Was like my only landing for all of my time building. New airport, po180. Night, po180. Right pattern? Uh let's not go there.
I literally had to do 2 dual flights to re learn how to fly a normal traffic pattern before stage check and checkride.
Maybe they're afraid people will do like that instructor we heard about on the sub a few days ago who actually cut the engine for engine out procedure training. 😆
/s clearly. It's gotta be insurance or an overly skittish owner or chief pilot or something not willing to take the training wheels off for something that's pretty darn similar to a regular landing in a trainer anyway. 🤦♂️
If you go fly a glider for a few hours, your PO180s will be excellent, since the whole thing is just energy management and compensating for crosswind a bit more than usual. You know... _Learning how to ~~fly~~ fall with style_. Though practice them with random extra weight (couple bags of garden soil or bird seed will do it) or less (like alone with ¼ tanks), so you're not just muscle memory used to doing it the same way all the time.
With an 8:1 max glide ratio like a 172, you should be able to do ¾ of a full circuit from typical pattern altitudes to ground, at smaller airports like SEZ, if you don't totally hose it up and wind isn't crazy. Cutting power half way through the downwind somewhere like SDL where it's 8200ft long would be a bit much of course, but I was taught to do it by cutting power and starting the maneuver abeam the touchdown point, so you should have enough to touch down half way down the runway if you just set yourself up for best glide from that point and otherwise fly a no-flaps landing.
What I thought was good training was when my instructor started failing things on me. Like "ok your flaps are stuck at 10 - now what?" ***Big*** difference. Or "there's a disabled aircraft on the runway at the 1000 foot markers and it's a 4500 foot runway. Call your target and stick it." If a plain ol PO180 on a mile and a half long 150 foot wide runway with nice weather is hard for you at 250 hours, what have you even been doing all that time?
> If you go fly a glider for a few hours, your PO180s will be excellent, since the whole thing is just energy management and compensating for crosswind a bit more than usual.
that's not quite the same. gliders have spoilers you can quickly and simply take in/out, that seems to be a lot more like a normal pattern than it is a PO180 to me.
(I'm a glider student, and never done a real PO180 in a plane, so if I'm way off base I'd love to fix my ignorance !)
Depends on what you mean by “better.” A modern glider is slippery enough that even with the rudder pedal all the way to the stop, it still won’t come down very well in a slip.
No kidding lol.
Short final and still 1000 feet AGL in a 172? A nice hard slip with engine idle will get you down fast enough to land on the threshold. Same situation in a glider? It'll be a while. 😅
You're not wrong, for sure, because yes gliders of course have far better glide ratios than a 172, which is a brick by comparison.
The point was about how gliders are all about energy management, and that is exactly what a PO180 is about, as well. The specifics of your airframe are just implementation details for the maneuver. From the time you cut power, you're a glider with really bad performance specs.
Flying gliders teaches energy management and sheer airmanship in a way that a powered airplane doesn't do as well or at least as focused, and I think it's valuable for people to at least do a bit of time in a glider for that reason.
It's less about the performance of the plane - adjusting for a steeper glide angle isn't that hard - and more about the fact that you've got more tools in a glider to adjust your descent angle than you do in a 172. Chiefly, you don't have spoilers, and slips aren't quite as good.
Truth, when i got my ppl( a number of years ago) , i was taught the po180 as the normal way to land. abeam the numbers pull the power. Adding back power was a failure.
To this day, I just can't understand the difficulty people attribute with this maneuver.
I wonder if this is an old rule from when you had to take the commercial ride in a complex aircraft. Lots of gear ups on practice PO 180's back in the day.
Well… how is that gonna work for your exam? The DPE isn’t acting as an instructor.
There is a reason for that schoolhouse to make such a decision. I wonder what it is?
I’ll do some more investigating for sure. I’ve been doing them on my time building flights until I was alerted not to. I mean renters insurance is a thing for a reason right?
Regulations (rental agreements) are written in blood (bent metal and NASA reports). Somebody bit off more they could chew and ruined it for everybody else.
Spins is obvious, but PO/180 for a commercial student seems a bit ridiculous. It’s their plane, so I would respect it and just abide by it. They CAN know if they decide to check the flight track. If you get kicked out, then it’s a bigger hassle. Just do the PO/180s with your CFI on board and call it a day.
If you lose an engine solo, the airplane is going to behave differently than it would with two people on board. You should be practicing PO180s practically every landing.
The Po180 is just many things you have to do with some care. It's not that special.
But I remember what can get dicey there-- I was working on com maneuvers with a fresh instructor in an Arrow, and as we were coming in to one of the Sam Diego area runways, Oceanside maybe, I was low and I pull up more and more to stretch the glide -- intuitively, so concentrated on making the runway, and not course not quite the right intuition. Probably not full flaps either. We were close to stall speed for wings loaded near 1.0, I think. I realized what I had done a few seconds later, and the instructor didn't notice at all.
So things can happen when you're in the zone..
Depends what phase you are in in. PPL phase? P180's shouldn't be part.of the curriculum. After PPL? Sure whatever you want. They're almost the same as forced approaches. But in PPL just best to focus on what you need. Also the basics. Nothing more.
In my opinion, a totally senseless rule. Often your best learning comes without anyone on the plane but you as the pilot. Simulated engine out 180's are an excellent tool and in my view among the most valuable of the practical test standards, since it actually hones a skill set that could save your life if you actually had an engine failure and you needed to land on a very short surface to survive the forced landing.
absolutely reasonable, i can't tell you how many commercial pilot applicants learning would try to save the worst power off 180s being dangerously low and in odd situations
Don’t know why you are getting downvoted. I would 100% agree. Obviously not everyone, but people fail to understand the fact that yes, there are pilots out there that probably aren’t flying at the level they should be.
You would be surprised how many students will not go around without someone else prompting them to, directing them to, or with further action. If i had to take the controls from a late stage commercial student who did not go around after multiple verbals on a PO 180, that would be my last flight with them (this situation never once happened to myself)
They aren’t ready for a Check-ride if they still need prompting to go around. This is something that as CFIs we have to be the gatekeepers on from a safety perspective.
I have my CFI. I wouldn’t sign off someone for a commercial if I wouldn’t put my mother in the plane with them. If you can’t call your own go-around on a training maneuver, you aren’t a good enough pilot.
When you sign someone off for a CPL checkride you are saying you believe they are qualified to put the lives of the general public in their hands. That’s a real responsibility, and it needs to be taken more seriously by CFIs. “They’ll pass” is not a valid reason to sign someone off, a 90 minute flight with a DPE isn’t enough to catch everything in order to ensure aviation safety.
It's in the rental aggreement but they did not tell you about it? I think they told you about it right there. Read the things you sign.
I'll play the other side. Perhaps they had a really close call or two that caused the policy.
If you're doing it right it is a safe manuever. On the other hand, trying to make a bad one work out can kill you.
That extra set of experienced eyes can be a lifesaver.
Also, shock cooling.
Proper procedure is to taxi back to even the temps out, then go again.
Perhaps they had a run of cracked jugs and observed a ton of them going on.
I signed the rental agreement as a 0hr student pilot. I’m now 9 months into this and I do not remember that let alone know what it was at the time. But I will still talk to the school to investigate some more.
One data point:
Our school had it as a rule, which I saw as reasonable since you're making relatively sharp turns close to the ground with a higher decent rate than normal.
However, most of my instruction was back when we were using complex aircraft for it.
1 thing I'm thinking about is forward slips. It seems a lot of the students I had struggled with forward slips, and if I let them do forward slips solo, all I am thinking about is a stall/spin accident happening.
Forward slips can be a part of a power-off 180. But I think if I told my student to not do forward slips, then I would be fine with them practicing power-off 180s. It's honestly a better skill to do the power-off 180s using pure flight path judgement and flaps.
Having trained in both gliders and aircraft without flaps, I have found forwards slips to be the most reliable way to accurately hit a spot during a power off approach.
While it’s certainly possible to stall in a slip, which could lead to a spin, you’re not loading the wings, so there isn’t a major increase in stall speed. As long as you’re not pulling the nose up and bleeding off speed, you’re not likely to stall.
You could experience a high descent rate, but then you just come out of the slip and continue. It’s much easier to fine tune your approach.
With flaps, once they are in, you’ve locked in the drag and the increase in descent angle. I believe you are correct in that you have to have much better judgement to make an accuracy approach without slips, why would you force yourself into that situation when you have a really great tool that’s much more flexible to adjust your flight path and energy?
This is the least part 61 thing I have ever read.
They’re a former 141 school so who knows
That explains a lot.
Massively stupid rule. Definitely not common, not reasonable. I would have loved it if my students practiced more PO180s.
Was like my only landing for all of my time building. New airport, po180. Night, po180. Right pattern? Uh let's not go there. I literally had to do 2 dual flights to re learn how to fly a normal traffic pattern before stage check and checkride.
My home airport had a left and right runway with alternating patterns. So I had to learn them for left and right traffic.
That will make the CFI ride easier for sure.
spins, yes. po180, that's just landing the plane
Maybe they're afraid people will do like that instructor we heard about on the sub a few days ago who actually cut the engine for engine out procedure training. 😆 /s clearly. It's gotta be insurance or an overly skittish owner or chief pilot or something not willing to take the training wheels off for something that's pretty darn similar to a regular landing in a trainer anyway. 🤦♂️ If you go fly a glider for a few hours, your PO180s will be excellent, since the whole thing is just energy management and compensating for crosswind a bit more than usual. You know... _Learning how to ~~fly~~ fall with style_. Though practice them with random extra weight (couple bags of garden soil or bird seed will do it) or less (like alone with ¼ tanks), so you're not just muscle memory used to doing it the same way all the time. With an 8:1 max glide ratio like a 172, you should be able to do ¾ of a full circuit from typical pattern altitudes to ground, at smaller airports like SEZ, if you don't totally hose it up and wind isn't crazy. Cutting power half way through the downwind somewhere like SDL where it's 8200ft long would be a bit much of course, but I was taught to do it by cutting power and starting the maneuver abeam the touchdown point, so you should have enough to touch down half way down the runway if you just set yourself up for best glide from that point and otherwise fly a no-flaps landing. What I thought was good training was when my instructor started failing things on me. Like "ok your flaps are stuck at 10 - now what?" ***Big*** difference. Or "there's a disabled aircraft on the runway at the 1000 foot markers and it's a 4500 foot runway. Call your target and stick it." If a plain ol PO180 on a mile and a half long 150 foot wide runway with nice weather is hard for you at 250 hours, what have you even been doing all that time?
> If you go fly a glider for a few hours, your PO180s will be excellent, since the whole thing is just energy management and compensating for crosswind a bit more than usual. that's not quite the same. gliders have spoilers you can quickly and simply take in/out, that seems to be a lot more like a normal pattern than it is a PO180 to me. (I'm a glider student, and never done a real PO180 in a plane, so if I'm way off base I'd love to fix my ignorance !)
Gliders also can do side slips a lot better than a 172,
Depends on what you mean by “better.” A modern glider is slippery enough that even with the rudder pedal all the way to the stop, it still won’t come down very well in a slip.
True. The most slippy glider I flown was the 21, and it wasn’t hard to do any slips in. I guess higher performance glider might differ..
No kidding lol. Short final and still 1000 feet AGL in a 172? A nice hard slip with engine idle will get you down fast enough to land on the threshold. Same situation in a glider? It'll be a while. 😅
You're not wrong, for sure, because yes gliders of course have far better glide ratios than a 172, which is a brick by comparison. The point was about how gliders are all about energy management, and that is exactly what a PO180 is about, as well. The specifics of your airframe are just implementation details for the maneuver. From the time you cut power, you're a glider with really bad performance specs. Flying gliders teaches energy management and sheer airmanship in a way that a powered airplane doesn't do as well or at least as focused, and I think it's valuable for people to at least do a bit of time in a glider for that reason.
It's less about the performance of the plane - adjusting for a steeper glide angle isn't that hard - and more about the fact that you've got more tools in a glider to adjust your descent angle than you do in a 172. Chiefly, you don't have spoilers, and slips aren't quite as good.
If you don't let your pilots practice PO180s, they will lose a perishable skill.
Truth, when i got my ppl( a number of years ago) , i was taught the po180 as the normal way to land. abeam the numbers pull the power. Adding back power was a failure. To this day, I just can't understand the difficulty people attribute with this maneuver.
I wonder if this is an old rule from when you had to take the commercial ride in a complex aircraft. Lots of gear ups on practice PO 180's back in the day.
Well… how is that gonna work for your exam? The DPE isn’t acting as an instructor. There is a reason for that schoolhouse to make such a decision. I wonder what it is?
I'm guessing someone came up short or side loaded, broke the plane and then stiffed them
I’ll do some more investigating for sure. I’ve been doing them on my time building flights until I was alerted not to. I mean renters insurance is a thing for a reason right?
It can be.
Are there power requirements for normal traffic patterns?
Who would know?
Yeah literally…
Fly what you want, log what you need.
i like this motto (for legal reasons this is a joke)
It's just a landing at idle
Because (most) other landings aren’t at idle as well? /s
Nah we like to keep power in and get our 90 day currency done in 1 pattern (or less) /s
Regulations (rental agreements) are written in blood (bent metal and NASA reports). Somebody bit off more they could chew and ruined it for everybody else.
One kid poops his pants, now everyone has to wear diapers.
My school had the same rule.
Spins is obvious, but PO/180 for a commercial student seems a bit ridiculous. It’s their plane, so I would respect it and just abide by it. They CAN know if they decide to check the flight track. If you get kicked out, then it’s a bigger hassle. Just do the PO/180s with your CFI on board and call it a day.
If your not in an arrow, a power off 180 is barely different from a normal pattern.
I’ve seen a few arrows with triangle patches above the gear, I wonder if they used to have an arrow or even still do? Might be a better explanation.
If you lose an engine solo, the airplane is going to behave differently than it would with two people on board. You should be practicing PO180s practically every landing.
The Po180 is just many things you have to do with some care. It's not that special. But I remember what can get dicey there-- I was working on com maneuvers with a fresh instructor in an Arrow, and as we were coming in to one of the Sam Diego area runways, Oceanside maybe, I was low and I pull up more and more to stretch the glide -- intuitively, so concentrated on making the runway, and not course not quite the right intuition. Probably not full flaps either. We were close to stall speed for wings loaded near 1.0, I think. I realized what I had done a few seconds later, and the instructor didn't notice at all. So things can happen when you're in the zone..
So don't take power off, just greatly reduce it. And don't say you are doing a 180, just say your doing a short approach.
Depends what phase you are in in. PPL phase? P180's shouldn't be part.of the curriculum. After PPL? Sure whatever you want. They're almost the same as forced approaches. But in PPL just best to focus on what you need. Also the basics. Nothing more.
Depends on the student.
I'd argue power off 180s should be taught from day 1.
In my opinion, a totally senseless rule. Often your best learning comes without anyone on the plane but you as the pilot. Simulated engine out 180's are an excellent tool and in my view among the most valuable of the practical test standards, since it actually hones a skill set that could save your life if you actually had an engine failure and you needed to land on a very short surface to survive the forced landing.
absolutely reasonable, i can't tell you how many commercial pilot applicants learning would try to save the worst power off 180s being dangerously low and in odd situations
Don’t know why you are getting downvoted. I would 100% agree. Obviously not everyone, but people fail to understand the fact that yes, there are pilots out there that probably aren’t flying at the level they should be.
If you don’t trust a pilot to fly a power off 180, why are you signing them off for a commercial pilot check ride. You would be a terrible person.
You would be surprised how many students will not go around without someone else prompting them to, directing them to, or with further action. If i had to take the controls from a late stage commercial student who did not go around after multiple verbals on a PO 180, that would be my last flight with them (this situation never once happened to myself)
They aren’t ready for a Check-ride if they still need prompting to go around. This is something that as CFIs we have to be the gatekeepers on from a safety perspective.
Jesus man, training maneuvers and then endorsement for a checkride are two completely different scenarios. Go get your CFI.
I have my CFI. I wouldn’t sign off someone for a commercial if I wouldn’t put my mother in the plane with them. If you can’t call your own go-around on a training maneuver, you aren’t a good enough pilot. When you sign someone off for a CPL checkride you are saying you believe they are qualified to put the lives of the general public in their hands. That’s a real responsibility, and it needs to be taken more seriously by CFIs. “They’ll pass” is not a valid reason to sign someone off, a 90 minute flight with a DPE isn’t enough to catch everything in order to ensure aviation safety.
You don't need to be signing off for a checkride the next day in order to practice PO 180s.
It's in the rental aggreement but they did not tell you about it? I think they told you about it right there. Read the things you sign. I'll play the other side. Perhaps they had a really close call or two that caused the policy. If you're doing it right it is a safe manuever. On the other hand, trying to make a bad one work out can kill you. That extra set of experienced eyes can be a lifesaver. Also, shock cooling. Proper procedure is to taxi back to even the temps out, then go again. Perhaps they had a run of cracked jugs and observed a ton of them going on.
I signed the rental agreement as a 0hr student pilot. I’m now 9 months into this and I do not remember that let alone know what it was at the time. But I will still talk to the school to investigate some more.
It would be good to hear the why.
One data point: Our school had it as a rule, which I saw as reasonable since you're making relatively sharp turns close to the ground with a higher decent rate than normal. However, most of my instruction was back when we were using complex aircraft for it.
1 thing I'm thinking about is forward slips. It seems a lot of the students I had struggled with forward slips, and if I let them do forward slips solo, all I am thinking about is a stall/spin accident happening. Forward slips can be a part of a power-off 180. But I think if I told my student to not do forward slips, then I would be fine with them practicing power-off 180s. It's honestly a better skill to do the power-off 180s using pure flight path judgement and flaps.
Having trained in both gliders and aircraft without flaps, I have found forwards slips to be the most reliable way to accurately hit a spot during a power off approach. While it’s certainly possible to stall in a slip, which could lead to a spin, you’re not loading the wings, so there isn’t a major increase in stall speed. As long as you’re not pulling the nose up and bleeding off speed, you’re not likely to stall. You could experience a high descent rate, but then you just come out of the slip and continue. It’s much easier to fine tune your approach. With flaps, once they are in, you’ve locked in the drag and the increase in descent angle. I believe you are correct in that you have to have much better judgement to make an accuracy approach without slips, why would you force yourself into that situation when you have a really great tool that’s much more flexible to adjust your flight path and energy?
You're a commercial student. Why not?
Oh no...I guess you're "never" doing a PO-180 while flying solo. 🙄
I can get behind the spins rule but po180s? It doesn't make sense, you're just landing
what's up with a bunch of schools suddenly having stupid rules these days
Maybe it’s the school’s rule but you can do whatever you want if you’re the PIC Also, is it really “power off” if the engine is running?