When good electrons go bad

It was a perfect night for instrument training. The winds aloft were screaming out of the southeast, even at 3,000 feet, and the surface winds were plenty strong as well. That mixture meant it was a constant mix of light to moderate turbulence.

Throw in some nice overcast conditions and it was plenty dark, windy and just plain hard flying. Just the kind of conditions instructors love.

My student and I headed down to Flying Cloud to fly the ILS 10R a couple of times. At 2,600 feet the winds were from 140 degrees and 46 knots. My student did an outstanding job keeping the localizer perfectly centered throughout the approaches and nailed the glideslope as well. It was all the more fun to watch because the turbulence was impressive and got worse as we got lower.

After the second, nearly flawless ILS, we went missed and started getting set up for the GPS 14L back into Crystal when the lights suddenly dimmed. For a second I thought my student had turned down the cabin lighting but when I fiddled with the knob nothing happened.

Sure enough, I checked the ammeter and it was pegged to the left, indicating a full discharge.

My student recycled the alternator, which made no difference. About the same time, approach cleared us direct to PIKAW, an initial approach fix for the GPS 14L into Crystal.

A charging system failure during the day is an inconvenience. At night, well, it's still an inconvenience but can wind up being a full-blown emergency.

Anyhow, we told approach we'd lost our charging system and wanted to proceed direct to Crystal while we still had some juice in the battery. The approach controller was great. He gave us a heading to fly, asked if we needed any assistance at Crystal then called Crystal on the landline to tell them we were coming in with a failure and might lose communications along the way.

While my student flew I started turning off as much equipment and lights as I could then held a flashlight so he could see the panel.

I kept him under the hood for a while, figuring it was good experience to fly on instruments with something genuinely wrong with the airplane.

It's sort of a guessing game about what to turn off and what to leave on at night. I killed the number 2 nav/com, all the interior lights, strobes, ADF and landing light. I decided to leave the nav lights and beacon on simply because I didn't want somebody else to run into us. Since we were still working with approach and I wanted as much help as possible I left the transponder on even though it's a bit of a power hog.

If we had farther to go I probably would have shut everything off to conserve power for landing and dug out my handheld to use for communications.

As it was, it didn't take long to get back to Crystal but we were obviously running out of electrons quickly so I reminded my student to leave the flaps up in case we had to go around and didn't have enough juice to raise them.

At 50 feet on final I snapped on the landing light and we were both grateful for the weak, brownish glow that slightly illuminated the runway. I've landed without the landing light a bunch of times before at night so I wasn't concerned, but it was nice to have some extra illumination.

My student made a perfect no-flap landing with the winds more or less down the runway at 18 knots and we taxied back with the remaining lights and radio starting to dim.

Losing the charging system at night sucks but at least we were close to home, had flashlights at the ready and were in a well-lit area. If we had been in IMC it could have been much worse.

My handheld, which I purchased after my last charging failure a few months ago, paid for itself even though I never dug it out of my flight bag. Just knowing I had an option for communication and navigation in the event we totally ran out of electrons was well worth the price I'd paid for it.

It's really all about having options, both in daily flying and when something goes wrong. Giving yourself the best options means a fairly minor problem remains minor. And having a backup or two just opens up more options.

If we'd been in instrument conditions I probably would have turned everything off except for the Garmin and told approach we were going to fly the GPS approach, using my handheld for communications to save power. (Transmitting requires far more power than receiving.) If we ran out of power before we were visual, I could fly the VOR-A using just my handheld. It's not ideal, but it could work.

Luckily, we were visual all the way so wasn't a big deal and turned into just another one of those good teaching/learning moments.