{"id":2309,"date":"2013-10-04T06:08:25","date_gmt":"2013-10-04T13:08:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.mechadigital.net\/?p=2309"},"modified":"2021-08-26T20:37:57","modified_gmt":"2021-08-26T20:37:57","slug":"82-altimeter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/82-altimeter\/","title":{"rendered":"#82 The Altimeter"},"content":{"rendered":"

A lot of really good instructors cover the airspeed indicator from time to time.\u00a0 They do that so that the student will become less dependent on a gauge which may not be accurate.\u00a0 They want the student to become more dependent on the much more reliable pitch attitude of the airplane.\u00a0 After all, with any power setting there is a pitch attitude which will invariably result in a particular \u201cball park\u201d of airspeed.\u00a0 It\u2019s really handy to know what that pitch attitude looks like, especially in a power on climb and a power-off glide.<\/p>\n

Other instructors will cover the ball of the turn coordinator.\u00a0 They do this so that the student will learn to coordinate by the feeling of his butt or upper body and not by staring at some instrument.\u00a0 My students often joke that they have no idea what the turn coordinator looks like because it\u2019s always covered.\"DSCN2135\"<\/a><\/p>\n

But very few instructors will cover the altimeter.\u00a0 If they did, don\u2019t you think the student would get much better at judging altitude by use of his eyeball?\u00a0 I didn\u2019t give this a whole lot of thought until a few years ago when I was giving a lot of dual in a lovely little L-2 Taylorcraft.\u00a0 The owner and I both knew that this airplane had a sticky altimeter.\u00a0 It seemed to be perfectly accurate and normal when we were climbing.\u00a0 But when we were in a descent, the altimeter\u2019s hundreds needle would often stick.\u00a0 It wouldn\u2019t move at all until you\u2019d lost maybe a couple of hundred feet, then it would lurch downward and assume its proper position.\u00a0 We considered this to be a small inconvenience and we didn\u2019t think it was particularly serious or worth fixing\u2026 after all, it was a VFR airplane and we did no instrument flying or training in it.<\/p>\n

But one day I was in the pattern with a student who was a rated pilot working on his tailwheel endorsement.\u00a0 We\u2019d just turned final and we were at a pretty decent altitude for our position in the pattern.\u00a0 But I noticed that the nose lowered and the airspeed increased.\u00a0 From my position behind the pilot I could see that his high descent rate would put him well short of the runway, and maybe even too low to float to it.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy are we so low?\u201d I asked over the ICS.\u00a0 The guy pointed at the altimeter and declared, \u201cI can\u2019t seem to get down!\u201d\u00a0 His gesture led to his tapping of the altimeter\u2019s face and suddenly the sticky needle unwound.\u00a0 He was shocked that the airplane had suddenly descended!<\/p>\n

The light bulb had illuminated over my head.\u00a0 Have you ever heard an instructor say that once you leave the downwind for the base leg you should never look at the altimeter?\u00a0 Some instructors will say that.\u00a0 They want you to change from altimeter reference to visual reference as you turn final.\u00a0 I became one of them that day.\u00a0 I also became a believer in the fact that some pilots will actually believe that altimeter even when the truth is staring them in the face right beyond the windshield.\u00a0 I also realized then that development of the ability to judge altitude by eyeball is more important than a lot of people think.\u00a0 I now cover the altimeter lots of times.\u00a0 Mostly I cover it when we\u2019re practicing the 360 overhead approach or the dead stick landing.\u00a0 I\u2019m beginning to believe that the only time we need to know pattern altitude is when there are others in the pattern with whom we have to deal.\u00a0 The rest of the time I won\u2019t tell my students what pattern altitude is and I\u2019ll often cover the altimeter as we approach the airport.\u00a0 Just as our practice of making every approach power-off will prepare you for an engine failure, landing sans altimeter will also sharpen your accuracy skills.<\/p>\n

Good airmanship is often the development of reflexes and senses that are more commonly found in birds than mammals.\u00a0 Did you ever see a buzzard with an altimeter?\u00a0 I didn\u2019t think so.<\/p>\n

Brian<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Just as our practice of making every approach power-off will prepare you for an engine failure, landing sans altimeter will also sharpen your accuracy skills.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2310,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2309"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2309"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2309\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}