Instrument training…

StraightnLevel

StraightnLevel

Pre-takeoff checklist
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StraightnLevel
Yesterday I went up with a CFI doing IR training. Focus was partial panel work, fun stuff.

Partway through the flight, CFI covered the attitude indicator - fine, no problem. As I’m flying along, though, the G5 HI started to flash the heading number in yellow, then slowly started to rotate left, ending at about a 20 degree offset. From that point forward, the G5 and G650 (?) were giving bogus headings, both VOR and GPS. No backup in the plane.

So, we had a real partial panel situation to deal with. IPad took over for nav, as there was no other option. I found it really difficult to ignore the G5, and finally ended up turning the brightness down so it wouldn’t distract me.

I’m starting to see how a pilot can get into trouble really quickly if they get in over their head and have an equipment problem…
 
StraightnLevel said:
and finally ended up turning the brightness down so it wouldn’t distract me.
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It has long been the practice of pilots with analog gauges to carry stickies to cover a failed AI or DG in order to avoid that distraction. At least the backlight in modern systems can be turned down.
 
StraightnLevel said:
Yesterday I went up with a CFI doing IR training. Focus was partial panel work, fun stuff.

Partway through the flight, CFI covered the attitude indicator - fine, no problem. As I’m flying along, though, the G5 HI started to flash the heading number in yellow, then slowly started to rotate left, ending at about a 20 degree offset. From that point forward, the G5 and G650 (?) were giving bogus headings, both VOR and GPS. No backup in the plane.

So, we had a real partial panel situation to deal with. IPad took over for nav, as there was no other option. I found it really difficult to ignore the G5, and finally ended up turning the brightness down so it wouldn’t distract me.

I’m starting to see how a pilot can get into trouble really quickly if they get in over their head and have an equipment problem…
Click to expand...
I can see how having a faulty G5 with so much data packed into it would be hard to have go TU and ignore.
During one of my IFR training flights last year my steam gauge turn coordinator failed. It was permanently stuck wings level.
Every time I rolled into a turn it felt weird seeing wings level on the TC and caused me to second guess everything. IDK why but it took me longer than it should have to adjust, despite having a redundant TC built into the G5 AI.
Now I have stickies like midlifeflyer mentioned. Easier to not see the gauge at all than to see it and have to mentally discard it.
 
midlifeflyer said:
It has long been the practice of pilots with analog gauges to carry stickies to cover a failed AI or DG in order to avoid that distraction. At least the backlight in modern systems can be turned down.
Click to expand...

ArrowFlyer86 said:
Now I have stickies like midlifeflyer mentioned. Easier to not see the gauge at all than to see it and have to mentally discard it.
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It's really surprising to learn just how difficult it is to ignore a known bad indicator.
 
IMG_4737.jpeg

www.sportys.com

Failed Instrument Cover

Made with heat resistant silicon Sporty's® developed this simple silicon disc with a suction cup on the back to allow you to practice instrument flying with a "failed instrument" (partial panel) and also to cover an instrument that actually fails in flight.
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I have two of these in the airplane, come to think about it, I should double check they are in the side pocket. Also good to practice using them from time to time.

Do you have a compass in your aircraft? I think you are supposed to use that and the turn coordinator when your vacuum system or G5’s fails. But G5 is not supposed to fail, but I have plenty of times when Garmin stuff fails. Foreflight never failed for me once.
 
mandm said:
.

Do you have a compass in your aircraft? I think you are supposed to use that and the turn coordinator when your vacuum system or G5’s fails. But G5 is not supposed to fail, but I have plenty of times when Garmin stuff fails. Foreflight never failed for me once.
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Yes, a compass and a standard DG. Coupled with FF on the iPad it's a workable backup. Not fun, though.
 
But you have a track and a magenta line.
 
StraightnLevel said:
Yes, a compass and a standard DG. Coupled with FF on the iPad it's a workable backup. Not fun, though.
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I totally agree with you and I’m just wondering if my mind will make the right decisions. I’m already on high workload while in IMC and especially if you are flying in a crazy airspace like let’s say Chicago where you are cleared one route, get another route, and then get vectors. It becomes a nightmare to keep reprogramming while hand flying in IMC (happened the other day). Now add a failure, I would be in trouble.

I emailed Garmin about returning some equipment for repair and I told them exactly this. It’s not fun when your equipment craps out when you are in IMC. Hopefully they will fix it. They were terrible about email responses during Covid but at least now I got an acknowledgement email and response. I also need to send in my GDL50 too. Don’t rely on that if it’s the midst of summer or the sun is beating on your aircraft.
 
One of the coolest things that happened during instrument training was a failed AI. It didn’t go quickly. Over a 10 or 15 minute period, it was gradually contradicting the rest of the panel. It really reinforced a proper scan, a lesson never forgotten.

It had failed internally, a bearing if I recall correctly.
 
StraightnLevel said:
Not trustworthy. When the plane’s GPS is giving bad readings, I’m not going to rely on anything it displays.
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If you have an iPad with cellular, you have an independent gps source. Now if you are also in a raim outage are, you might have to use the cellular signal and hit your own location in the maps app. Only works in slow planes though.
 
I had a DG go bad once. As I completed a turn, it just started spinning quickly in one direction. Consistent rate and direction. I’ve probably had hundreds of various instrument failures in military simulators and was very surprised at how distracting and disorienting this was, even with two stable attitude (and all other instruments) indicators. I covered it and was immediately relieved, but admit it would have been very difficult to fly a stable instrument approach if that was in my vision. My DG sits to the right of the primary AI instead of above, so a little more difficult to ignore it.
 
Clip4 said:
Navigation and approaches with a mag compass, turn coordinator, stop watch and VOR is a lost art with IR pilots today.
Click to expand...
Google search
Def:VOR
Result: No results found

What’s a VOR?
 
Clip4 said:
Navigation and approaches with a mag compass, turn coordinator, stop watch and VOR is a lost art with IR pilots today.
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A mag compass is no longer required for IR, so yes.

That said, they certainly still teach standard rate turns and VOR. I took my checkride in a plane that was VOR only.
 
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midlifeflyer said:
It has long been the practice of pilots with analog gauges to carry stickies to cover a failed AI or DG in order to avoid that distraction. At least the backlight in modern systems can be turned down.
Click to expand...
Or use a few of the $100 bills from the stack that all of us pilots carry.
 
Partial panel nowadays is a whole new thing… not sure the ACS and training systems have really kept up.

Had 8 round things in the past, limited number of failures. The vast array of stuff now, and the vast array of ways they can fail/deceive/confuse, not to mention self induced problems… it’s daunting.

THEN finding a reason to train to what you may experience when it’s not necessary for a check ride, takes ADM to a new level.

Even coming up with scenarios for what you might likely experience is challenging. I don’t do a lot of instrument training, but do try weird but plausible scenarios once in a while. Always met with wide eyes!!

Honestly, I experience a lot of this with the weird equipment I fly these days, old cargo converted MD-80s, some with varying levels of Universal flight management systems cobbled into them. It’s CHALLENGING.

Bottom line is you gotta find SOME WAY to survive just long enough to get to where you can be comfortable. IE get vmc, stay vmc AND LAND. Or some derivative thereof. To do that, you gotta know where the less challenging conditions lie relative to your present position ALL THE TIME.
 
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Seems like Garmin could add a “disable this” button for any particular piece of information and resulting graphical representations… with all their other buttons in the UI…

If they’re concerned someone would leave it off and forget, force enable at power up from cold.

Leaving bad information on a screen seems like a completely stupid way to deal with a failure in 2024.

And yes, y’all know me and I know the wheels of certification turn slowly in avionics.

But it’s really dumb you can’t just turn it off.

How’s that for a nice rant to say hi to y’all? I hope you’re all well.

Software design has gone full … what an Airbus calls pilots at landing. I swear. Just put a disable button in a menu.

Put a nice dumb-dumb “Are you sure?” on it if pilots are THAT stupid that you’re worried they will disable the wrong thing. Just like every other piece of software now designed to lowest common denominator users… if you don’t want to turn it off, don’t hit Enter-Enter. lol.
 
Failure modes are hard. The system has to know it has failed, and know it reliably. Dimming the screen or putting a sticky note over it are very good solutions to a complicated problem.
 
Hengelo said:
Failure modes are hard. The system has to know it has failed, and know it reliably. Dimming the screen or putting a sticky note over it are very good solutions to a complicated problem.
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While it may be the “only”, or possibly even the “best” solution for the circumstances, I wouldn’t call it “very good.” It’s way too easy for a pilot to not actually understand the failure modes of his system and/or not be able to determine which components are actually failed and which are working.
 
MauleSkinner said:
While it may be the “only”, or possibly even the “best” solution for the circumstances, I wouldn’t call it “very good.” It’s way too easy for a pilot to not actually understand the failure modes of his system and/or not be able to determine which components are actually failed and which are working.
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I agree. The practical problem from a checkride standpoint is that there are so many variations it would at worst require a DPE to understand every variation or, at best, lengthen the oral substantially.

Take an extremely simple example. My club has two G1000 DA40s. PFD failure (“loss of primary flight instruments” fka “partial panel”) in one means loss of autopilot. PFD failure in the other doesn’t affect the autopilot. Just easier from a practical standpoint to combine the loss of PFD and the sans autopilot tasks together regardless of whether the AP is available.

Yes, the way it’s done is a lousy solution. A hairy hand placing a sticky on a vacuum AI or DG is just as poor a solution.
 
midlifeflyer said:
I agree. The practical problem from a checkride standpoint is that there are so many variations it would at worst require a DPE to understand every variation or, at best, lengthen the oral substantially.

Take an extremely simple example. My club has two G1000 DA40s. PFD failure (“loss of primary flight instruments” fka “partial panel”) in one means loss of autopilot. PFD failure in the other doesn’t affect the autopilot. Just easier from a practical standpoint to combine the loss of PFD and the sans autopilot tasks together regardless of whether the AP is available.

Yes, the way it’s done is a lousy solution. A hairy hand placing a sticky on a vacuum AI or DG is just as poor a solution.
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It also goes back to the ACS not being a limiting document…training in failure modes can, and should, be much more thorough than testing.
 
StraightnLevel said:
Not trustworthy. When the plane’s GPS is giving bad readings, I’m not going to rely on anything it displays.
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Do you know where the G5’s heading information comes from?

Pedantically, VORs don’t provide a heading; when was the last VOR check accomplished?
 
TCABM said:
Do you know where the G5’s heading information comes from?

Pedantically, VORs don’t provide a heading; when was the last VOR check accomplished?
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The overall good news is, with the modern equipment, most failures are annunciated. They, and strategies for dealing with them are discussed in both the Pilot Guide and the AFMS (which no one seems to read). The bad news is, what else it affects is very system specific. And with the G5, you are also considering whether it's a primary or backup flight instrument.
 
TCABM said:
Do you know where the G5’s heading information comes from?

Pedantically, VORs don’t provide a heading; when was the last VOR check accomplished?
Click to expand...
The problem we saw in flight was constant in both VOR and GPS usage. Maintenance has not yet solved it, but we are guessing it is tied to the magnetometer. I "think" I recall that the relationship between the course diamond and heading arrow was correct, but they were displayed being well off of the actual heading we saw on the magnetic compass and backup vacuum HI.
 
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midlifeflyer said:
with the G5, you are also considering whether it's a primary or backup flight instrument.
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In this case, we use the single G5 in the plane as the HI. When the problem occurred, the CFI had "failed" the primary attitude indicator; with a vacuum HI in the plane, one failure response is to shift the G5 to PFD mode....oops.

This failure was not annunciated in a manner that was obvious. The flashing yellow cardinal heading was not a persistent indication, and we never got a red indication or the "X" that we expect to see with Garmin displays.
 
StraightnLevel said:
Yesterday I went up with a CFI doing IR training. Focus was partial panel work, fun stuff.

Partway through the flight, CFI covered the attitude indicator - fine, no problem. As I’m flying along, though, the G5 HI started to flash the heading number in yellow, then slowly started to rotate left, ending at about a 20 degree offset. From that point forward, the G5 and G650 (?) were giving bogus headings, both VOR and GPS. No backup in the plane.

So, we had a real partial panel situation to deal with. IPad took over for nav, as there was no other option. I found it really difficult to ignore the G5, and finally ended up turning the brightness down so it wouldn’t distract me.

I’m starting to see how a pilot can get into trouble really quickly if they get in over their head and have an equipment problem…
Click to expand...
Backups for your backups, baby, and remember what the Irish say: Murphy was an optimist.
 
StraightnLevel said:
and we never got a red indication or the "X" that we expect to see with Garmin displays.
Click to expand...
A red indication or “x” indicates something has failed rather than something isn’t right. There are a lot of failure modes where those won’t show up…the system has to be able to identify the failure. Without another heading system it couldn’t, and even with another heading system it still wouldn’t be able to determine which one was bad.

The yellow basically boils down to, “I think something’s wrong, but I’m not sure. Better do some of that pilot ****, Mav.”
 
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MauleSkinner said:
A red indication or “x” indicates something has failed rather than something isn’t right. There are a lot of failure modes where those won’t show up…the system has to be able to identify the failure. Without another heading system it couldn’t, and even with another heading system it still wouldn’t be able to determine which one was bad.

The yellow basically boils down to, “I think something’s wrong, but I’m not sure. Better do some of that pilot ****, Mav.”
Click to expand...
We're back to the same problem that existed when two different analog instruments gave conflicting information.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
 
MauleSkinner said:
A red indication or “x” indicates something has failed rather than something isn’t right. There are a lot of failure modes where those won’t show up…the system has to be able to identify the failure. Without another heading system it couldn’t, and even with another heading system it still wouldn’t be able to determine which one was bad.

The yellow basically boils down to, “I think something’s wrong, but I’m not sure. Better do some of that pilot ****, Mav.”
Click to expand...
Well, that's what I did. Eyeballing the Foreflight trace on my iPad and comparing with mag compass and vacuum HI gave me decent confidence that the G5 was AFU.

Without the backups? Well, that's when it's time to declare an emergency and get ATC to vector to the nearest safe endpoint.
 
StraightnLevel said:
Eyeballing the Foreflight trace on my iPad and comparing with mag compass and vacuum HI gave me decent confidence that the G5 was AFU.
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But by your account, only part of the G5 was AFU, and you ignored the parts that weren’t.
 
StraightnLevel said:
Well, that's what I did. Eyeballing the Foreflight trace on my iPad and comparing with mag compass and vacuum HI gave me decent confidence that the G5 was AFU.

Without the backups? Well, that's when it's time to declare an emergency and get ATC to vector to the nearest safe endpoint.
Click to expand...
IFR? In the clouds?

To me the time to declare an emergency is as soon as I know the PFD is AFU. I might indicate that no precipitous action is required if I have a decent backup, but I am dealing with an equipment failure which should be reported to ATC (AIM 5-3-3) and makes the aircraft unairworthy, requiring termination of the flight (FAR 91.7(b))
 
midlifeflyer said:
IFR? In the clouds?

To me the time to declare an emergency is as soon as I know the PFD is AFU. I might indicate that no precipitous action is required if I have a decent backup, but I am dealing with an equipment failure which should be reported to ATC (AIM 5-3-3) and makes the aircraft unairworthy, requiring termination of the flight (FAR 91.7(b))
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This was simulated IFR - under the hood.

The PFD was not actually failed, just the GPS and G5 which is configured in this plane as HI; in that plane we also have both a mag compass and vacuum HI. Steam gauges were all nominal, so no need to declare emergency in VFR conditions.
 
StraightnLevel said:
This was simulated IFR - under the hood.

The PFD was not actually failed, just the GPS and G5 which is configured in this plane as HI; in that plane we also have both a mag compass and vacuum HI. Steam gauges were all nominal, so no need to declare emergency in VFR conditions.
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That’s where it got confusing for me. I thought we were talking about a PFD failure. Being able to pull off a hood in VFR conditions makes many IFR emergencies VFR non-events.
 
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