I'm confessing my aerial transgressions. I am a 39-year-old pilot who earned my certificate in 2000 after about a year of training. I am not a bad pilot, and I had an excellent instructor. But as with any endeavor, the book learning doesn't cover everything. A good pilot is always learning, and the best aviation classroom is often thousands of feet above ground level. Errors are common, and often small.
James Minor, CFII, is a jet jockey who occasionally swoops down from the flight levels long enough to impart bits of wisdom to student pilots. I was one such student, and I owe my private pilot certificate to him. Albertville Municipal-Thomas J. Brumlik Field in Alabama is a great place to learn how to fly. But I've made several blunders and learned from several incidents, and here-in no particular order-are some that I'll admit to.
Where's the horn
The first incident occurred on my initial solo. I had completed some pattern work and accomplished six landings at our nontowered field. James had nervously grabbed at the control wheel during only half of them, after which he directed me to head over to the FBO. As I pulled to a stop, he got out and told me to perform three landings and taxi back to him.
Exhilarated and frightened, I performed an acceptable takeoff. Just as I had heard, the airplane jumped off the runway now that half the load had been shed. New vibrations and sensations attacked me all at once. Radio work, instrument scan, traffic scan, altitude check, pattern turns, oh my gosh, I'm already mid-field! Carb heat, breathe, traffic scan, yikes! A red-tailed hawk is at my two o'clock! We're both in straight-and-level flight and headed for a midair. I imagined my mother (the antiflyer) at my funeral, shaking her head and muttering, "I told him!" Image two: Me, landing a badly damaged Cessna 152 on a pitching carrier deck after saving the world from a suicidal hawk. Then reality set in. I had to avoid this hawk.
As the distance decreased, I felt sure that the hawk would see and avoid me. My first reflex was to look at the center of the yoke for the horn button. I've been driving much longer than I've been flying, and sometimes you just revert to what you know. In the next instant, I banked left and exercised the throttle to change the sound of the engine and get its attention. It banked left, folded its wings, and passed under the airplane's right strut. The downwind leg was salvaged, the landing anticlimactic, and the rest of the solo was soon complete.
Compass rose not so sweet
Navigation, to me, came easily. I have wanted to be a pilot forever. I have subscribed to the magazines for years, and in 1992 I had taken lessons (9.2 hours) and completed ground school. When I started again the only major changes seemed to be with airspace classification. VOR navigation, although archaic, was simple. Visualize a huge compass rose on the ground below you; draw a line from the center of the compass rose through the radial, and you know where the VOR station is. Fly the radial toward the center of the rose and the station is in front of you. This painfully simple logic would bite me on a solo cross-country flight.
Flying to a nontowered airport, I was nearing the destination and working out traffic pattern altitudes, frequencies, listening for traffic, and visualizing the traffic pattern. I pictured my compass rose, drew the line from the runway heading to the center of the rose, and visualized the pattern with the landing flare over the compass rose numbers and the rollout ending on the center of the rose. Once abeam the numbers, it occurred to me that someone had painted the wrong numbers on the runway. About this time, it sunk in that I was already flying the runway heading. What went wrong? My compass rose trick, while working with VORs, actually put me on the reciprocal runway. A simple mistake with tragic potential. I was landing on the wrong runway, flying the wrong pattern, and making the wrong radio position calls. Luckily I was the only traffic around and the only witness to my folly. A lesson well learned.
Balancing act
Regardless of weight, the CG remains about the same in the typical two-seat trainer. Except for one of my training flights. A local pilot needed to pick up his airplane at a paint shop 300 miles away. My CFI cleared me to fly the return leg solo. My new best friend and I loaded into the FBO's 150 and headed toward the beach. To save down time, my friend had removed the seats from his airplane to get them recovered while the airplane was painted, so we were carrying his pilot's seat in the 150's baggage area.
Headwinds prompted us to make an unscheduled fuel stop. I was in the left seat, as my passenger was a former instructor. The approach was normal, but it was harder than usual to keep the nose down. Stall speed came up fast, and the tail wanted to land before the main wheels. The result was my worst landing post-solo. We were within CG limits, but the CG was rearward from what I knew as normal. I had failed to allow for the change and was rewarded with an eye-opening experience.
Continuing education
After I got my certificate, I flew with my wife to Chattanooga, Tennessee, for a $100 hamburger. The weather was beautiful, and the flight was fantastic. The control tower cleared me for right traffic onto Runway 20. Pleased with my radio work and professional attitude, approaching from the south I entered crosswind for the runway and noted a larger departing aircraft crossing left to right in front of me. About this time, the tower asked if I was landing on Runway 2. Caught off guard but noting the sarcasm coming through my headset, I realized that I had missed the single word right when told "right traffic." My crosswind to Runway 20 was leading me into departing traffic, and my flight path must have appeared to be a base leg to Runway 2. I explained my error, sans the professional voice, and was told to proceed on my left pattern to 20. Thank you, controllers, for keeping me safe in spite of myself.
Another day, I was flying the wife and kids to Callaway Gardens in Georgia and tracing our progress on the Atlanta sectional. Identifying the large lake ahead and to the right as the lake under my finger, I calculated an estimated time of arrival. I was king of all that I surveyed, and life was good. I watched the lake pass under me and eventually crosschecked my location with the loran. I was surprised to learn that I was much closer to our destination of Pine Mountain Airport than I had thought. Was it rogue tailwinds? Superior piloting? Time warp? Nope. It was a simple navigational error-wrong lake. That's funny in hindsight, because the flight was without a hitch. But had an emergency popped up while I thought I was somewhere else, I would have steered away from the nearest airport. Long live the king.
These transgressions I confess. My absolution will be to learn something from every flight. There's information out there waiting to attack me. I will not be afraid to assimilate it.
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