Control Lock Safety

[rightrudder]

Originally Posted by AndyRV7

In my checklist!

Excellent. Me too!

[Bevan]

Originally Posted by Mel

At what point will we stop trying to make things idiot proof and take responsibility to do things right?

If you make it "idiot proof", someone will come up with a better idiot.

Exactly! And operation of aircraft is a "licensed" activity. That implies training, standards, skill, competence and consequences. No place for idiots.

Bevan

[Dundee Downunder]

What a concept -- a pilot's check list!
On October 30, 1935, at Wright Air Field in Dayton , Ohio , the U.S. Army Air Corps held a flight competition for airplane manufacturers vying to build its next-generation long-range bomber.
It wasn't supposed to be much of a competition. In early evaluations, the Boeing Corporation's gleaming aluminum-alloy Model 299 had trounced the designs of Martin and Douglas.
Boeing's plane could carry five times as many bombs as the Army had requested; it could fly faster than previous bombers, and almost twice as far.
A Seattle newspaperman who had glimpsed the plane called it the "flying fortress," and the name stuck. The flight "competition," according to the military historian Phillip Meilinger, was regarded as a mere formality.
The Army planned to order at least sixty-five of the aircraft. A small crowd of Army brass and manufacturing executives watched as the Model 299 test plane taxied onto the runway.
It was sleek and impressive, with a hundred-and-three-foot wingspan and four engines jutting out from the wings, rather than the usual two. The plane roared down the tarmac, lifted off smoothly and
climbed sharply to three hundred feet. Then it stalled, turned on one wing and crashed in a fiery explosion. Two of the five crew members died, including the pilot, Major Ployer P. Hill (thus Hill AFB , Ogden , UT ).
An investigation revealed that nothing mechanical had gone wrong.
The crash had been due to "pilot error," the report said. Substantially more complex than previous aircraft, the new plane required the pilot to attend to the four engines, a retractable landing gear,
new wing flaps, electric trim tabs that needed adjustment to maintain control at different airspeeds, and constant-speed propellers whose pitch had to be regulated with hydraulic controls, among other features.

While doing all this, Hill had forgotten to release a new locking mechanism on the elevator and rudder controls.

The Boeing model was deemed, as a newspaper put it, "too much airplane for one man to fly." The Army Air Corps declared Douglas's smaller design the winner. Boeing nearly went bankrupt.
Still, the Army purchased a few aircraft from Boeing as test planes, and some insiders remained convinced that the aircraft was flyable.
So a group of test pilots got together and considered what to do.
They could have required Model 299 pilots to undergo more training. But it was hard to imagine having more experience and expertise than Major Hill, who had been the U.S. Army Air Corps' Chief of Flight Testing.

Instead, they came up with an ingeniously simple approach: they created a pilot's checklist, with step-by-step checks for takeoff, flight, landing, and taxiing. Its mere existence indicated how far aeronautics had advanced.
In the early years of flight, getting an aircraft into the air might have been nerve-racking, but it was hardly complex. Using a checklist for takeoff would no more have occurred to a pilot than to a driver backing
a car out of the garage. But this new plane was too complicated to be left to the memory of any pilot, however expert.
With the checklist in hand, the pilots went on to fly the Model 299 a total of 18 million miles without one accident. The Army ultimately ordered almost thirteen thousand of the aircraft,
which it dubbed the B-17. And, because flying the behemoth was now possible, the Army gained a decisive air advantage in the Second World War which enabled its devastating bombing campaign across Nazi Germany.
Source: Wikipedia

[PerfTech]

...Thank you for this very interesting and informative bit of history. I am sure most people, myself included were unaware of the beginnings of the check list and it"s early use. Thanks again, Allan...

[sblack]

Often on the Biz jets I have worked on the auto throttle is an STC, i.e. a generic unit supplied by a third part. It is on the Challenger 600 series, so it would not have provision for an interface with the gust lock.

Where ever you draw the safety line, somebody will cross it and some lawyer will tell you after the fact that you should have drawn it in a different place. That's just life in this business.

I haven't even thought about gust locks on my 4 yet. But I guess I have a couple of yrs left to worry about it.

[LifeofReiley]

I lost many good friends going on a hunting trip in a Baron... control lock left in on takeoff everyone dead. very sad but true.

[Mel]

Back when I was in the C-170 Association, we had a fellow take off with the yoke tied back with the passenger seat belt. How do you overlook that?
But....... It happens.