Situational Recovery

Upset Prevention and Recovery Training (UPRT) is not a medical term for how to prevent and train your stomach against upsets when questioned by your Chief Pilot, CFI, or when undergoing a CASA line check You won’t hear it from your DAME at your next annual medical review either!

UPRT is the name given to describe the training that “should” be included with every pilot’s basic or advanced flying training for those that have been flying for some years. That is according to the International Civil Aviation Organisation. (ICAO).

Increasingly around the world, one of the major causes of accidents and fatalities in aviation today is the loss of control of the aircraft or the inability of the pilot to recognise that they are approaching losing control or they have already lost control and what steps need to be taken to recover the aircraft to controlled flight.

General aviation pilots may go years and hundreds of flying hours throughout their flying career and never see anything or be assessed on their ability to recognise the aircraft’s point of losing control and how to recover from it.

Even many instructors will not have seen or experienced it as many will have progressed straight from getting their CPL to instructing, that is until the day when maybe a student might place them in that situation. Foretrained, is forewarned and prepared.

So how do we get ourselves into an upset situation?

There are many factors that may lead to a pilot approaching losing control or completely