New pilots (and some who aren’t so new) can find the lines of authority confusing. Early in flight training, a student gets used to following directions—first from his own instructor, then a check instructor, then from air traffic control at towered airports. Flights into and out of Class C fields require clearances. These people are there to help, and they usually have good reasons for saying what they do—but the pilot in command is responsible for getting the aircraft safely onto the ground, preferably in a condition that allows it to be used again.
On April 7, 2008, a student pilot took a Piper Warrior out for solo pattern work at his home airport. Vero Beach, Florida, is a Class D airport with three runways: 11L/29R, 11R/29L, and 4/22. The most recent METAR reported 10-knot winds from 020 degrees, but the control tower had traffic using the parallel runways. This meant 10 knots of direct crosswind, fairly challenging for a student solo.
On his first landing, the pilot did a touch and go rather than a full stop out of concern about his ability to maintain control on the ground. The second attempt led to a go-around. The pilot later admitted that he wasn’t comfortable with the runway assignment, but didn’t feel able to “challenge” the controller’s directions.
On the third try, the airplane bounced, veered off the runway into the wind, and went into a ditch. The pilot wasn’t badly hurt, but the damage to the airplane was substantial, and both were done flying for the day.
Given his misgivings, what were this pilot’s options? Perhaps the best would have been to drop the idea of going solo, find a CFI, and practice crosswind landings. Landings are the most common type of GA accident—and lack of directional control is the most common landing mishap, accounting for more than 40 percent of the total. That’s good evidence that many pilots don’t train in meaningful crosswinds nearly enough.
Once out there, though, he still had alternatives. The best would have invoked the magic word “Unable,” which every pilot should use whenever an ATC clearance can’t be executed safely. If he’d told the tower, “Unable to land 11 Left due to wind; request Runway 4,” it might have taken the controllers a while to sort things out, but they’d have done it. As it was, they switched all traffic to Runway 4 after the accident anyway.
Controllers have a lot of responsibilities—separating aircraft, managing the flow of traffic, and keeping the system running smoothly. They don’t always know what a particular pilot can manage in the aircraft he’s flying today. They’re not in the cockpit, so they don’t make those decisions—you are, and you must.
David Jack Kenny is manager of aviation safety analysis for the AOPA Air Safety Foundation and is an instrument-rated commercial pilot.
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