“There I was, 10 minutes after takeoff from Omaha in the [Cessna Citation] CJ1+ and the avionics strapping unit fails,” said Charles J. Precourt, a retired NASA astronaut with more than 12,000 hours of flight time in over 90 models of military and civilian aircraft. Now a consultant, but recently retired as vice president of propulsion systems at Northrop Grumman Space Systems in Ogden, Utah, Precourt was on the second leg of his homebound journey from Washington, D.C., to Ogden when the emergency occurred.

“All of a sudden, I had a lot of missing information on my displays and the autopilot disconnected,” Precourt said. “We train for a variety of avionics malfunctions, but this particular failure affects many avionic systems at once. I transferred the autopilot to the copilot side and got some of my information back, but it didn’t give me the autopilot. So, I had to hand-fly the arrival to Denver Centennial [airport]. That was my best option since I couldn’t fly it into RVSM airspace with the autopilot out.”

A FlightSafety customer since 2016 and brand ambassador since 2020, Precourt credits his extensive simulator training for preparing him to handle this unusual avionics failure. “Parts of what I had done in the simulator were applicable,” Precourt said, “although there was some uniqueness to this failure that caused me to build upon the training. Certainly, if I hadn’t practiced air data computer or attitude heading reference system failures at FlightSafety, I would have been further from figuring out the right thing to do.”

Simulators and the Space Shuttle

A 1977 graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy, Precourt spent time as an instructor in T-37 and T-38 jets and as a pilot in the F-15 Eagle before graduating from the USAF Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in California in 1985. Remaining at Edwards after graduation, Precourt flew the F-15E, F-4 Phantom II, A-7 Corsair II, and A-37 Dragonfly.

NASA selected him as an astronaut candidate in 1990, at a time when the Space Shuttle program had already been in operation for nearly a decade and yet its spacecraft had flown only 32 times.

“From the beginning of the human space flight program, NASA relied heavily on the experience of military test pilots because of the experimental nature of spacecraft,” said Precourt. “They leaned on the approach taken from flight tests and corresponding preparations, including the ability to use simulators not only to prepare, but to create the simulators from flight test data.”

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Precourt now attends simulator training at FlightSafety a couple of times per year to keep his skills in the Citation sharp, but back then nearly the entire Shuttle training was spent in various simulators and procedure trainers. Each phase of Shuttle flight had its own simulator—launch, orbital phase, operations during orbit, reentry, and landing.

“We had a motion-based simulator much like FlightSafety has for [14 CFR] 61.58 [pilot proficiency check] training in the jets,” said Precourt. “We would use that to train engine failures after liftoff, electrical failures, and all the kinds of things that jet pilots do in their 61.58…What you learn quickly is that to best prepare for the inevitable variations from the plan during space flight, you have to use a simulator.”

Precourt served as mission specialist on the Columbia mission STS-55 in 1993, using another simulator to learn how to operate the a variety of on-orbit systems. Between that and his next mission, piloting Atlantis on STS-71, he spent more time in simulators, including an airborne simulator crafted out of a highly modified Gulfstream GII, and another simulator that focused on rendezvous and docking with the Russian Mir space station.

“We would not allow a pilot to command a Space Shuttle until they had done a thousand approaches in the Gulfstream,” Precourt said. “The left seat was modeled just like the Space Shuttle. We would fly up to 35,000 feet and then put it into the approach phase of the Shuttle flight. The pilot in the left seat could fly exactly like he would on the last phase of approach and landing in the Space Shuttle. We would typically fly 10 approaches per training sortie, so that’s 100 flights in the GII. The simulation was so accurate that when I did my landing in the Space Shuttle, it felt like I was back in the Gulfstream.”    

In addition to building muscle memory doing so many landings, the pilots received instant feedback after each landing—similar to the feedback provided after a simulation session at FlightSafety. Computers onboard the GII captured various flight parameters, which the pilot could study during the ascent between landings.

“Once we got to a touchdown point, the safety pilot in the right seat would take over the Gulfstream, add power, and climb us back up for another approach,” Precourt said. “During the climb out, the flight engineer would hand you a graphical trace of your hand controller inputs and the resulting trajectory shape along with a table of parameters. You could look at that and relate it in real time, make adjustments, and see if the aircraft did what you expected after the adjustment. I became a big fan of gathering and using flight data like this, and when I was chief astronaut, I would review the plots of my other commanders to see what we could do to improve.”

Simulation Primes the Pump and Sets a Mental Model

Precourt flew four Shuttle missions—three as pilot or commander—on three different orbiters. During those missions, he and his crew experienced software malfunctions, computer failures, and even a loss of communication requiring Precourt to reconfigure the radios during orbit to regain contact with the ground team. The most extensive failure caused an aborted launch on Precourt’s first mission where 3.5 seconds into the main engine start, computers detected a leak and shut down the three engines while still on the launchpad.

“You’re thinking about launch, the engines light off with all the sound and steam, and within seconds of liftoff, all of a sudden the engines are being shut down again,” Precourt recounted. “There are a huge number of procedures to run through, and of course we had done that in the simulator. So, we weren’t completely at a loss as to how to react in this unexpected situation, even with our brains still focused on launch.”

Whether in the Shuttle or in a business jet, Precourt stresses the value of being prepared through simulation.

“In the Citation I’ve had generator failures, a P2T2 probe failure, hydraulic issues, and other things that I’d seen in the simulator,” he said. “Failures become much less of a big deal after you’ve practiced them in the simulator. You know what the first step is, what the pacing is, and what the likely outcome’s going to be because you’ve pre-thought these decisions. It’s truly invaluable to have had that first experience in the safety of a simulator on the ground.”

You might think that Precourt—having retired from NASA in 2004 and transitioned to civilian life—would shun spending more time in simulators. Instead, the opposite is true as he continues to sharpen his skills in FlightSafety’s Citation simulators.

“Every time I go to FlightSafety, I learn something new,” Precourt said. “It allows you to create a mental model that means you’re not just going into an approach like the last one that turned out nicely. You’re always thinking about what do I do if such and such occurs, so when the time comes that the ‘if’ happens, you’re not so surprised and the go-around can be fine instead of an ‘oh, crap!’.”

Precourt says being prepared to go into the simulator is as important as being prepared to fly the real thing. “It’s priming the pump,” he said. “I like doing the online ground school at FlightSafety because it gives me a couple of weeks to dive back into the details on various systems and procedures like single-engine go-arounds, single -engine approaches in the weather, engine failures at the outer marker, and so on.”

In addition to being personally prepared, Precourt, in his role as Safety Committee Chairman for Citation Jet Pilots Association (CJP), worked with the Presage Group and FlightSafety on a study of more than 200 CJP pilots regarding their decision-making process during stable and unstable approaches. The study led to CJP creating their Safe to Land initiative and new SOPs will be integrated into FlightSafety’s Citation simulator training over the next six to 18 months.

“We looked at accidents from unstabilized approaches and asked ourselves why that happened,” said Precourt. “Using the simulator during beta testing, we put the guys through a variety of anomalous approaches and studied how they would react. We were able to get instantaneous feedback on the stability of each approach, height over the threshold, touchdown point and touchdown speed. And we were able to better define what a stabilized approach is, as well as the criteria demanding a go-around.”

Preparation Is Key for Unexpected Challenges and Better Outcomes

Whether flying military, civilian, or space craft, simulators provide pilots with a means to prepare for those unexpected challenges of component, equipment, system, and engine failures in various weather, airspace, and runway configurations. But simulator training can also help prepare pilots for new adventures.

“I just came back from visiting various places in South America in the Citation, and the one that was most challenging was our visit to Machu Picchu,” said Precourt. “We flew in and out of Cuzco with an 11,000-foot airport elevation, minimum descent altitude of 14,500, broken clouds down to 15,000 feet, and mountains all the way down final on both sides. It’s a very complex place to fly in and out of, but on my last sim session we went through a variety of approach and takeoff scenarios. So, when we broke out of the clouds at that altitude with the sun breaking through on the city of Cuzco, the sky was unbelievably clear and bright colors were amazing. It was a really pretty approach, and a lot of fun to fly in there. That’s the value of being prepared.”

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