Windshear Warnings in regional A/C
 

Lets talk windshear. So i just finished my first probationary/recurrent PC at the regional i work for flying the CRJ2. One thing that always amazed me in sim training was doing the windshear training/escape maneuver practice. it seems to me with the way they give us windshear in the sim if it happened in real life on takeoff or on landing if you didnt react accordingly within a few seconds you would be dead. At our company when we get a windshear warning it is the only time they let us go balls to the walls on the throttle and it really seems like if you you used any less power you wouldn't make it. also another thing i noticed is that if the windshear came with a performance increasing at first if you didn't recognize it as windshear immediately and take advantage of that performance increase while doing a go around on landing your gonna crash. has anyone had anything of the equivalent of this in the real world? looking to hear some stories. Also i think in the sim what they may be giving us is microbursts is that correct? Maybe other A/C can handle severe windshear better but to me and what i hear from alot of people is that the CRJ2 is underpowered. I really wouldn't know because its the only jet i have time in. In the year ive been flying the CRJ2 ive had a windshear warning once on takeoff. i was the pilot non flying but as soon as i heard it i called windshear escape and just pushed the power up to the stops. may have been stepping on the captains dick by touching his thrust levers on his leg but from what i seen in the sim i wasnt going to sit and wait an extra second for him to do it. When we did get the warning though it wasnt that bad.. lost maybe 15 knots on takeoff which only put us back to around V2 speed so it wasnt that bad.

Saab and the Q didn't have warnings. We didn't go missed like RJ's due to "warnings".

Windshear is pretty common. It varies in degree from barely noticeable to potentially catastrophic. They are training you for the worst case...I wouldn't firewall the throttle unless you are in it bad and ground contact is imminent. Most companies and most airplanes recommend a graduated approach, something like this:

1. Max Continuous + Pitch
2. Emergency Power (+ maybe more pitch)
3. Firewall

The urgency of the event depends on how bad the performance loss is, and how fast the ground is approaching. On some airplanes, firewall WILL require an engine teardown, so that should not be a step taken lightly unless you need it.

The 200 has plenty of power at or near sea level.

But follow your SOP procedure... if that tells you to pitch for the shaker and cook the motors I guess that's what you have to do.

I've checked out in 6 jet types, and all are maximum power and 15 degrees nose up or ride the shaker for a windshear warning.

The CRJ-200 has plenty of power down low.

What you're doing in the sim are worst case scenario windshear profiles. Just like most airline pilots will only have one engine quit over their career, you're more than likely never going to encounter a windshear anything like that in your lifetime.

:D dont deviate penetrate ! turboprop terror ftw.

Blaze the way and open the corridors for the jets.

thanks for the replies. yeah i know it is severe windshear and its rare to actually encounter this. was wondering anyone has actually had to deal with this? In the CRJ2 we are supposed to chase the flight director or ride shaker if ground impact is imminent. the maneuver itself in the sim is actually pretty fun to do.

You can actually give yourself a windshear warning in the e145 by rapid thrust lever changes while you are chasing a speed below 1500'. It is a bad habit that a lot of people have. It is similar to people who pump the yoke just before touchdown.

I'll go along with this with one addendum: At least the instructors I've worked with in the sim are training you to ingrain best practices which will hopefully enable you to survive if you encounter a severe windshear. What you're getting in the sim (at least the ones I'm familiar with) is NOT the full 100% setting on the windshear model - several of those are simply NOT survivable if you wait until you get the warning. This is also true for the aircraft - there are shears which you cannot escape with any known technique.

Again, I must emphasize (not for you 80, just in general): We aren't training technique for flying through windshear, we're training the best known way to survive if you find yourself in that situation.

As far as the thrust - depending on the airframe (some are susceptible to compressor stalls above rated power, so utilize the best practices for your particular airframe.

Do what you have to do, keeping in mind the meso or synoptic scale situation you are in. Convective weather in the vicinity or climbing through a low-level winter inversion, or a gusty day behind a cold front?

That said, as a wise man once put it: They don't overhaul crashes.

This might be the same thing bcrosier said but just said differently. In the sim we can give you windshear events ranging from 100% (you will crash no matter what) to zero percent (not even noticeable). If you need firewall power in the sim just to survive, your instructor is most likely giving you a shear in the 70-80% range just to see how well you do and to make you fly the director and manage energy as long as possible. Like the other poster said, that's probably one of those once in a lifetime if ever real world events. Don't let it scare you into thinking normal shear encounters in the CRJ will be like that.

I've had a scenario in the CR7 sim where if you didn't go full power and pitch with a positive wind shear you would crash because of the imminent negative performance shear the quickly followed. I think it was a recreation of the Delta Dallas crash on short final. We barely made it and we did iniatiate the go as soon as we hit it.

We have the Delta 191 model in the sim I teach - again it is scalable from 0-100% as Mooney said. I've never tried 100%, but based on what 50-60% looks like, I'd guess that 100% is not survivable.

Just like you get an engine failure right before V1, sim instructors design the windshear to test limits of the plane and the pilot. Think of it as microburst recovery training.

I had an encounter this summer that was exactly like my ATP ride. It was in denver on a heavily loaded 200 (of course) and as far as I can tell we encountered a microburst. I was PM and as we accelerated the airspeed paused right around 100kts then promptly flew past v1,vr and v2. We were airborne almost instantly and got the the red WINDSHEAR warning/aural shortly after. The CA firewalled the thrust levers and shortly after we got a significant loss of airspeed. It was everything he could do to keep it from coming back in contact with the ground. We didn't quite get the shaker but I know we weren't far from it. Needless to say I didn't need coffee for the rest of the day!

As our indoc instructor said, you put the engines on pay roll deduction in windshear. I assume he was talking about the "worst case" scenario windshear, where you "rapidly advance the trust levers to the forward stops." AKA, somewhere up with the radar antenna and the yoke just prevented your FO from ever having kids again.

I had severe windshear in the 200 during an ILS. It was worse than anything I have ever been given in the sim. We firewalled immediately, like we are trained, and the plane continued to descend. The plane leveled at 900 feet with our nose pitched up and still firewalled. After riding this way for about 10 seconds we shot up at 4,000 ft/minute just like in the sim.

I have a few type ratings as well and it has always been firewall during a windshear escape.

Old aviation words of wisdom: when in doubt, climb! No one has ever crashed with the sky before.

If you are being trained to push the thrust levers past the detents, do it! Get as much distance between you and the ground until the warnings go away. When the event is over notify ATC and ask them what altitude they want you at. I sure as hell won't be trying to figure out what the best pitch power combo is near the ground. Firewall it and follow the guidance. Remember it was designed to make it as simple as possible to avert the danger!

Always brief windshear escape with high gust factors,windshear advisories and airports that are in mountainous terrain :)

Several different levels of extremity in the sim, some instructors like to use the max. It's your ride so if you know you still need a W/S e scape maneuver on the PC and you suddenly see +20 kts get the h-e-chopsticks out of there, don't wait for the warning, by the time your pitched up you will have it.
Shake & Bake.

Now this is exactly what I wanted to hear. Real life examples of when and how it happened and what became of it. I understand that the instructors are giving us near worst case scenarios but it's really cool to hear stories of how it plays out in the real world and how our training protects us from the worst.

I have about 7000 hours in the CR2 now and can say with confidence that an awful lot of windshear events are pilot induced. Guys chase airspeed with throttle too aggressively and end up fast then a gust kills the speed and they overreact and the speed climbs like crazy and then they pull it back to idle. Or something like that.

Many of these events can be dealt with by holding a bit more speed to begin with and bring it back slowly closer to the ground.

I'm not saying real windshear can't happen but in my experience it is often accentuated by overcorrection with the throttles.

If I get windshear I'm mashing those throttles into the EICAS. What is this BS "graduated" approach to using power in a windshear. You don't pay for the engine hours and stress put on them from max power, you are paid to keep people alive.

You have no way knowing how bad it is or how bad it can get. You might just be encountering the edge of a stronger microburst event that could get really bad really fast. I'd rather at that point have as much speed and altitude as I can get.

Dead on. Getting away from the ground is your #1 goal. I just discussed this with some classmates in recurrent recently, and none of us who have encountered windshear have used less than max power for the escape.
(LostInPA assumes no responsibility for the results of this small sample size, non-scientifically conducted survey) :D

Never had a windshear warning in the CRJ-200, but did have a couple of windshear cautions going into DCA and PHL on particularly breezy winter/spring days.

Had a couple of windshear cautions in the CJ2+ too, but again, no warnings...and all of them were +/-15kts.

If I ever get an honest-to-goodness warning, its escape maneuver until I see 4000fpm+ climb and let maintenance inspect the engines when we land.

As saab2000 said, carry a little extra speed and you don't have to go sawing on the power levers, making a crappy situation worse.

In my nearly 9 years now in the CRJ-200 I have never seen a red windshear warning that was legit. There were a couple of false alarms which were quite clearly not wind shear. Calm winds and blue skies in ILM once and another with about 10 knots out of the NW. False alarms. No panic. No shoving the levers to the stops. No drama.

People need to take the possibility of wind shear seriously but gusty winds is not a reason to panic. I landed at JFK once with gusts to 50 knots and there was no real trouble.

If you're landing underneath a thunderstorm it could be different but we need to be asking ourselves if that is a wise move to begin with.