Flight Lesson: Of all the emergencies…

“Of all the emergencies in all the airspace in all the world, this one flies into mine.” A twist on the quote from Humphrey Bogart in the movie Casablanca was apropos for me on the Sunday after a long Thanksgiving weekend.

The day started out great, with beautiful cool blue skies on my island paradise at Amelia Island, Florida. I was instrument-rated and flying my trusty Cessna 182 back to Atlanta with my husband, Richard. Winds were brisk, but we launched into the wild blue yonder from our nontowered airport and picked up an IFR clearance in the air. We looked down at the bumper-to-bumper traffic on the interstate with a laugh: “Glad we aren’t down there!” About an hour into the flight, I noticed my relatively new electrical clock (I had recently upgraded my avionics) started flickering and went dark. Within seconds, my Garmin number one radio and navigation system also went dark and then it said initializing.You might be thinking this is an alternator failure, but I always test the alternator light during my preflight runup. The red failure warning light illuminated for the test, but not during my flight.

My Garmin 430W was now dead so I switched to my number two radio with the last ATC frequency dialed in, and declared an emergency. Thankfully I was in visual conditions. ATC gave me a vector to the nearest airport approximately 20 miles to the northwest in Dublin, Georgia. They asked for souls on board and how much fuel I had. Then they asked me for my cellphone number and at that moment the number two radio went dead. I told my husband to watch for traffic, started shutting things down to save electricity, and headed toward the airport. My husband had the iPad out, reading ForeFlight for weather and information and pointing me in the right direction. I managed to get in a notch of flaps on short final before the battery went completely dead. A few heart palpitations later, we were safely on the ground, and I was sitting there thinking, Wow, that really just happened.

I called 1-800-WX-BRIEF when I landed to let them know I was OK, and I needed to close my flight plan, so they wouldn’t send out search and rescue crews. While I was on the phone with them, Atlanta ATC called my cell to see if I was OK. Remember when I said they asked for my cellphone number and right then my second radio died? By coincidence my flight instructor happened to be in the sky in his own airplane heading back to Atlanta, and on the same frequency. He heard me declare the emergency, and he gave ATC my number. While I was on short final approach to the Dublin airport, my cellphone rang, and my husband answered it because he saw it was my flight instructor. Richard told him, “She can’t talk right now because we’re on short final in an emergency landing.”

So, after a $125 taxi ride home on the congested freeway—just where I didn’t want to be on the last day of a Thanksgiving weekend—I was glad to be on the ground safe and sound with my dear husband by my side. Later, we found out the problem was a combination of battery failure and a $30 alternator belt fracture. It was a relatively minor ordeal, and we came out unscathed. Of all the emergencies in all the flying world, I’m glad that this one was mine.