Accident Report: ‘Get Back and Check the Weather’

There’s a cliffhanger of an old story about a miscommunication between a flight instructor and a student pilot that leaves it to a listener’s imagination to envision what occurred after the instructor commanded, “Takeoff power!” and the student pilot responded by taking off power.

Similarly, a pilot at AOPA recalled having been coached during a training flight to “bring in the power,” and responding in a manner equally adverse to what the instructor had in mind.

What constitutes clear communication to one person doesn’t always work for another, whether sitting alongside or at the other end of a radio or phone dialog. Expectations, assumptions, language, or a gap in experience all can become limiting factors. A presolo student pilot struggling to land a trainer in a challenging crosswind, not yet capable of dividing attention between that and other tasks, may not “get it” that an instructor’s casual suggestion, “Let’s get out of here,” translates to “Go around!”

And in an instance that could have been a lot worse than it was, when a student pilot holding for takeoff received instructions to “taxi up to and hold short Runway 16,” logic suggested to the student that the thing to do was to taxi onto the runway. The aircraft had already been holding short of it when the clearance came; why would the pilot be instructed again to do so? Unfortunately, there was another aircraft on final approach. Accounts of the event from both the cockpit and the tower were included in a report to the Aviation Safety Reporting System. (Search the database using the search term “misunderstanding” and you can find a lot more like it.)

“Radio communications are a critical link in the ATC system. The link can be a strong bond between pilot and controller or it can be broken with surprising speed and disastrous results,” notes Section 2, Radio Communications Phraseology and Techniques, of the Aeronautical Information Manual.

The Aviation Instructor’s Manual also contains a chapter on effective communication that states the challenge for flight instructors: “While communication is a complex process, aviation instructors need to develop a comfortable style of communication that meets the goal of passing on desired information to students.”

The chapter also discusses barriers to effective communications, noting, “Lack of common experience between the communicator (instructor) and the receiver (student) is probably the greatest single barrier to effective communication. Communication can be effective only to the extent that the experiences (physical, mental, and emotional) of the people concerned are similar.”

Those attributes seem not to have been on June 16, 2016, when a student pilot operating a Cessna 152 on a solo cross-country lost control while attempting takeoff on the return flight to Miami Executive Airport from the Immokalee, Florida, regional airport. Rain had delayed the return several hours. The student pilot and flight instructor had discussed conditions off and on by phone.

The next time the CFI called, the rain had stopped and the student was preflighting the airplane. He had checked the automated weather but found no data available, and informed the instructor of that fact, according to his report to the National Transportation Safety Board. The CFI advised the student pilot to “get back and check the weather and I’ll call you back.”

Interpreting the response as an instruction to depart for home, the student pilot attempted to take off, but “high winds pushed the aircraft off the runway,” according to an FAA aviation safety inspector’s report. The aircraft hit a ditch and a dune 350 feet off the runway. Unsurprisingly, the next phone call between the student and CFI was contentious.

Accident reporting provides an opportunity for an owner/operator of an aircraft to offer a recommendation, which in this case was for “clear communications with the student and a double check with the chief or assistant chief pilot before takeoff.”

Whatever the barriers to communication may be—experience, language proficiency, a scratchy radio, expectation, distraction—such instances remind pilots that any doubt, or skepticism about a message received, should be resolved before further action is taken. And try as hard as possible to ensure that the message you communicate is the one the other party has received and comprehended.