Survival Flying Introduction and Lesson Plans

Every other page on this site assumes a working system: a GPS that knows where you are, a radio that reaches someone who can help, a fuel truck, a mechanic, a current chart, an instructor in the right seat. This one assumes none of that. The satellites are down or jammed, the radios are silent, nobody is answering, and you need to move an airplane a few hundred miles.

It is sometimes called a pinch-hitter course — what the non-flying spouse learns so they can get the airplane down if the pilot is incapacitated. This is that, extended: not just land it, but start it, fuel it, load it, navigate it without a magenta line, and put it down somewhere useful.

Two things to be clear about before anything else. This is not a substitute for a certificate and it will not make you a pilot; it is the irreducible set of skills that keeps a non-pilot alive at the controls, and every hour of real instruction you can get instead is worth more than everything written here. And it assumes an airplane you are entitled to fly. Nothing on this page is about getting into someone else’s airplane.

The through-line, which is the same argument the mountain page makes in different terrain: the airplane will kill you long before the situation does. Almost everything below is about not giving it the chance.

What You Are Not Learning

Deliberately left out, because it is not what kills people in this scenario and there isn’t time:

• Radios and ATC. You will fly without talking to anyone. That is legal at most airports and survivable at the rest.
• Airspace and regulations, beyond staying away from the few places that will get you intercepted.
• Night flying. No horizon is the same problem as clouds. See below.
• Instrument flying. Emphatically not.
• Weather theory. You get one rule instead, and it is the most important rule on this page.

Two exceptions, because they cost nothing: squawk 7700 on the transponder if there’s any chance someone is still listening, and stay out of the Class B shelves and any restricted area you can identify on the chart.

The Propeller

Before the airplane, the propeller. It is the most dangerous object on any airport, it is nearly invisible when turning, and it does not care that the ignition is off.

Treat every propeller as if the magnetos are hot, always. A magneto is grounded by a single wire — the P-lead. If that wire breaks or comes loose, the switch in the cockpit does nothing and the engine will fire if the prop is moved. This failure is common enough that it is the assumption, not the exception. Never move a propeller by hand as a way of “checking” anything. Never walk through the arc. Never let anyone stand in it.

Hand Propping

If the battery is dead — and in this scenario it very well might be — the engine can be started by hand. Many airplanes have no starter at all and are started this way every day. It is also the single most likely way to get killed on the ground, and doing it alone is the dangerous version.

Set the airplane up so that if it starts and runs away, it stays put:

• Chock the wheels, and tie the tail down. Parking brakes leak, and a brake that holds during the pull may not hold at 1,200 rpm. If you are alone, the tail rope is not optional — a runaway airplane with nobody aboard has killed the person who started it and everyone downrange.
• Throttle closed, or cracked no more than about an eighth of an inch. Too much throttle is how the airplane leaves without you.
• Mixture rich, fuel selector on, and the magnetos OFF while you set up and position the blade. Only then do you switch on.
• Better with two people: one competent adult at the controls, brakes held, with clear callouts — “switch off, throttle closed”, then “brakes set, contact” before the pull. Say the words out loud even when you feel silly.

The pull itself:

• Stand with firm, level footing, facing the propeller, feet clear of the arc and your weight balanced so that if you slip you fall away from the disc, not into it.
• Grip the blade near the tip with your fingers flat against the trailing edge — never hooked around the leading edge and never wrapped over the blade. If the engine fires, the blade must be able to leave without taking your hand with it.
• Pull the blade down briskly and step back and away in the same motion. One movement, committed.
• Never push up on a blade. If it fires on an upward push, the blade comes back through where you are standing.
• No loose clothing, no scarves, no untied laces. Cold, numb hands grip badly — that matters more than it sounds.
• Once it starts, get to the cockpit and get the throttle under control immediately.

Fuel

• 100LL is blue. Jet-A is clear or straw-coloured and smells like kerosene. Jet fuel in a piston engine will let you take off and then quit, which is the worst possible sequence. Jet nozzles are wider and are not supposed to fit a piston filler — but adapters exist and people have made it fit. Look at the colour, smell it, and check the placard by the filler.
• Sump every tank and the gascolator before every flight. Water sits at the bottom as clear beads under the blue. Drain until what comes out is uniformly blue and clean.
• Use the dipstick, not the gauges. A fuel gauge is only required to be accurate at empty. Look in the tanks with your own eyes and know how many gallons you are actually carrying.
• Ground the airplane before fuelling. Static into a fuel vapour is a real fire.
• Know the burn rate. A typical light single burns 8 to 10 gallons an hour. Plan every leg at about 75% of the book range and you have absorbed most of your own imprecision.

Weight and Balance, Simplified

You do not need the arithmetic. You need the two failure modes.

• Too heavy: uses much more runway, and then will not climb. This is what puts airplanes into the trees off the departure end.
• Too far aft: feels light and twitchy in pitch, stalls earlier and more sharply, and recovers badly. Heavy bags in the back seat and the baggage compartment are how it happens.

The working rule for a four-seat trainer: two adults and full fuel is almost always fine. Four adults and full fuel almost never is. If you are over, take fuel out before you take anything else out — but never so much that you have no margin, which puts you back on the other horn.

Heat and altitude make all of this worse at the same time: a hot day at elevation can add thousands of feet to what the wing and engine think they are doing. That mechanism has its own page here — the Density Altitude simulator is worth ten minutes before you load anything.

Start, Taxi, Run-Up

Use the checklist. You have no experience to fall back on, and the checklist is the substitute for it — read it, touch the thing, then move on. Out loud, every time.

• Start: master on, fuel selector on, mixture rich, prime as required, throttle cracked, shout “CLEAR PROP” and look, then the key.
• Taxi: feet steer, the yoke does not. Taxi slower than feels necessary. Hold the yoke into the wind. Test the brakes in the first few feet, before you need them.
• Run-up: into the wind if you can. Check the mags (a small rpm drop on each, and the engine keeps running), carb heat, oil pressure and temperature, and the controls free and correct — actually look at the surfaces move the right way.
• Before you release the brakes, look at the windsock and pick the runway that points most nearly into it, and the longest one you have.

Flying It

Trim is the most important control in the airplane. Set the power, set the attitude, then trim the pressure away until it flies itself hands-off. An airplane in trim is far more stable than you are, and a trimmed airplane gives you the hands and the attention to do everything else.

Attitude flying: pick the pitch attitude against the horizon and hold it. Look outside. The instruments confirm what the windscreen already told you.

Not Stalling

The wing stalls at an angle of attack, not a speed. It can stall at any airspeed and in any attitude — including fast, and including with the nose below the horizon. What it always takes is asking the wing for more than it has left.

Recognition: the stall horn, a buffet through the airframe, mushy sloppy controls, a high sink rate, and the nose wanting to drop. Recovery is always the same first move: reduce the angle of attack — push — then level the wings, then add power.

But recovery is the wrong emphasis. Avoidance is, and there are only two situations that matter:

• The base-to-final overshoot. You roll out and you are wide of the runway centreline. The instinct is to tighten it with rudder while keeping the bank shallow — and a skidding, slow, descending turn is the classic spin entry. Low, it is unrecoverable. If you overshoot final, fly through it, go around, and set it up again. The runway is not going anywhere.
• The departure stall. Full power, nose high, slow, climbing away. Lower the nose. Airspeed first, altitude second, always.

The two hard rules: never a steep turn close to the ground, and never use rudder to help a turn come around.

Weather: Do Not Go Into the Clouds

This is the most important section on the page.

A pilot without instrument training who flies into cloud has, on average, about three minutes before losing control of the airplane. The often-cited University of Illinois study put twenty non-instrument-rated pilots into simulated cloud; the average time to loss of control was 178 seconds, and every one of the twenty lost control. Not most. All of them.

The reason is not skill, it is plumbing. Your inner ear measures changes, not attitude. Roll slowly enough into a bank and the fluid settles, and your body reports wings level while the airplane is banked — the leans. From there the sequence is mechanical:

So the rule is absolute, and it is the one thing on this page with no exceptions:

Stay out of cloud. Stay out of haze thick enough to lose the horizon. Do not fly at night. Do not fly over water or featureless terrain out of sight of the ground.

Which in practice means:

• Do not take off into a lowering ceiling. If it looks marginal on the ground it is worse in the air.
• Do not scud run. Flying lower and lower under a descending cloud base is how the ground and the cloud meet with you between them.
• Turn around early. The single most valuable manoeuvre you have is a 180° turn back the way you came — you know it was flyable three minutes ago, because you were just there. Make that turn while you can still see. Then land and wait.
• If you do get in anyway: level the wings, reduce power, be gentle, and start a slow, shallow turn back out. Trim it and hold the controls lightly — grabbing at it is what tightens the spiral. But understand that this is the paragraph with the worst odds on the page, which is why the previous four bullets exist.

Navigating It

No GPS. The tools are a paper sectional, a compass, a watch, and your eyes — which is how everyone did it for the first sixty years of aviation, and it works.

Pilotage is looking out the window and matching what you see to the chart. Prefer big, unambiguous, linear features: coastlines, rivers, major highways, railways, ridge lines, power line cuts. Towns all look alike from 3,000 feet; a river bend does not. Following a road — the “iron compass” — is legitimate and safe, and if a road goes where you’re going, take it.

Dead reckoning is the arithmetic that fills the gaps between landmarks:

• Time = distance ÷ groundspeed. At 100 knots you are covering a bit under 2 nm a minute, so a 130 nm leg is about 80 minutes.
• The 60-to-1 rule: 1° of heading error puts you 1 nm off course for every 60 nm flown. A 5° sloppy heading over 120 nm is 10 nm off — which is far enough to miss an airport entirely.
• Pick checkpoints every 10 to 15 miles for the first part of a leg, longer once you trust your heading.
• Then fly the heading and trust it. The classic beginner error is chasing every feature that looks vaguely right and wandering off a perfectly good course.

The compass will lie to you in predictable ways, and only tells the truth in straight, level, unaccelerated flight. Turning through north it lags and through south it leads, so you roll out early heading south and late heading north. On east or west headings, accelerating reads as a turn to the north and decelerating as a turn to the south — ANDS. Let it settle before you believe it.

Deliberately aim off. This is the best trick in the chapter. Do not aim straight at a small airport — aim five or ten degrees to one side of it, and pick a long feature beyond it as a backstop. When you reach your time or hit the road, you know without ambiguity which way to turn. Aim exactly at it and arrive slightly off, and you have a fifty-fifty guess with fuel burning.

Set the altimeter to the field elevation before you take off — with no radio you have no altimeter setting, and field elevation on the chart is the honest substitute. Fly at a decent altitude, 3,000 to 5,000 feet above the ground where terrain allows: you see farther, you glide farther, and the chart makes more sense.

Landing It

This is the hard part, and it is worth being blunt: everything else on this page can be learned in an afternoon, and this cannot. So the goal is not a good landing. The goal is a survivable arrival.

• Pick the longest runway you can reach, and take the one most nearly into wind. Read the wind off the windsock, or smoke, or dust, or ripples on water.
• Fly a stabilized approach. By 500 feet you want to be on speed, on the path, with the power set, pointed at your aiming point, making only small corrections. If you are still fighting it at 500 feet, it is not going to improve.
• Pick an aiming point — a spot on the runway a little way in — and keep it in the same place in the windscreen. If it creeps up, you’re low. Down, you’re high.
• Accept a firm touchdown. Do not stretch the flare hunting for a greaser. Wings level, nose straight, on the mains, and let it settle.
• Never salvage a bad approach. Full power, pitch for a climb, flaps up in stages, go around, and do it again. Have a hard gate in your head — not right by 300 feet means go around — and honour it every time, because the approach you try to rescue is the one that kills you.

In a crosswind, either crab and straighten at the last moment or fly it wing-low with opposite rudder; the Crosswind Sideslip simulator shows the geometry. If what you’re flying happens to be a taildragger, the workload starts at touchdown rather than ending there — see the Ground Loop simulator and read the tailwheel page.

If there is no runway, an airplane put into a field under control is a very survivable event. Pick the biggest, flattest, most open thing you can reach; land into the wind and uphill if you have the choice; avoid ditches, wires and stone walls; keep the wings level; and touch down as slowly as you can with the airplane still flying. Use all of it. What kills people in forced landings is not the field — it is stalling or spinning on the way to it.

Land It Now

The one habit that outweighs every skill above: be willing to stop early.

Weather going down, light going, tired, thirsty, lost, uneasy — those are all the same signal, and the answer is always the same. Put it on the ground while the decision is still yours. A 400-mile trip flown as three unhurried legs with a night on the ground in the middle is an entirely different proposition from one four-hour push by someone who has never flown four hours in their life.

Fuel is not your limiting factor. Daylight and your own capacity are. Plan around those and the airplane will get you there.

Lesson Plans

Two ground sessions and four flights. The airplane does not matter much — a basic four-seat single is the assumption. There are no hours attached: each lesson is finished when the standard is met, and the standards are deliberately low-bar and physical rather than precise, because this is a survival syllabus and not a certificate.

Ground 1 — The Machine

• The propeller, P-leads, and why it is always hot. Hand propping: chocks, tail rope, throttle, grip, stance, callouts.
• Fuel: grades and colour, misfuelling, sumping, the dipstick, grounding, burn rate.
• Weight and balance by failure mode. Density altitude and what a hot day costs.
• The checklist as a substitute for experience.

Completion standard: sets up and hand props the airplane unassisted and correctly, having first secured it; states the fuel grade, the burn rate, and the usable fuel from the dipstick without prompting.

Ground 2 — The Trip

• Reading a sectional. Linear features and choosing checkpoints.
• Dead reckoning: time–distance–speed, 60-to-1, and the deliberate offset.
• Compass errors and when to believe it.
• Weather: the one rule, the 180° turn, and what a lowering ceiling looks like from the ground.
• Planning the 400 nm trip as three legs, with alternates and a stopping rule written down in advance.

Completion standard: plans all three legs on paper — headings, times, fuel, checkpoints, offsets, and a named go/no-go rule for each — with no electronic aid of any kind.

Flight 1 — Aviate

• Straight and level, climbs, descents, turns. Trim until it flies hands-off.
• Attitude flying, eyes outside.
• Slow flight and stall recognition. Recovery by reducing angle of attack.
• The two killers demonstrated at altitude: the skidding overshoot turn, and the departure stall.
• Radios off for the whole flight.

Completion standard: holds an altitude and a heading well enough to be useful, recovers from an approach to a stall by lowering the nose without being told, and recognises the onset before the horn.

Flight 2 — Land It

• The pattern, flown at a quiet field. Stabilized approach and the aiming point.
• Normal landings to a full stop, taxi back, repeat.
• The go-around, practised until it is automatic — including from low and from an overshooting turn to final.
• Crosswind technique to whatever the day provides.

Completion standard: flies a stabilized approach to a survivable landing without assistance, and — more important — abandons an approach that isn’t right, unprompted, at least once.

Flight 3 — Navigate It

• A 100+ nm cross-country by pilotage and dead reckoning, GPS covered up, radios off.
• Deliberate offset onto a backstop feature for the destination.
• One deliberate “lost” exercise: stop, hold a heading, climb, find a linear feature, re-establish position.
• A landing away and a return.

Completion standard: arrives at the destination without electronic navigation, within a reasonable margin of the planned time, and states the position from the chart when asked at any point in the leg.

Flight 4 — The Trip

• The whole thing: load it, fuel it, hand prop it if the day allows, and fly all three legs with landings between.
• A real go/no-go at every stop, including at least one where the honest answer might be no.

Completion standard: completes the trip, or declines to for a good reason — both are passes, and the second one is the better lesson.

References

Both free from the FAA and both worth having on paper, since the premise of this page is that the internet is not there:

• Airplane Flying Handbook (FAA-H-8083-3) — basic manoeuvres, approaches and landings, emergencies
• Pilot’s Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge (FAA-H-8083-25) — weight and balance, weather, navigation, the sectional

None of this makes you a pilot. It is what you would want to know if you had to fly anyway — and the honest recommendation is to go and get the real training now, while getting it is still easy.