And just before to. I walk in to take my check ride, went through all
the standard questions and flight planning, during the review of my
Log book we discovered that one of my cross countries was only 48nm
instead of the required 50. The examiner ask me if I wanted to go on
with the test, but he would not give me my license until I completed
the Cross country requirements. I only had 9 hours instead of the
required 10. I took the remainder of the test and passed. Shortly
after the exam My instructer signed me off for a short cross country
of about 70nm. The next morning I depart on the flight. As a low time
pilot I was haveing difficulty relating the size of a feature on a map
to the size of the feature on the ground. about 2/3rds through the
flight i was looking for a small body of water for a checkpoint. It
was about 5 min late showing up. and looked rather large. The next
check point was my destination itself. It also was about 7 min late
showing up. I arrived over the town and began looking for the airport.

No airport, I couldn’t find anything that looked like an airport. the
town had a population of only about 300 to 500 peaple. As did my
destination. So there wasn’t much place for it to hide. I finally
circle the town dropped to an altitude of a few hundred feet and
followed a major road into town. Just before enter then town I spotted
a sign. The only word I could read on the sign was HALFWAY. Great,
halfway from where. I reverted to my backup plan. Climb to about
10,000 in a 152, and intercept the nearest VOR for a postion fix and
possibly fly to it as it had an airport at the VOR station. While
doing the climbing circles to get to an altitude where I could recieve
the VOR and get out over the surrounding mountains. I began looking at
my sectionals, starting at my destination and running my finger
arround in increasingly larger circles to find anything on the map
thatllooked familiar. Final about 35 miles out from my destination I
found a small town called HALFWAY. I had managed to fly down the wrong
side of a mountain range. I finaly climbed high enough to cross the
range and sure enough on the other side was my destination. The whole
time I am thinking all I have to do is make this one short cross
country to get my license. All my other cross counties had gone great.
So I have to get lost on this one.

Brian

What the heck.  Finally a post that I can add to.  :)

Tell your dad that it happens after you get your ticket too.  In
my case "right" after.

I had to fly about 2 hours from my home airport to the examiners
on the day of my checkride.  Got there went through the oral exam
and then an approximately 2 hour check flight.  We get back and
the DE tells me congrats you passed let’s write up you license.

I walk out SOOOOOOO proud.  Do another very careful preflight,
hop in and head for home.  About 10 minutes into the flight I
realize, SHIIIIIIIIIIIT (standard pilot response I’ve been told)
I forgot to taxi to the FBO and fill up.  Get my E6B out and do
some calculating.  Figured it’d be REAL embarrising to return with
less than reserve left and even more so if I ended up in some
field 20 miles short of home.

Turned back and stopped at an airport about 15nm from where I
departed.  Didn’t want to go back to the airport with the DE.
He had a radio with airport traffic on it!  :)  Turns out that
the FBO I stopped at was owned by the DE and he had flown over
there right after my test.  He got quite a chuckle out of it.

Jeff
***************************************
*  /~-__    Jeff West – Sr. Test Eng. *
* { x   }/  Cray Research, Inc.       *
*  \    /   Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin *
*   |___|   jw…@els.cray.com  PPSEL *
***************************************

My personal favorite:

A C172 with a student pilot is in the taxiway awaiting departure, with a
B737 behind him.  When tower tells the C172 to backtrack (back-taxi for
you Americans) to position 33 the pilot enters the runway and turns the
wrong way, heading for the button of 15.  Tower points out to the pilot
that he is headed for the wrong end of the runway, and suggests maybe an
intersection departure would save the pilot from having to turn around.
After the C172 departs, tower clears the B737 to backtrack to position 33.
You guessed it– after watching and listening to the above, the B737 pilot
*still* manages to enter the runway and turn the wrong way.  Needless to
say, the B737 did *not* want an intersection departure, and had to do a
big one-eighty on the runway right in front of the terminal building.

–
Chris Rasley
ATC (CZQM ACC), Private Pilot, Computer Geek.
Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada.

My opinions only.  If you want an *official* interpretation, ask elsewhere.

[Nice story!]. Though I think the 23G35 kt that you refer to in your
article is a bit stiff, it’s worth pointing out that the "maximum
demonstrated crosswind component" in the POH is *not* a *limitation* and
so it’s not *illegal* to exceed it.  Whether it’s a condition of you
insurance that you obey it  is another matter (unlikely I would think).
Other limits (max takeoff weight, max speeds etc.) *are* legal limitations
which appear in the POH or on the C of A).

Julian Scarfe
ja…@cus.cam.ac.uk

Anyway, I was at gross at Minneapolis International about -20F
taxiing for takeoff in a line of 727′s.  Finally I am cleared for
takeoff so I takeoff the door pops open, I land (and tell tower
what I am doing), slam the door and take off again all
on the same runway.

As I called the tower that I was established on final he cleared me to
land and gave me the wind, which I ignored because by this time I was
concentrating so hard on keeping my approach good in this cross-wind.

I touched down and immediately the trusty 172 started skittering about
all over the place, at one point I was on the left-main and nose-wheel
with the right wing (into wind) and tail high off the ground I was
absolutely convinced that I was going to crack up and simply reacted on
the controls without thinking, countering the by now violent gyrations
of the aircraft.

After what seemed an age I was down to walking pace, the plane still
felt skittery and hard to steer, I was convinced that I had seriously
damaged the nose-gear in my attempts to keep the plane on the ground.  
I taxied back to the ramp veeerrrrrryyyyy sllllooowwwlllllyyyy!

When I got out my instructor was waiting for me, he had been monitoring
me on the radio and told me that the wind equated to a 23kt cross-wind
with gusts up to 35kts!  The cessna I was flying had a demonstrated
cross-wind limit of 17kts!!!!

Fortunately there was no damage to the plane, we gave it a thourough
check.  If there had been I guess the insurance would not have covered
it because I had screwed-up and landed outside the cross-wind limits.

This really brought home to me the importance of trying to stay cool
and not to allow the concentration on one task to blot out another.  
I believe/hope that if a similar thing happened to me now I would be
more aware of what was going on around me and so able to identify the
potential problem early enough to do something sensible (in this case I
should have paid attention to ATC who were giving me valuable
information, aborted the landing and gone an found an alternate with
better winds or an into-wind runway!).

Flying aeroplanes is not the same as driving a car, if things go wrong
you can’t stop and think it over, but this is both the challenge and
the fun of it.  I hope you dad doesn’t give up because he made a
mistake, everyone does at some time, the important part is to learn
from it.  I often wonder if the people that you read about who die
because the continue VFR into IMC or aerobat a plane not cleared for it
do so because they didn’t make enough mistakes when they were training
and so think that they are invulnerable.

I’m still very inexperienced <100hrs total, and am sure that I’ll get
things wrong in the future, though hopefully not the same things , I
learned to treat aviation with more respect because of my experience, I
hope your dad does the same.

——————————————————————–  
Dave Farely    EMail d…@ios.softwright.co.uk
——————————————————————–

Me, I’ve managed to be on downwind for an international airport
(they vectored me there) and still not be able to find the
runway until they turned on the approach lights..dumb, but
no real problem.  I also had the airshow announcer ask if I
could log three landing when I bounced (but good) coming into
a Lindberg Days Fly In…embarrasing!

–
Alan L. Peterman                                 (503)-684-1984 hm & work
a…@qiclab.scn.rain.com                               Tigard, Oregon 97224
As I get older the days seem longer and the years seem shorter!

Richard,

     Tell your dad to take heart.  I remember making a very similar error
once.  Shortly after getting my private ticket, I moved to Miami and
was flying out of Tamiami airport.  I had just checked out in a new airplane,
too, and it was my first time being based at an airport with a control tower.
Although I felt fairly confident, the combination of new, rather congested
airport, new airplane, the fact that I only had < 100 hours, etc. worried me
a bit.  The second time I went to fly, I took my mom and dad and was going
to shoot some touch and gos.  Tamiami has a set of parallel runways, and
that day 27L and 27R were both in use.  Although I took off on 27L, the
controller was trying to move all touch and go traffic to 27R.  On downwind,
he asked me to make a left base to 27R.  However, he seemed to forget about
me, and never cleared me to land.  As I turned final, I was just preparing
to confirm that I was cleared, when he told another plane he was cleared for
takeoff.  Now this plane was not even in position and took his sweet time
getting onto the runway. It was not a really difficult situation, but it
was the first time since training that I had had to prepare for a REAL go-around.  Of course, this is a task that one practices over and over, but until you
do it the first time with radio chattering a mile a minute, flying a non-std.
pattern at a new airport, etc. , it’s not apparent just how quickly you must
make decisions.  I was completely flustered seeing that airplane pull out
on my runway.  It took me much longer than it should have to make my
go-around decision.  
Just before touching down, I executed a go-around.  Moments
later the controller remembered me and called ‘go-around’, but I was already
going.  Being cautious not to get too close to the airplane who cut in front
of me, but still thinking about making left traffic to 27L, I completely forgot
I was on the right side and began to make a left turn.  This time, though,
the controller was on his toes and caught me before I could cross the
departure path of the other runway.  It was not the most graceful go-around,
but I certainly learned a lot from the experience.  On top of that, later on
I was asked by the controller to do all kinds of other hijynx in the pattern,
including returning to the left runway again, doing some 360s, extending
downwinds, etc.  This time I was ready, handled it all OK, and after I landed
the tower controller commended me on my subsequent pattern work and thanked
me for all the help.  Tell your dad that he’ll have good days and bad days.
Mistakes are inevitable.  All it takes to persevere is reverence for sky
and airplane, and a desire to learn as much as possible, even if by error,
about both.  

–
Mike Reed >>>> Internet: gt25…@prism.gatech.edu

When I took my private checkride, the examiner said to me something like,
"Don’t worry about making mistakes.  I’ve made all of them, at least the
small ones".

–
Roy Smith <r…@nyu.edu>
Hippocrates Project, Department of Microbiology, Coles 202
NYU School of Medicine, 550 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016
"This never happened to Bart Simpson."