Plastic Pilot

Aviation is a good school of life, particularly when it comes to learning humility. I’ve no reason to be proud of what I will relate in this post: my worst landing ever !

It all started with an ILS approach to runway 09 in a Bonanza. The needles were well centered and quite stable. Everything was looking fine, and I was relatively relaxed. The wind was blowing from my left, and the correction angle I was applying worked fine.

The descent was smooth, no turbulence despite the wind. While flying down an ILS, the wind speed normally decrease, and the pilot reduces the correction angle to keep the localizer needle centered. But an excellent meteorolgy teacher told me once, all rules but one in meteorology have exceptions (i.e. pressure always decrease when altitude increase)…

On this particular day the exception was that wind speed was not changing at all during the descent… When passing 2 miles on final, the controller confirmed it: “HB-XXX, wind 360 degrees 15 knots, cleared to land runway 09 !”

Yiiiihaa ! A perfect 90 degrees crosswind of 15 knots ! I was glad the runway was 40 meters wide and 3 kilometers long. I mentally reharsed “Aileron to the left, rudder to the right”, and made my best to apply it.

I initiated the flare way to early, so I had to apply power to get the things within survivable limits. The subsequent landing was more than positive ! All pieces of the plane were still together, and I was probably able to walk away.

After that I swallowed once, and then turned towards the right seat, saying something like “Errrrr, not my best landing ever…”. The guy sitting there was looking more relaxed than I was, and just said “I’m not judging your landings today, only your IFR skills”.

Did I mentionned that this was the first leg of my initial IFR examination ?