of the kids now have at My flight school. But how good, bad, indifferent do you want to share the UC applicants knowing, actually knowing the equipment that they're using and then using it effectively and being on top of the game with that equipment?
18:04
Wally Mulhern
Yeah, well, we've gotten very reliant on the technology to an extent where we've allowed situational awareness to go out the window to an extent. And you know, a lot of times if I'm doing a check ride, say out of Conroe. We end up being. There's a big lake on the west side of Conroe, a really big lake. And we end up being a little bit west of that lake. Doing our maneuvers. And that's usually where we kind of where the final maneuver is of a given checkride. And I will say to them, I will say, okay, maybe we've just finished our last thing. Whether it be ground reference maneuvers or whatever it might be. I'll say, okay, here's the scenario. We are lost. We're not really sure where we are. Take us back to Conroe. Everything is available to you. Altitude at your discretion.
19:20
Wally Mulhern
And I would say 95% of the applicants, the first place they go to is their GPS and they put in Conroe Airport. Is that wrong? No, absolutely not wrong. However, a lot of times I'll stop them and I'll say, just out of curiosity, why don't you just point the airplane where you think the airport is and they'll go, well, okay, well, I know it's on the other side of the lake, there's a lake. So let me point us at the lake. Okay, so now they point it in. Guess what? We're going straight to the airport before they even put it in the gps. So, you know, I. Tell them, I say it's not absolutely not wrong to use the gps, but if we can get going in the perceived correct direction ahead of time, let's go ahead and do that.
20:20
Bobby Doss
Yeah, most of us are probably intuitive enough to point the plane in the right direction for sure. And that 30 seconds might be the difference in getting back, not finishing in the lake, getting across the lake. It is one of those skills that comes with maturity and aviation skills, but something we should try. So let's talk about some practical strategies that can maybe help us with those distractions. And I think this is broken down into a few parts. So we'll break this down. Kind of pre flight prevention. Man, I've grown up a lot in my own aviation skills. What are your company rules around sterile cockpit? If you can Share those.
21:04
Wally Mulhern
Yeah, well, we, you know, sterile cockpit is below 10,000ft. So and basically. Prior to starting, prior to pushback, it's not, we're not in sterile cockpit. But you know, when it's game time, we all need to be engaged. And I mean, that cockpit door might be open, but if we're going to start briefing and start talking about the flight. Quite frankly, I've never really had an issue with anybody ever because I'll say, okay, are you guys ready to talk about this or are we ready to brief? And if somebody's right in the middle of doing something, they may say, give me about 90 seconds, let me finish loading the winds in the FMC or whatever the case may be. But yeah, so. You know, from up until 10,000ft, we are in what we call sterile cockpit. And basically. No nonessential conversation is supposed to happen.
22:21
Bobby Doss
And should we adopt something like that in GA? Like maybe not 10,000ft because I'd probably never get there. But yeah, you know, when I start my descent, when I'm below 2,500ft, like.
22:33
Wally Mulhern
There is no for sure. Absolutely. And most applicants will brief me about sterile cockpit, but they don't adhere to it. They tell me we're going to have.
22:46
Bobby Doss
Don'T talk to me.
22:47
Wally Mulhern
Yeah, we're going to have a sterile cockpit, non essential conversation on the flight and then we're taxiing out and someone will say, what's it like flying a triple seven? And I go, okay, well that's interesting. I will usually do a very one word answer. Nice. Yeah.
23:09
Bobby Doss
Well, that's a good point. Like we break the sterile cockpit, probably more. Or we let the sterile cockpit get broken. It's not a. If my wife tries to talk to me when I push the throttle in for takeoff, I just don't respond like I'm focused. She might make a mistake or might not even be aware of what she's doing in that case, but I'm not going to engage. You can't respond. And I think it's beholden to the pilot in command and probably the instructors to say, hey, we're not doing this. We just said we're not doing this.
23:43
Wally Mulhern
Right.
23:43
Bobby Doss
Dpe, you're evaluating, you're doing that on purpose. You're engaged. But man, please stay quiet unless you see a fire or a tower or another aircraft that I may not see.
23:55
Wally Mulhern
Right.
23:56
Bobby Doss
Which then is a reason to break the rule of sterile cockpit.
24:00
Wally Mulhern
Well, I think CFIs, I think we're guilty to an extent of always wanting to teach and you know, I think the amount that a CFI talks should be inversely proportional to the level of your student. You know. Yeah, that first flight, are you going to be talking to them all the way out? And you know, again, this is flight critical, so it's not a violation of sterile cockpit, obviously, if you're teaching, but sometimes we should pick and choose, you know, as the student starts getting closer to getting their pilot certificate, maybe the amount of talking that you're doing should be coming down a little bit because so now the applicant gets in there with me and I'll brief him. I'll say, hey, look, I'm not going to talk a whole lot.
24:56
Wally Mulhern
And I will even say there might be awkwardly silent, you know, stretches in there. And I'm telling you, the applicants, it drives them crazy, you know, they just can't stand. Okay. You know, it's too quiet. Are you okay over there? Yeah, I'm okay. I'm all right. But because they're not used to it, they're not used to silence in the cockpit.
25:22
Bobby Doss
Yeah, that's probably something that we could do better at from a teaching. Per teaching or training perspective for sure. So let's talk. We did a little pre flight. Okay. We're going to do sterile cockpit. We're going to communicate about this stuff. We're going to abide by our own rules. Next, in flight discipline. The pilot in command's the one doing the work. There may be passengers. How do we keep ourselves from getting distracted? I think aviate, navigate, communicate is obviously the easy one that we all learn early on. How do we balance that autopilot? Distraction. And I think I struggled with it in my vision. Jet training, extremely fast aircraft, faster than anything I've flown. Things coming at me quick.
26:09
Bobby Doss
I got to a point where I started calling out the scoreboard on the autopilot just to make sure I knew exactly what I thought was happening. And so if I touched any button on the autopilot, anywhere at all, I called out what was on the scoreboard above the Garmin G3000 to make sure that I knew the components that were programmed. Was auto throttle on, yes or no? Was it set to the speed that I wanted to, or was it the actual system managing the speed based on its parameters? Is the heading or GPS what I'm following? Right. We talk about the CDI button a lot when we're learning how to fly. And I can remember people telling me there was this $500 button. I'm like, I can't believe a button costs 500 bucks, but now I understand what that CDI button does.
26:58
Bobby Doss
But in the vision jet, if you think you're following a GPS track but you're following a heading, you're never going to get to that GPS track. And that's probably just as distracting or damaging as anything else that could be. I think we have to manage that buffer of distraction with that autopilot. For me, it's really calling out the scoreboard and making sure, hey, I want to be on auto throttle. Auto throttle on. I want to be in GPS mode. GPS mode's on, right? And altitude select. I want to fly at flight level 2, 1 0. And it is on flight to level 210. I'm climbing to that number. Now. That's important stuff to not get distracted.
27:40
Wally Mulhern
At United Airlines, those are actually required call outs. We don't call it a scoreboard. We call it an fma, which stands for flight mode enunciator. So those are required call outs, LNav, VNav, flight level change, heading select, whatever it is. Because, you know, what we say is when you push the button, it's like ordering off the menu. What comes up on the fma, or your case the scoreboard, is what you actually get. You may order a chicken sandwich, but you got a hamburger, okay? So just because you push the button doesn't mean you got it. And there are times where you might push the wrong button. I know on the. 757, 777 versus 737. If I want heading select on a 737, there's a button under the heading select knob that you push for heading select.
28:49
Wally Mulhern
On a triple seven or a seven, five, seven six, it's if you push that button underneath it's heading hold. So you can always tell a pilot that has recently come off the 737 on the bigger airplanes because they hit heading hold when they want heading select. Well, if you're looking at your fma, boom. You look down, and there it is right there. You know, it says heading hold. Well, it says it right there in front of you. So. But you got to read it. So again, so what you're doing. Those are required call outs for us at United Airlines.
29:25
Bobby Doss
That's awesome. I love that analogy of what you ordered might not be what you get, because I can assure you I've probably ordered a thousand things that I didn't get, and it took me a little bit to figure it out. But it is a distraction that will Overwhelm you, and it can overwhelm you when you're close to the ground, which could be very dangerous for all of us. Man. I think my configuration of how I fly is a big less distraction for me nowadays too. As I said, I very rarely have my iPad on my knee board nowadays. I can, I use a great flyboys pivot kneeboard. They're not a sponsor, but they're a great partner and I do think they make the best stuff. That kneeboard is now pad of paper and two pins. And I don't really use my iPad now.
30:14
Bobby Doss
My iPad's normally within reach. I use it as a backup for traffic. I use it a backup for plates and plans, but it is a backup. I am using the equipment on the cockpit to help me with my navigation. But my pad and pen are so less distracting than the iPad. From the iPad overheating to going to sleep, to the display not being bright enough. I could go into a million reasons of how hard sometimes it is to manage your iPad and keeping it charged, functional the way you want it. On short flights, yeah, easy peasy. But on a three hour flight, that's a lot of work that I'm not sure we need for three hours in straight level flight at 9,000ft, I'm not sure that's the most important thing that we need to worry about.
31:01
Bobby Doss
So I would challenge everyone to simplify your CRM, your cockpit resource management. To the bare minimum.
31:10
Wally Mulhern
Yeah, yeah. Well, that's a good way of putting things. You know, one distraction that I really wanted to talk about and as we're getting to over 30 minutes here, but I want to talk about this because this has caused people to die and you know, that's what we're trying to prevent is accidents where people die. And that's cockpit doors coming open. You know, it happens. Probably in Beechcraft airplanes. And this isn't banging on a particular manufacturer, but I just remember looking at a twin engine airplane at Hooks airport probably five, seven years ago. Wasn't yours, but it belonged to another flight school that went off the Runway because they had a door open on takeoff and they attempted to reject the takeoff and went off the Runway and totaled the airplane.
32:18
Wally Mulhern
In this case, there wasn't anybody that died, there wasn't anybody that got hurt or anything. But I think one of the things that I've started incorporating in the ground portion of my checkrides is talking to applicants and more so in Piper airplanes. And Beechcraft doesn't seem to be as big of an issue in Cessnas that have the two doors. But you know, I talk to the applicants about what's going to happen if you're rolling down the Runway and the door opens. And most of them tell me that they've never discussed this, they've never discussed it with their instructors. And the vast majority of them tell me that they're going to reject the takeoff over an open door. And I can't say that's wrong. But I will say this, it's not what I'm going to do. I'm going to keep going.
33:13
Wally Mulhern
I'm going to take the airplane airborne. And an open door in a Piper is a non event. Okay. Now, do we want to fly three hours to our destination with that door open? Probably not. But can we come back in and land the airplane and close the door? Yeah, we can. So I would challenge the CFIs out there to, at some point in your training. At least discuss this, discuss how you're going to manage this. Because. Most of us have noise canceling headphones right now. And so you might not even know it. You might not even know that the door opened, especially if you're in the left seat and the door is over on the right side because it's going to stay pretty much flush with the airflow. But probably not something we want to continue to our destination with.
34:14
Bobby Doss
No, for sure. And are these planes safe to fly with the door open? Is it maybe a misconception of what that means?
34:23
Wally Mulhern
Oh, yeah. Actually, a couple weeks ago, took a helicopter instructional flight in a Robinson R44. It's just incredibly awesome. But we, the doors were off the helicopter. The doors, we didn't, the doors were gone. They took them all. So we go out and the instructor says, okay, make some turns. And I'm going, of course, in the helicopter, the flying pilot sits on the right in the right seat and the left turn wasn't so much of an issue. But boy, when we made that right hand turn, I was, it was a little weird for me. I'm, I'm looking down there going, man, I hope the seatbelt works.
35:14
Bobby Doss
Hope centrifugal force on this steep turn is helping me stay in my seat.
35:19
Wally Mulhern
I mean, I can't tell you in my flying career, you know, I don't know how many hours, but I've had lots of doors open. In fact, going to, either to or from Oshkosh. I think it was going to Oshkosh last, you know, just a few months ago, we stopped for fuel and we take off. And I'm in the right seat, my wife's in the left seat. She's flying our Saratoga and I, I left the door open. Okay, we take off and we're about 500ft. I look up, I go, oh boy, look at this. And so we just turned around and came back and landed the airplane. And. Can you close it in flight? Yeah, you can. And in fact, there's one flight school that even has a checklist for it.
36:09
Wally Mulhern
And if you slow the airplane down and you open up that little window on the left hand side, you can get it closed. However, it's not very conducive for one person on their own to do it. It's almost a two person. And so if you got two pilots, it works really well. One pilot and one non pilot, it might work. But by yourself, it may be kind of tough to do that.
36:38
Bobby Doss
Well. Yeah. And aren't you always close to the ground like this? Sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. Let me try and save 5 minutes to close this by myself. Absolutely, man. I always say one more lap in the pattern is about six minutes. Yeah, that's not going to set any of us back ever.
36:55
Wally Mulhern
Yeah. You know, and on the big jets, I mean, we have big windows on the flight deck. And because they're escape hatches, they're emergency exits, basically. It's how if we have a bad problem, we can go out the window. We got ropes that we pull down and we shimmy down the rope. But at United Airlines, our procedure is in the high speed regime, which is above 100 knots. If a cockpit window opens up, we continue. Think about that.
37:32
Bobby Doss
These are shocking.
37:34
Wally Mulhern
These are big windows. They're really big and they're right there. I mean. You could touch it with your elbow. So the airplanes are designed to fly with that. And you know, if it were at night, especially if it were cold and raining, you know, at 120 knots, that window opens. It would, it would be hard. I mean, just because you're going to hear, you're going to feel these senses, there's going to be loud noises, you know, it's going to take you a, a little while, you know, I don't know. Second, maybe. I don't know. It's going to take you a while to process what just happened, but yeah.
38:18
Bobby Doss
You have no idea how it happened, why it happened. You'd be freaking out, you know.
38:22
Wally Mulhern
Right. And you don't care the why, you know the what. Okay, this window came open. Did it come open? Because I left it open. Was there a mechanical failure? You know the problem with the Saratoga going to Archer? It was not a mechanical failure. It was me. 100% me. I left the door open.
38:41
Bobby Doss
And not many people would admit to that, but that's good. People need to be able to feel comfortable saying, I made a mistake. None of us are perfect. None of us are going to fly a perfect flight. I think that's a good place to wrap it up. The best pilots aren't the ones who never get distracted, Wally. They're the ones who catch the distraction early and make it stop. They tell their. They tell their wife. They tell their friend, hey, sterile cockpit. It's. It's five minutes from now. We'll be able to talk. Whatever. On your next flight. Whoever you are listening to this show, try to consciously note every little distraction you have. Essentially, just write it down, make a note of it. Debrief with your instructor, debrief with yourself. You might be shocked.
39:26
Bobby Doss
But if you can start recognizing these distractions sooner than you may be able today, you're going to be a much better pilot. As always, fly safely and stay behind the prop.
39:38
Nick Alan
Thanks for checking out the behind the Prop podcast. Be sure to click subscribe and check us out online@brave.theprop.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.
39:58
Wally Mulhern
Sam.