Photo courtesy of Desert Air Over many years of instructing in Twin Commanders, Barry Lane has given transition training to dozens of pilots new to the airplane and challenged many more through recurrent training. He also sees himself as an evaluator for insurance companies, as the weight of an instructor’s signature tells an underwriter its investment in a pilot is sound.
Of the many skills that Lane teaches, one of the most important is basic attitude instrument flying. There’s a reason it’s the foundation of all instrument training. Having full confidence in your instrument skills enables you to concentrate on learning a more complex airplane, and it serves as a backstop when things go wrong. Lane uses holds to illustrate this.
“You need to know and understand how a hold is executed because you’ll need that hold to deal with an emergency or abnormality,” he said. “A great example is a hydraulic failure. In the Commander the checklist more or less says to slow down to 100 knots and put the gear down. It takes at least six minutes for the gear to come down using the emergency extension procedure, and I’ve had it take much longer. You don’t want to be banging around in hard instrument conditions at 2,000 feet while you’re fighting the gear. What I train and evaluate is to ask for a hold at the outer marker at 8,000 or 9,000 feet and ask for a block altitude. Now you’ve put yourself into a basic IFR skill and you’re using that foundation to manage the aircraft. Once the gear is down you can descend in the hold and shoot a normal approach.”
Lane also sees a lack of structure to the way many pilots operate. In slower airplanes like a Bonanza or Cirrus the inconsistent approach usually works out fine. But in a faster airplane like the Twin Commander procedures must be followed to help the pilot stay ahead of what’s happening. He advocates for taking a page from airline pilots and make the approach a highly structured and regimented process.
“I tell pilots that we can work through a system,” he said. “They need to work out what works for them so that it is consistent and repeatable, and they must commit to doing it that way every time. And if they find they can’t make certain parameters or gates, they need to ask for delaying vectors or a hold to get back to the expected condition. For example, I look over the approach plate, set frequencies, figure out my runway turnoff, and consider other extra details by the time I’m 30 miles out from the airport. You can figure out your flow by writing down all the steps you need to accomplish, then reorder, combine, and strip them down to the eight or nine things we all do, and make that list a contract with yourself on how you’ll operate.”
With a bigger and faster airplane like the Twin Commander, transitioning primarily tests the pilot’s ability to manage the speed and weight. And that can be as simple as picking new airport reference points and getting your process sorted prior to the point on the approach to which you’re accustomed. Do that and focus on foundational instrument skills, and upgrading to a Twin Commander or improving your technique will become much easier.
