I Learnt About Flying From That

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Sisemen

I Learnt About Flying From That

#1 Post by Sisemen » Tue Jan 26, 2016 10:52 am

The RAF flight safety magazine used to have a regular article entitled “I learnt about flying from that” where readers were invited to tell their tales of cock-ups which they survived and subsequently learnt from.

Another thread on here (The Rhythm Method) brought it to mind and I thought it might be a good idea to have a learning thread on this esteemed website. I’ve put it in crewroom as there didn’t seem anything more appropriate but Alison feel free to change it!

My sorry tale of leaving an aircraft whilst still running is a good starter.

Another is the time that I stopped off in the middle of nowhere to refuel at a station and forgot to properly fasten the oil dipstick flap. Flap then became the operative word as it banged about in the prop wash as I climbed out. A quick 360, land, fasten and off again and my error was fixed. I used to make a deliberate double check thereafter!

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Re: I Learnt About Flying From That

#2 Post by rgbrock1 » Tue Jan 26, 2016 12:45 pm

Sisemen wrote:My sorry tale of leaving an aircraft whilst still running is a good starter.


Is there an easier way of leaving a running aircraft? I used to do it all the time. Lots of fun. Well, sort of. :D
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Re: I Learnt About Flying From That

#3 Post by Sisemen » Tue Jan 26, 2016 1:33 pm

Still had a pilot at the controls though eh Rg?

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Re: I Learnt About Flying From That

#4 Post by rgbrock1 » Tue Jan 26, 2016 1:41 pm

Sisemen wrote:Still had a pilot at the controls though eh Rg?


Most assuredly. And excellent ones at that, for the most part. :-bd
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Re: I Learnt About Flying From That

#5 Post by MoreAviation » Tue Jan 26, 2016 4:44 pm

I had an ILAFFT (ref. icing in IMC) article published in Pilot Magazine in the mid 90s. I will see if I can fish it out of the attic and post it here with names and places obscured to protect the idiotic (namely me).

Great thing about flying is that you are always learning and hopefully not making too many mistakes.

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Re: I Learnt About Flying From That

#6 Post by MoreAviation » Wed Jan 27, 2016 8:02 am

I see that the Admin has politely categorised this thread under "Tales of daring do" when it could so easily have been categorised under, "Don't be a nincompoop too"!

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Re: I Learnt About Flying From That

#7 Post by GrumpyOldFart » Thu Jan 28, 2016 4:26 pm

A quick 360


That would be 360 half-degrees, one assumes, Nemesis?

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Re: I Learnt About Flying From That

#8 Post by Sisemen » Thu Jan 28, 2016 4:28 pm

Take off on 27, complete but short circuit and land again on 27 makes it 360

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Re: I Learnt About Flying From That

#9 Post by Ex-Ascot » Fri Jan 29, 2016 11:09 am

OK guys one all.

250' 300kts low level navigation, stop watch and chart turn on to 270° instead of 170° convinced simulated bombing run is over Mildenhall but it was actually MAN. :-o Come on guys, I was only one digit out. They issued me with a navigator after that. The CAA insisted on it.
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Re: I Learnt About Flying From That

#10 Post by Sisemen » Fri Jan 29, 2016 11:31 am

Oh come on .... Manchester surely deserved it :-bd

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Re: I Learnt About Flying From That

#11 Post by Ex-Ascot » Wed Apr 27, 2016 4:55 pm

This thread needs more input. There must be more out there.

Don't drink and fly. Not prepared to discuss it. A bit of confusion with time zones and local time wake up call. All ended well.
'Yes, Madam, I am drunk, but in the morning I shall be sober and you will still be ugly.' Sir Winston Churchill.

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Re: I Learnt About Flying From That

#12 Post by GrumpyOldFart » Wed Apr 27, 2016 11:03 pm

Here's some input - an apology to Nemesis for my erm... intemperate smartarsism regarding degrees - it was the liquor talking.

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Re: I Learnt About Flying From That

#13 Post by Fox3WheresMyBanana » Mon Jun 06, 2016 12:59 pm

Low Level nav on the Jet Provost, detached to Kinloss. Weather is scochie but the Flight Commander has a brainwave. He'll fly the route ahead of us, with another solo student and I each in 5 minute trail. He'll pull up if it's bad and call us back. It's bad. He pulls up and calls. Scottish glens are deep, and neither of us hear him. It gets worserer and worserer, but we think it MUST be OK because he hasn't called, and are determined not to wimp out. The other stude is engaged to be married with a kid on the way, and wisely chickens out after another 15 minutes for an 'entertaining' low level pull up and RTB. Yours truly is single, and presses on. After about 15 more minutes, off track, surrounded by mountains and at a height that definitely wasn't 500' agl, I round a bend in a glen to find a face full of snow squall and rock walls. The low level pullup tumbles my gyros completely. We only practised it at 240 kts, and at 300kts there's some real 'g' force. I level at safety altitude in cloud and spend the next couple of minutes trying to fly straight and level. This is ridiculously difficult, and every time I scan the AH it seems I've acquired at least 45 degrees of bank. Eventually I get myself in some sort of order and call Scottish Mil. I get an identifying turn,and handed off to Kinloss. They give me a descent call almost immediately, which doesn't feel right but I'm too scrambled to argue. I emerge below cloud in the middle of a glen, with the surrounding mountain tops all in cloud. My first instinct is to climb straight back to safety altitude, but the worst of the weather is now behind me and this glen leads north to Kinloss. I really don't fancy more instrument flying with scrambled brain. F#ck it, I'll just bimble home. Radio contact has been lost in the glen, but I get them back once I clear the mountains. Kinloss has a 24 hour scruffs bar,and we all adjourn to it, even though it's 10:30 in the morning.
Lessons learned: If you are the Captain, make the decision based on what you see and knowing yourself, not what somebody else might think.
Air Traffic f#cks up just like everyone else, and misidents happen. If you aren't comfy, don't descend below safety altitude.
If you can't think, stay in a safe place till you can. And therein lies another story 6 months later....

Both the other stude and I ended up on Tornados. The Flight Commander returned to Canberras.

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Re: I Learnt About Flying From That

#14 Post by Sisemen » Mon Jun 06, 2016 3:18 pm

Fox - I had a mate at Lossiemouth on Hunters who tried to create a new pass on the Isle of Skye trying to keep below the cloud base on a weather check for the days studes. Needless to say the Isle of Skye won. You had luck on your side that day!

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Re: I Learnt About Flying From That

#15 Post by Fox3WheresMyBanana » Mon Jun 06, 2016 3:58 pm

Don't I know it!
As we were reminded before the Gulf War: The Laws of Physics are one bunch of rules you can't break, the ground has a Pk of 1, and the Boss didn't care if we were Good or Lucky,BUT WE MUST ALWAYS BE ONE OF THE TWO!
And I would never claim to be consistently good, which I guess makes me bloody lucky.
I reckon I'm on Life 7 out of 9, all the previous 6 having been used up on flying training. It all smoothed out by the front line.

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Re: I Learnt About Flying From That

#16 Post by Alisoncc » Mon Jun 06, 2016 4:44 pm

Fox3WheresMyBanana wrote:Radio contact has been lost in the glen, but I get them back once I clear the mountains.

You mean like these mountains Fox. In PNG the nice fluffy clouds had granite centres to keep you on your toes. The mountain pass from Kokoda through to Popondetta had granite centres each side up to 13,000 ft. Could be difficult when the pass filled up with cloud and you had ceiling of 10K. Not something one would ever want to repeat. :D

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Re: I Learnt About Flying From That

#17 Post by Fox3WheresMyBanana » Mon Jun 06, 2016 5:41 pm

Ah,cumulo-granite!
The picture never really does the fear factor justice, does it?
About the scariest story I got was from the CI at Valley (I struggled on that course,so I got to speak to him regularly!). He'd done an exchange on Starfighters with the Italians (deathwish, or what?).
With the Appenines often cloud covered, his fam trip in the T-bird took them up a valley which soon ended in a wall of white stuff.
"We go up now!" the instructor said (to his relief), climbed to safety altitude, then hit a stopwatch. A few minutes later, still IMC and without talking to anybody, the instructor announced
"We go down now!", and shoved the stick forward. They appeared below the clag in a valley on the other side of the mountains, well below safety altitude.
He managed to avoid ever flying in the t-bird again!

I ferried a Cessna 152 over the Greenland icecap IMC. One is supposed to have 2,000' above highest point, but the best I could manage (after 7 hours in the climb) was about 1,000 feet above "believed* maximum height". The weather had changed drastically so I had nowhere else to go. Two and a half hours handflown on instruments at the end of a flight of over 11 hours. Still, I'd rather have that than your experience, where up isn't an option at all, and jungles make even weirder weather.

*Most people think the World is fully mapped - not so. I kept looking around the map for a "Here be Dragons!"

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Re: I Learnt About Flying From That

#18 Post by boing » Tue Jun 07, 2016 12:29 am

And the classic.


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Re: I Learnt About Flying From That

#19 Post by boing » Tue Jun 07, 2016 4:56 pm

Not exactly thread drift because we are into (if you will excuse the expression) terrain.

Once I was given the delightful job of showing one of our foreign exchange instructors how things were done in the instructional World in the UK. This involved spending a couple of days flying around the country and introducing him to some of the operational UK airfields and between airfields dealing with a little bit of our standard RAF instructional methods generically called "patter".

Now, one thing is entirely obvious. A foreign air force does not send a duffer on exchange with the RAF, the selected pilots are good, very good, to get the message fully across, exceptionally damn good. Therefore the job of telling them how we do things better than they do is pretty tricky and leads to some friendly competition.

In this particular case the competition took place at low-level.

Out across Wales somewhere I showed him standard RAF low-level instructional patter. He watched this and copied perfectly. Then it was time to "relax". This involved him flying incrementally lower and faster until it seemed we were reducing our supposed minimum height above the ground by a factor of ten as we cleared the ridge-lines. It was, of course, a test --- for both of us. He wanted to see when I would crack and I wanted to see if he was as good as he thought. He was, he had spent a while in a mountainous war zone where clearing a ridge by too great a margin would get you filled full of machine gun fire.

The terrain clearance got lower over the ridges and the required push-over to stay low became more dramatic. Eventually we came to a situation where we climbed a mountain side low enough that the ridge was clearly outlined against the sky, we topped the ridge pushing considerable negative G to see -- another ridge-line immediately ahead of us considerably higher then we were flying over. No problem, we had plenty of speed, a good pull and we were zooming over that ridge-line too.

The interesting point is that there were sheep standing on the top of the second ridge-line --- it is the only time I have seen the sky through a sheep's legs from an aircraft. I think there were probably some extra sheep droppings on top of that ridge that day.

Ah, good old days.
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Re: I Learnt About Flying From That

#20 Post by Boac » Tue Jun 07, 2016 6:23 pm

I remember (just!) those hazy days of the Jet Provost training at RAF Leeming. We had a Polish instructor (now no longer with us) called ?Bob Bobrowski? who was conducting a 'Final Nav' test on one of my course, which involved a bit of 'high level' nav followed by low level. Bloggs decided to show Bob how much below the 250' minimum he could ace it. Bob took control and apparently lifted the jet over stone walls and hedges for a few minutes - Bloggs was helped from the aircraft............... B-)

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