Emergency operations and postflight procedures

What this lesson is for: teaching emergency operations and postflight procedures from the right seat, and being able to introduce a simulated emergency to a Student safely: briefed, bounded, and ended on criteria you stated rather than on how it feels.

This is the last lesson of phase 3, and it is recorded. Your recording gets compared against lesson 25's. That comparison is why lesson 25 was recorded thirteen lessons ago.

Read:

• FAA-S-ACS-25, tasks AI.XII.A through AI.XII.D and AI.XIV.A, in full. Note that postflight is a task in its own right.
• FAA-H-8083-3C, the emergency procedures chapter.
• The emergency checklists for the airplane you will fly, from that airplane's own approved material, and find where the emergency equipment is stowed in the actual airplane.
• Your own lesson 25 debrief.

Deliverable: Three things. First, write the preflight ground lesson you will teach on emergency operations. This is one of your seventeen P3 plans, covering an emergency operation. Second, memorize the six rules below. You will state them without reading. Third, write down what you think has changed in your instruction since lesson 25, before you rewatch anything.

Flying emergencies is the easy half. You have been doing simulated engine failures since you were a student.

What is new is the instructor's side: creating an emergency for somebody else without creating a real one. That has rules, the rules are not obvious, and an instructor who was never taught them will invent them badly under pressure. Every year somebody bends an airplane demonstrating an emergency that was not one.

The six rules

North Aero policy, not regulation. Know them.

1. Say it is coming, in the preflight brief, and do not say when. A Student who was never told is being startled, not taught.
2. Simulate with the throttle. Nothing that stops the engine for real. No mixture, no fuel selector, no magnetos, in flight, at any altitude, ever.
3. State the altitude floor before the exercise and terminate there, whether or not it has reached a conclusion.
4. State the configuration limits. What the exercise may reach and what it may not.
5. Never introduce one where a real failure would leave no option. If the simulation becoming real would be fatal, it is the wrong place for it.
6. Terminate on the stated criteria, not on how it feels. The floor, running out of options, the Student overloading, traffic, or the engine needing attention. Any one ends it.

1. The six rules, and why each one exists.
2. The emergency descent, and what it is actually for.
3. Engine care during and after a simulated failure.
4. The simulated emergency approach and landing: field, pattern, checklist, radio.
5. Field selection as a repeatable process rather than as an eye for terrain.
6. Systems and equipment malfunctions that are not the engine.
7. Partial power loss, which is harder to teach and more common than a clean failure.
8. Emergency equipment and survival gear, for this airplane and this terrain.
9. After landing, parking, and securing, taught rather than done in silence.
10. The postflight debrief as part of the lesson.
11. Where the emergency thread runs through this whole program.

Postflight is a graded ACS task. AI.XIV.A. More to the point, the shutdown and securing is where a Student learns whether the airplane matters to their instructor. Narrate a whole flight and then park in silence and you have taught something you did not mean to.

Partial power loss is where the accidents are. A clean failure is simple: the engine is gone, the decision is made. Partial power is a decision under ambiguity, with the airplane still flying and a real temptation to press on. It is much harder to teach, and it is the one worth the extra ten minutes.

You have been meeting emergencies since phase 1. Here is where.

You will be asked at the debrief to name as many of these as you can. Most candidates get seven or eight, which is the right answer: it means emergencies registered as a habit rather than as a topic.

1. Teach your preflight ground lesson, including the six rules from memory.
2. Agree and write down the altitude floor and the configuration limits.
3. Demonstrate an emergency descent and a simulated emergency approach and landing, narrating.
4. Introduce a simulated emergency to your Student, correctly briefed and bounded.
5. Teach a systems malfunction and a partial power loss.
6. Teach the emergency equipment actually in the airplane.
7. Teach after landing, parking, and securing.
8. Take the airplane at the threshold, out loud, three-way.
9. Critique, self-critique, then listen. Then review the recording against lesson 25's.

1. You deliver the preflight ground lesson on emergency operations, covering all seven items of the brief, and state all six rules for introducing a simulated emergency, from memory.
2. You state the altitude floor and the configuration limits for the exercises as numbers, before engine start.
3. You introduce a simulated emergency to the Simulated Student using the throttle only, having briefed beforehand that one would occur, and state what you want the Student to do.
4. You terminate each simulated emergency at the stated floor, out loud, whether or not the exercise has reached a conclusion.
5. You fly an emergency descent and a simulated emergency approach and landing to the tolerances the current tasks specify, from the right seat, while narrating continuously.
6. You teach field selection as a repeatable process, and direct the Simulated Student to fly the airplane before choosing the field.
7. You name the fixation when the Simulated Student stops flying the airplane, rather than only correcting the resulting deviation.
8. You teach a partial power loss as a decision under ambiguity, and can say why it is harder than a complete failure.
9. You teach the emergency equipment actually aboard the airplane being flown, having located it, rather than a general list.
10. You teach after landing, parking, and securing, narrating it as instruction rather than completing it in silence.
11. You take the flight controls using the three-way exchange, out loud, in both directions, including at least once when the airplane was not offered.
12. You deliver a critique naming the error, its probable cause, and the correction for at least two of the errors flown.
13. You deliver a self-critique before hearing the instructor's, and state what you believe has changed since lesson 25 before hearing the instructor's comparison.

Standards 1 through 4 are the lesson. They are the difference between an instructor who can fly an emergency and one who can teach it without eventually causing one.

Falling short does not block phase 4. No proficiency gate. It triggers the visibility rule in policy/REMEDIATION-VISIBILITY.md. This is the last lesson before checkride preparation, so anything found today is worth working before lesson 39 rather than carrying into the mock flight.

• The six rules read rather than known.
• Simulating with anything other than the throttle. This is the one that bends airplanes.
• No floor agreed, or a floor agreed and then passed.
• Startling a Student who was never told an emergency would happen.
• Introducing one over terrain with no options.
• Choosing the field before setting the airspeed.
• Fixating on the field and stopping flying the airplane. The most common error in the exercise.
• Changing fields three times on the way down. The second-best field, committed to, beats three good ones.
• Checklist from memory, half of it missed. Flow, then checklist.
• Never touching the radio. It is part of the sequence and it gets forgotten every single time.
• Pressing on with partial power toward a distant airport.
• Shutting down and walking away.

• The airplane descends through the agreed floor and the exercise has not been terminated.
• Airspeed reaches 1.1 Vso at any point in a simulated emergency approach without correction applied.
• The nose is raised to stretch a glide. No time allowance, as at lesson 36.
• The airplane is maneuvered below 500 ft AGL other than in the traffic pattern.
• Any control other than the throttle is moved to simulate a failure.
• Bank exceeds 45 degrees below 1,000 ft AGL.
• Either of us is unclear about who is flying the airplane.

Hard floor: every simulated emergency approach is terminated by 1,000 ft AGL unless it is being flown to a runway in the traffic pattern. North Aero policy, not regulation.

The item about moving a control other than the throttle applies to both of us. It is on this list rather than in the common errors because there is no version of it that is a teaching moment.

Positive exchange of controls, both directions, every time.

Four slots, all currently empty: VS-38-1 Exemplar on AI.XII.B, VS-38-2 Error on AI.XII.B, VS-38-3 Error on AI.XII.C, and VS-38-4, a second Exemplar on AI.XIV.A.

The second Exemplar is a deliberate exception: postflight is its own ACS task with no other lesson claiming it, and a task with no Exemplar is worse than a lesson with two.

This lesson is complete and deliverable whether or not its Video Slots are filled.

This flight is recorded, and it is the last of the four. Its whole purpose is comparison: you and your instructor will look at it beside the lesson 25 recording and name what has changed across thirteen lessons.

Write down what you think has changed before you watch either one. Then watch. The gap between what you expected and what you see is the most useful thing this program will show you about your own instruction.

The camera changes nothing about when I take the airplane.

Two things get confirmed today, and both are easy to discover too late.

• Your 61.183(i) spin endorsement is in your logbook, or you have a firm date. This one is yours. North Aero does not provide spin training and does not book it for you. If it is done, bring the logbook today so it can be checked against the endorsement checklist. No endorsement means no checkride, and that is an eligibility requirement on you, not a school process.
• The second instructor for lessons 40 and 41 is being arranged. That one is ours.

Ask about both today.