Ident if you hear me
Lost coms in Class B
Neither she nor I wished to make any mistakes departing from this busy Class B airport on an instrument flight plan in visual conditions taking us to a destination 400 miles away. I had offered to handle the radios before we climbed into the airplane, but she was more familiar with this airport and—as we had never flown together before—I did not want to disrupt her rhythm by jumping in now.
Soon enough we were cleared for takeoff, instructed to climb to 1,500 feet, and told to expect vectors to intercept our filed course. During climbout we were told to turn right to a heading of 090. Jane read back the instruction and began a climbing right turn. A few seconds later the controller repeated the instruction and Jane repeated the readback. We looked at each other with the same ‘I wonder why he did that’ expression on our faces. Quickly, the problem became clear—and urgent.
“November One-Three-Three-Alpha-Bravo, I’m not receiving your transmission,” said the controller. “Ident if you can hear me.” Jane immediately pressed the ident button as she adroitly hand flew the climbing right turn. The potential seriousness of the situation hit me. Here we were in heavily congested airspace with airliners taking off and landing all around us and we were unable to talk to ATC—other than through ident smoke signals. It’s a situation neither of us had been in before.
This is a reminder that we pilots are often the weakest link, and that proficiency in any one airplane is harder to achieve if we fly multiple airplanes.“November One-Three-Three-Alpha-Bravo try switching radios,” suggested the controller. Jane switched to Com 2 and dialed in the tower frequency while continuing to hand fly the airplane. Feeling a bit helpless, I was monitoring her altitude and heading to make sure we remained on course as she was now completely task saturated. Jane’s call to the tower on Com 2 was obviously unheard as the tower now told us to climb to 3,000 feet and ident to confirm his instruction.
What’s our next step, I thought, not knowing if we’d be asked to fly an approach back to the airport or sent on our way for another controller to tackle our partial coms situation. The latter: “Contact departure on One-Three-Zero point Five-Five,” said the controller. I yearned to make the radio call to provide Jane some breathing room, but she was quick to change frequency and check in.
To my surprise the controller could hear us. “How did you fix it?” I asked Jane. “My fault, I was pressing the wrong button on the control stick,” she confessed, “The other airplane I fly has a black push-to-talk button on the top of the stick. I was pushing the black control wheel steering button on the top of this stick. This airplane actually uses a trigger on the front of the stick for push-to-talk.” It was a case of muscle memory when you don’t want it.
After we leveled off at cruise altitude, we debriefed on what we could have done differently to prevent our anxiety-inducing departure. Jane could have reduced her workload by asking me to handle the radios—and that’s exactly what she did after we regained communication.
As it turned out, my stick did not have the black button on top, only the push-to-talk trigger, so it would have been impossible for me to push the wrong button. Conversely, I could have been more proactive in offering to handle the radios knowing we would have a busy departure in Class B airspace. Jane said she planned to file a NASA aviation safety report so others could learn from her mistake.
This is a reminder that we pilots are often the weakest link, and that proficiency in any one airplane is harder to achieve if we fly multiple airplanes.
Ultimately, I was impressed by the way Jane remained calm under pressure and worked the problem. She maintained control of the airplane—and the situation—by aviating first, navigating second, and communicating third.
