Crash & Burn Baby!

Today I crashed. Badly.

At 600 feet in the air after takeoff my engine quit. I switched tanks, turned on my fuel pumps, switched to alternate air intake, tried to get the engine going again.. but no love. So I turned as fast as possible, but I didn’t maintain enough altitude and let my airspeed drop… then I crashed into the ground about 400 feet from the runway I had just taken off from… and I probably died. If it wasnt an amazing full sized simulator at my flight school.

My instructor got a chuckle today out of the following scenarios:

  • fire in the airplane
  • forgot to disconnnect the parking brake
  • total pfd failure followed by total gps and comm failure
  • went up above the clouds and then magically within 2 seconds the cloud cover went from scattered to totally overcast
  • ice on the wings in a non-certified for known icing plane
  • he accidentally turned full flaps on (his fault) and then was suprised that I stalled during my climb.. thanks al for at least botching up ONE thing

Overall the simulator at performance flight is wonderful, it simulates a Cirrus SR-22 which means it is significantly faster and more powerful than the plane I normally fly but it gives you the ability to experience catastrophic emergencies that normally could mean “goodby cruel world!”.

The great thing is that out of all of the above emergency simulations and more, I failed only on one… of course one in real life would be too many, but in a sim with a trigger happy funny guy instructor who is hoping that the tornado that just appeared on takeoff in new york during january might trip you up… I think I did pretty well.

Tomorrow we go up and practice a lot of these emergencies in a real plane, engine outs, failed pfd’s etc..etc.. this will be exciting!

If i’m alive I will blog again ;-)

-Arlo