P-51 engine out landing debrief

Again, hoggit comes through for me with some great content links.

Some great discussion from the pilot of the P-51. Really appreciate how honest and straight forward pilots often are about what went wrong.

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Yeah… We’re trained to be honest, from flightschool and onwards. From your first lesson you are tought to analyse your own performance, as a way to learn.
We’re also very upfront about our mistakes. The «Just Culture» in aviation is really important. The idea is that you can do almost anything, as long as you didn’t mean to do it, and you fess up about it, without being punished. Now, there are limits to this, of course.
It has worked pretty well, looking at the safety statistics in aviation.

There is, however, a rising problem in that the authorities, police and prosecution, and lawyers of possible victims, etc. are looking for someone to blame, when something goes wrong.

This means we need to be very careful about who we are honest and straight forward to.

In every situation there will be something the pilot(s) could have done better or perhaps just differently.
My take on this is that if you weren’t in the cockpit, at that particular time and space, you don’t have a say.

That’s not how everybody sees this, though…

Soon after an incident, you will meet a police officer, who will ask questions about what happened. If you start spilling your guts about everything you feel you could have done differently, that officer will start taking notes, and those notes may make it look like you, yourself, is admitting to be the cause of the events that has transpired.

That looks like a very interesting video, though. Will save it for later. :slight_smile:

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Great, now i’m dying to know what the real issue was with the engine…

Informative video.
On a side not Planes of Fame restored the aircraft and it is already back in the UK as of a couple weeks ago. Should be ready for Duxford.

Wheels

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Hmmmmm…The first leason learned from sim-flying is, when something goes wrong, push the pause button, exit the flight and erase the entry from your logbook. I have a stellar, unblemished sim-flying career…over 2,000 hours with nary a bumpy landing let alone an crash or untoward incident…according to my FSX logbook. Just say’n :wink:

Actually, I only erase the crashes that would have killed me…no point in counting the flight hours and ladings if I’m virtually dead. I do have several flights annotated with various remarks like “ran out of gas”, “Hard landing - broke nose gear and trashed prop” and several “Gear up landing” entries.

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