Asymmetric 2 (Weds part 2)

The second trip of the day was refreshing the earlier engine failure drills, and in my case seeing if I could get the left engine failure detection right. This time I got most of them ok when I payed attention to the balance ball. So quite a relief that I wasn't a dunce and couldn't tell my left from right! :-)

Then we moved onto the big one - engine failure in the climb at 100 kts and 25/25 on the power/props. This produces a significant yaw such that you can barely maintain directional control which one of the the primary aims. If you were taking off at the end of a valley you couldn't afford to veer left or right or fail to maintain a climb of you'd risk a CFIT event. Initially both Dave and myself were all over the place with insufficient rudder causing the secondary effect of roll and veering us off our "runway" heading. You also need to maintain 85kts which is Vyse - the speed for best rate of climb on a single engine. If you're speed is lower, you are pitching higher and you have insufficient power to maintain any useful climb and furthermore the ability to control the aircraft is harder and harder. For speeds higher than 85 your pitch is too low to generate enough lift to climb.

You than have to go through a series of drills to confirm and shutdown and secure the dead engine so as to minimise drag, act on any fire that may be present, and configure and look after the live engine. It's all well and good doing these on the ground and think you have them down to a T, but up in the air when you're actually trying to fly the uncooperative beast it's a different matter and a lot of it goes out of the window. This is why you practice the drills again and again in the air and initially at altitude where you have the altitude to recover if you do the unthinkable and manage to put the aircraft inbto a spin. With the drills, it's so easy to forget one little item which could have a drastic effect on the situation. Both me and Dave were struggling and always managed to forget one or more things.

Once we "sort of" had the engine failure drills passable we then went into a simulated asymmetric circuit. This involved doing the same kind of things as in a normal circuit such as downwind checks, lowering the gear & flaps etc. but things are subtaly different and which I have practiced the drills for the normal circuit in the simulator cockpit, I was rubbish at the asymmetric ones. The crux comes at the ACH of 200 feet where you have to make a go-no-go decision to land or not, and in our case we practiced the go go around where you put on full power on the remaining engine and pitch up into the climb and immediately take up the gear and all flaps. This causes a sudden yaw and you have to boot in huge amounts of rudder as you had eased off some of the trim and maintain your "runway" heading. Needless to say, we were pretty crap at this and ended up veering off our heading by up to 30 degrees.

We then came back to Leeds and did a normal landing - not good enough to be trusted to handle things on a single engine only relatively few feet above the ground, and I was quite glad at that. Did a pretty ropey landing as if to emphasise the point. Felt pretty crap about things after this flight and it didn't help me to get a decent nights sleep which I so badly needed having been sleeping poorly recently on top of being stressed with the flying.