instrument scan...help

adreamer

adreamer

Well-Known Member
I was in the sim yesterday. I did something that I thought it could never happened. I did graveyard spiral in the sim. twice. It happens when I was doing partial panel - no HSI and AI. I was so foucs on try to level the plane and forgot to scan turn coordinator. Therefore, I did it twice. My instrument check ride is about 2 weeks. How would you recommend / teach instrument scan?
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I re-read my instrument handbook. It suggests establish, trim, cross check, adjust, quick and constant scan in the partial panel situation. What scan pattern you would teach your student?
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Relax your grip.

If you are flying the plane propely you should only be flying with your fingertips. Retrim constantly to achieve this.

If you grip the yoke too tightly you will not notice the slight foward pressure as you start descending.

This is something I always empahsize with my students.
 
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My suggestion would be to just keep practicing, you will get it sooner or later. I think its kind of hard to teach a student how to scan (except for the basics of course) and that its just something you have to learn by doing and learning from your mistakes. I says its a lot like landing a plane for the first time, the instructor can only teach so much and then its just up to the student to keep practicing and learn from his or her mistakes. IMO, scanning is just something that takes lots of practice and until you learn a good technique, there will be mistakes. Just make sure you know what your primary and secondary instruments are for all the maneuvers with and without inoperative instruments and keep telling yourself in your head to scan, scan, scan! Thats just my 2 cents on instrument scanning.
 
"What scan pattern you would teach your student?"

The only thing keeping you alive partial panel is the T/C. You need to pay really close attention to wings level. Guys get wrapped up in a partial panel IFR approach with a navigation problem and simply don't devote enough brain cells to keeping the wings level.

Now for my editorial rant:

People need to realize that partial panel is an EMERGENCY. If it ever happens in real life IMC, and you identify the problem without killing yourself, the last thing you want to do is shoot an approach. If at all possible, give consideration to no-gyro radar vectors to VFR conditions so you can focus on flying the airplane.
 
As far as i'm concerned a good instrument scan is very important and I don't move on until my students have develop a good scan.
I suggust more of the control/performance method. Control the aircraft first by using the attitude indicator and the tach. However, this means you need to know what configurations give you the desired result. For example, when i tell my students to do a Vy climb. I should see them pitch up to about 5-6 degrees on the attitude indicator and be at full power. After you CONTROL the aircraft then you need to scan your performance instruments and make sure they are giving you the desired results. If not, the re-adjust. If they are then trim it up then incorporate all the instruments in your scan.
As far as partial panel goes- due what others above have suggested. Yeah, trim is very important and so is light control imputs. You still have one control instrument (the tach), so use to set the desired performance for certain phases of flight. For example, say you had to do a 500fpm descent you would CONTROL your power (probably 1800rpm in most light aircraft) and use your VSI (more of a primary in this case), airspeed, and altimeter to watch your pitch (also use you mag compass and TC to keep your heading).
Hope this helps, good luck

P.S- i suggust practice practice practice and microsoft flight sim could help
 
Also, i teach my students to do several things when they go partial panel and usually in this order (you can think of the C's)
1. Control the aircraft
2. Cross-check (to identify which instruments are inop)
3. Cover (do whatever you need to to cover up the inop instruments, even if that mean pulling a 20 out of your pocket to stick over the inop instruments)
4. Call (report the malfunction and ask for assistance)
 
Also, after getting the concepts of the relationships of different instruments (triangle of agreement) and getting more experience, I found that having a view of all of them at once (the working ones of course), using peripheral vision, worked the best. Scanning one at a time instead of taking in all the information together is what got me into trouble while learning in the sim.
 
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People need to realize that partial panel is an EMERGENCY. If it ever happens in real life IMC, and you identify the problem without killing yourself, the last thing you want to do is shoot an approach. If at all possible, give consideration to no-gyro radar vectors to VFR conditions so you can focus on flying the airplane.

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(To piggyback on 727s comments)......Or give serious consideration to taking a ASR or PAR approach for those airports that have them. Civil pilots don't pay enough attention to this service that's available at many fields, especially the ASR. Will definately lighten your workload by keeping the majority of your attention to flying the plane, vice having to navigate too.
 
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Also, i teach my students to do several things when they go partial panel and usually in this order (you can think of the C's)
1. Control the aircraft
2. Cross-check (to identify which instruments are inop)
3. Cover (do whatever you need to to cover up the inop instruments, even if that mean pulling a 20 out of your pocket to stick over the inop instruments)
4. Call (report the malfunction and ask for assistance)

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Same thing I use:

Aviate- Your 1
Navigate- Your 2 and 3
Communicate- Your 4
 
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People need to realize that partial panel is an EMERGENCY. If it ever happens in real life IMC, and you identify the problem without killing yourself, the last thing you want to do is shoot an approach. If at all possible, give consideration to no-gyro radar vectors to VFR conditions so you can focus on flying the airplane.

[/ QUOTE ]

(To piggyback on 727s comments)......Or give serious consideration to taking a ASR or PAR approach for those airports that have them. Civil pilots don't pay enough attention to this service that's available at many fields, especially the ASR. Will definately lighten your workload by keeping the majority of your attention to flying the plane, vice having to navigate too.

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Indeed take the ASr approach. I have only done one in my training and I have to say the controllers are extremely helpful. If I was partial panel and one was available, I would take that in a minute.
 
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I was so foucs on try to level the plane and forgot to scan turn coordinator.

[/ QUOTE ]Scan patterns vary, and I would never even consider telling someone how to scan without watching them fly.

But all good scan patterns involve looking at the instruments that give you the most important information about your flight condition. (I'm purposely avoiding the "primary/supporting" vs "control/performance" debate, but those are essentially the "primary" instruments form the P/S school and the "performance" instruments from the C/P school.

With that in mind, let me ask you a question in response to your question:

How were you trying to level the plane partial panel =without= scanning the TC? What =were= you looking at?
 
First of all, thanks for all suggestions. These suggestions help a lot.
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Midlifeflyer, to answer your question - I looked at wrong gauge aka VSI.
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However, I flew again in sim w/partial panel condition. I was able to fly a GPS approach down to minimum.
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However, I lost my concentration during go around.
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Therefore, I did a graveyard spiral again, but able to recover from it. My exact thought was "What the hell I am doing? Need to put more attention on the turn coordinator." However, my instructor was impressed with my improvement. Actually, today was my 2nd session in the sim with partial panel(no DG, no HSI) situation. Can't you guy tell that I am a VFR pilot?
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However, I flew again in sim w/partial panel condition. I was able to fly a GPS approach down to minimum.
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However, I lost my concentration during go around.
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Therefore, I did a graveyard spiral again, but able to recover from it. My exact thought was "What the hell I am doing? Need to put more attention on the turn coordinator."

[/ QUOTE ]You're on your way. Once you've identified your instruments and settled on a technique to make sure they are covered in your scan, the next step if to make the scan natural enough that it becomes automatic when your attention is diverted to something else (like reconfiguring the airplane and maybe the avionics for the missed). That's why the actual technique tends to get so personalized. That takes time and practice.

The only "universal" suggestions I can make are (they apply to full panel flying also):

1. Fly the airplane. Should go without saying, but fiddling with an OBS, radios, and heading bugs is not flying the airplane.

2. Figure out what is the most important instrument for your phase of flight

3. Never leave the most important instrument for any reason for more than 3 seconds.

4. Verify instruments against each other (best if they use different systems)

5. (Not really universal, but I've found it extremely helpful). When you look at an instrument, instead of looking at it to see what it says, look at it to confirm something already in mind. It's a small distinction, but "I'm looking at the TC, the wings should be level; they're not" or "the DG should read 325; it doesn't" seems to produce a smaller, quicker, more accurate correction.
 
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Midlifeflyer, to answer your question - I looked at wrong gauge aka VSI.
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Yup. Not a very good primary instrument due to it's lag, unless you have an Instantaneous VSI (IVSI) installed....then it can be used. We've got that in my jet and it's a good primary crosscheck when under the steam gauges. However, it's another habit that needs to be broken, or kept on the front of the mind, when flying a plane that doesn't have that feature. So there are ups and downs to it.
 
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Yup. Not a very good primary instrument due to it's lag, unless you have an Instantaneous VSI (IVSI) installed....then it can be used. We've got that in my jet and it's a good primary crosscheck when under the steam gauges. However, it's another habit that needs to be broken, or kept on the front of the mind, when flying a plane that doesn't have that feature. So there are ups and downs to it.

[/ QUOTE ]Interesting article I came across a few years ago. It suggested that the regular VSI could be used as a principal (I try to avoid using "primary" except n the FAA sense when talking about flight instruments) scan instrument. Even though it lags on the rate information, it's pretty instantaneous on the trend information. In other words, if you start to climb, it will lad on the rate of climb, but will show that a climb is taking place right away. We use that for basic unusual attitudes - the airplane is level when the VSI reverses it's movement, even though it may be pointing at 700 FPM in either direction at the time.

The article suggested an "inverted V" scan for steady state full panel flight (AI, TC, and VSI) and the TC and VSI alone for partial panel.

I toyed with it for a while. Seemed to work, but I didn't see any real advantage over the Altimeter for a principal focus.
 
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Interesting article I came across a few years ago. It suggested that the regular VSI could be used as a principal (I try to avoid using "primary" except n the FAA sense when talking about flight instruments) scan instrument. Even though it lags on the rate information, it's pretty instantaneous on the trend information. In other words, if you start to climb, it will lad on the rate of climb, but will show that a climb is taking place right away. We use that for basic unusual attitudes - the airplane is level when the VSI reverses it's movement, even though it may be pointing at 700 FPM in either direction at the time.

The article suggested an "inverted V" scan for steady state full panel flight (AI, TC, and VSI) and the TC and VSI alone for partial panel.

I toyed with it for a while. Seemed to work, but I didn't see any real advantage over the Altimeter for a principal focus.

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Interesting to hear, and agree on the trend vs lag info. Agree for primary focus, the altimeter would trump the VSI for me personally too, but the VSI could be a good backup if the limitations you mentioned are kept in mind.
 
Late into the conversation but anyhow...

That's a great point that partial panal is an emergancy. Because it is part of the PTS for the IR checkride many people just think of it as something else that has to be done like a DME arc. However, if you have the fuel, vectors to a VFR field are going to be much more practical. As for the ASR/PAR... I've never actually got an ASR before but I have done several PARs with my students (would have done more if DM in Tucson would allow people on the approach) and the last few I have had them do partial panal. Really good stuff. Question for military people... would a "closed" military airport (like DM) take a civilian aircraft in on an ASR in a true emergancy?
 
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. Question for military people... would a "closed" military airport (like DM) take a civilian aircraft in on an ASR in a true emergancy?

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"Closed" in how? Airfield hours? Reason I ask is that DM is 24/7 operations. Luke airfield has operating hours, but the RAPCON is 24/7.

And yes, they would take you in for any emergency. You're a declared emergency, that's reason enough.

As for practicing approaches, for you Bob, Yuma MCAS, Kirtland AFB (Albuquerque Intl), or Nellis AFB, NV are the nearest fields with ASR approaches. DM only has PAR, ABQ only has ASR, and Nellis and Yuma have both. Luke's PAR was shut down a year ago, but their aux field PAR may still be in operation.
 
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