Emergency procedures

14 CFR 61.31(i) requires no emergency training at all. It requires normal and crosswind takeoffs and landings, wheel landings, and go-arounds. That is the whole list.

The Progress Tracker's element view is indexed by that regulation, so it cannot show the absence of anything the regulation does not name. A student can carry PROFICIENT against all six elements having never discussed what to do if the engine stops on climbout, and every view North Aero has would look correct.

Everything in this document is North Aero's own standard rather than a regulatory requirement. That is precisely why it needs a home the element view does not provide.

Go-arounds are not in this document. The go-around is a regulatory element introduced in L2 and brought to standard in L3. Restating it here would create a second version to keep in step with the first. What belongs here and nowhere else is that a go-around in this airplane needs more right rudder than a pilot coming from a tricycle-gear trainer expects, and that the rudder goes in as the power comes up rather than after.

Three facts about N1302B change how a generic procedure is flown. They are the reason this document is not a copy of a standard trainer's emergency section.

1. The mass sits behind the main wheels. On any off-field arrival, directional control through the rollout is the part that decides whether the airplane stops upright. See ../GROUND-LOOPS.md for the mechanism.
2. The magnetos are independent of the electrical bus. An electrical failure does not stop the engine. Students consistently expect the opposite, and it is the fact in this section that gets the most relieved reaction when it lands.
3. The engine is carburetted and the panel carries a carburetor heat control, item 9 in Figure 1 of the Owner's Handbook. Carburetor ice is the failure mode a student is most likely to actually meet, and it is the one that announces itself gradually enough to be missed.

These are the only memory items in this program. Three procedures, and they are labelled as memory items because they are short enough to be memorised. A long list is not memorised, and an unmemorised memory item is worse than a checklist, because it is trusted without being read.

Everything else in this document is briefed, discussed, and flown, and is not committed to memory.

Engine failure after takeoff

Engine failure in flight

Engine fire on start

No memory item in this program instructs a pilot to touch a control this airplane does not have. The manual's engine failure memory item read "Flaps: As needed for obstacle clearance." N1302B has no flaps. That item is the reason this document exists in a governed folder where program/check.py can reach it. The manual has since been adopted into the same folder, its memory items now reproduce the three above, and the checker reaches it too.

This is the emergency that kills people in light airplanes, and the reason is usually the same decision made the same wrong way.

The rule is straight ahead. Land ahead, or within a shallow turn of ahead, and accept the field you get. The turn back to the runway is the one that does not work: it costs more altitude than a pilot expects, it is flown slower and steeper than intended, and it ends in a stall and a spin at an altitude with no recovery in it.

North Aero does not publish a single turnback altitude, and that is deliberate. The height at which a turnback stops being fatal moves with the wind, the runway remaining, the weight, the density altitude, and how quickly the pilot actually lowers the nose. A published figure gets read as permission, and the pilot who has memorised one is the pilot who attempts the turn on the day it does not apply.

What North Aero teaches instead: with no wind, not below traffic pattern altitude. Below that it is straight ahead. Circumstances move it, and they move it up more often than down.

This is a North Aero standard and not a figure from any handbook. It sits alongside the 10 knot solo crosswind limit in ../CONTEXT.md. The turnback is not taught, not practised, and not expected of a student in this program at any altitude.

What is specific to this airplane is the part after the touchdown. On a rough surface, with the mass behind the wheels, the airplane will try to swap ends the moment one wheel finds something the other does not. The stick comes back, the feet stay alive, and the airplane is flown until it has stopped moving.

Above the height where troubleshooting is worth the altitude, work the restart flow in order: fuel selector, mixture, carburetor heat, magnetos, primer. The magneto switch bumped off its detent is a real cause and takes one second to check.

Do not spend altitude troubleshooting low down. If the engine quits below the height at which a restart could plausibly be completed and the airplane still arrive somewhere chosen, the restart is abandoned and the whole of the remaining altitude is spent flying the airplane to the best available surface. Aviate first, and the order is not negotiable.

The field chosen matters more here than in a trainer. A taildragger arriving on a soft or uneven surface is a nose-over candidate in a way a tricycle-gear airplane is not, so the flattest, firmest, longest option wins over the closest one when there is a choice.

The most likely cause of a power loss this student will meet, and the one that is missed because it arrives slowly.

What it looks like: a gradual loss of rpm at a fixed throttle setting, roughness, and a slow decay of performance that a pilot busy with something else attributes to the airplane rather than to ice.

What to do: full carburetor heat, and leave it on. Expect the rpm to drop further before it recovers, because the melting ice goes through the engine on its way out. A pilot who applies heat, sees the rpm fall, and pulls the heat back off has confirmed the diagnosis and then undone the cure.

When to expect it: carburetted engines can accumulate induction ice across a wide range of temperature and humidity, including on warm days. Carburetor heat is applied on descent and before any closed-throttle work as a matter of routine rather than as a reaction, which is what the Owner's Handbook already directs.

This matters more here than in a modern trainer because starting this airplane involves priming, and an over-primed engine puts raw fuel where a fire starts.

Keep cranking. The instinct is to stop, and stopping is what turns a fire in the induction system into a fire in the engine compartment. Cranking draws it into the engine, where it burns itself out.

If it does not go out, the airplane is shut down and left: mixture to idle cutoff, fuel selector off, and everyone out and clear before anything else is attempted. Nobody fights an aircraft fire from inside the aircraft.

North Aero does not permit hand-propping. N1302B is started on the starter, and no North Aero student, member, or renter hand-props it. That removes the case where a fire on start has somebody standing in front of the propeller, and it is why this procedure is written throughout for a pilot who is in the seat with the brakes set.

The engine keeps running. The magnetos are self-contained and are not fed by the electrical system, so a total loss of the bus is a communications and equipment problem rather than an engine problem. Students consistently expect the opposite, and the briefing is not finished until this one has been said out loud and repeated back.

What is actually lost is the radio, the electrically driven instruments, and any electrical navigation equipment.

At KSNS with the tower open, a radio failure is handled with light signals. The student is expected to know the signals before Lesson 1, and to know that squawking 7600 only helps while the transponder still has power to squawk with.

../GROUND-LOOPS.md covers the mechanism, what a ground loop costs, and what to do in the ninety seconds after the airplane has stopped. This section is the part it does not cover, which is what to do with the controls while it is still happening.

As it starts: throttle closed if it is not already, full opposite rudder, stick full aft to plant the tailwheel and give it something to steer with. This is the second in which the airplane can still be saved, and it is why the first lesson is spent taxiing.

Not the brakes. Differential braking into a developing ground loop digs in the inside wheel and is how a swerve becomes a wingtip or a nose-over. The brakes are how a pilot converts a recoverable event into an insurance claim.

Once it is sliding sideways, ride it out. Past a certain point the airplane is going to finish what it started, and the remaining decisions are about protecting the people in it. Let it dissipate its energy, then apply ../GROUND-LOOPS.md.

The student has met this standard when they can do all of the following. These are the words the instructor grades against, and they ask for actions rather than recitation.

1. You state the straight-ahead rule for an engine failure after takeoff, and you state why North Aero gives no single turnback altitude rather than reciting one.
2. You state the glide speed and the engine failure after takeoff speed, in MPH, without looking them up.
3. You fly a simulated power failure to a spot landing in L5, arriving at a surface you chose and named, at an airspeed you can defend.
4. You run the restart flow from memory, in order, touching the actual controls in the cockpit rather than naming them.
5. You diagnose simulated carburetor ice from the symptoms described to you, apply full heat, and state what you expect the rpm to do next before it does it.
6. You state what an electrical failure does to the engine, correctly, without hedging.
7. You demonstrate the ground loop recovery inputs in the airplane during taxi work, on command, without reaching for the brakes.
8. You state the three memory items in this document, and you state that they are the only three.
9. You say what you would do about a fire on start, including the part about continuing to crank.

The intervention threshold for the flying portion is L5's, not a separate one. See ../lessons/L05-crosswind-review-and-power-failures.md.

• The height below which a restart is abandoned is deliberately not a number here. It depends on the field selected and the glide available to reach it. It is a briefing decision rather than a published figure, for the same reason the turnback altitude is.
• The glide speed is read from the SLSA-8 handbook rather than from this airframe. It is a procedure airspeed for a Light Sport airplane at a lower gross weight, adopted for N1302B by the CFI. It is the best available figure and it is not one read off this airplane's own placard. See ../AIRCRAFT.md.
• Light signals are referenced and not reproduced. Confirm whether the student packet should carry the table rather than assuming private pilot knowledge is current.