Testing your glide. Are people doing this?

G.R. Patterson III wrote:

Jay Honeck wrote:

Now that we monitor Unicom at all hours, I can tell you that it is VERY rare
to hear someone practicing any "engine out" procedures over our airport.


Nearly every "engine out" practice I've been handed was off-airport.

George Patterson
You can dress a hog in a tuxedo, but he still wants to roll in the mud.

When I was training for my private, I had the same experience as George.
Every "engine out" was off-airport. Additionally, the procedure was
always the same -- CFI pulled the throttle, said, "you've lost your
engine," and I went through the memorized engine out procedures.

Got to my checkride, and the DPE threw me for a loop (not literally),
first by by pulling the throttle *slightly* back and saying, "suddenly
you can only make 2000 rpm. What are you going to do?" It wasn't how I
trained, and I had to actually stop and think, and I nearly blew it.
Then he said, pulling the throttle back a little more, "you can only
make 1500 rpm."

By this time I had determined the nearest airport, and was heading for
it. He planned it that way, which was the second thing that was
different from my training. He liked to do engine outs where your best
bet was heading for an airport, and let you take it all the way down.

In my case, I was too high and fast. I would have made the runway, but
probably would have run off the end, so we went around. It would have
been a messy but survivable landing.

I passed the checkride, but a big hole in my training had been pointed
out to me. Later, I went to that same airport, which has almost no
traffic, and practiced all sorts of power off approaches to landing,
pulling the power off at various altitudes directly over the runway, at
various points in the pattern, and at various points and altitudes away
from the airport.

I learned a lot from that, but as a renter, not all of it carried over
to the other planes I flew.

--
David Hill
david at hillREMOVETHISfamily.org
Sautee-Nacoochee, GA, USA