Emergencies with passengers aboard

Immediate action items and the airplane's limits, the engine-out glide and the field, fire and smoke, system failures from the vacuum pump to the trim, the door that opens, and the checklist discipline that keeps an abnormal situation from becoming an undesired aircraft state.

18 min read · Commercial operations

After this lesson you can

  • Separate immediate action items from the checklist that follows, and say why the airplane's performance and limitations shape both.
  • Fly an engine failure: best glide versus minimum sink, the field, the stabilized approach to it, and the configuration and the calls that go with it.
  • Diagnose partial or complete power loss by its likely causes and know which are recoverable in flight.
  • Handle an in-flight fire, smoke, a vacuum or display failure, inoperative trim, and an open door as the Airplane Flying Handbook describes.
  • Use the checklist for a malfunction without letting it capture the attention that flies the airplane.

Every emergency in this lesson has a passenger in it, which changes the pilot's job in two ways. The passenger will do what the briefing told them and nothing else, so the briefing is part of the procedure. And the passenger is watching, so the pilot's own reaction, the Airplane Flying Handbook's recurring subject in Chapter 18, is what decides whether a malfunction stays a malfunction.

The handbook's emergency chapter is built on a single sentence it repeats in different forms: accidents are almost never caused by the failure; they are caused by the pilot's distraction or failure to maintain control of the airplane. This lesson takes each emergency in that light.

The rest of this lesson

  1. 1.Immediate action items, and the airplane's own limits
  2. 2.Engine failure: the glide, the field, and the approach to it
  3. 3.Partial or complete power loss: the causes you can fix
  4. 4.Fire and smoke
  5. 5.System failures: vacuum, displays, and trim
  6. 6.The door that opens, and the pilot who reaches for it
  7. 7.The checklist, the distraction, and the undesired aircraft state

These 7 sections, their figures, the checks along the way and the end-of-lesson quiz come with the CPL track. Paid once, yours for good.

See what the CPL track costsEvery module 1 is free to read, no account, no card.

Key terms

Try to recall each definition before turning the card.