All pilots I know went through stressful, sometimes scary situation in flight. My personal story is about icing, turbulence and autopilot disconnection in a cold front, flying from Geneva to Biggin-Hill. It involved using unusual attitude recovery techniques…
The question for this month’s poll is the following: what was the in-flight event that scared or stressed you the most ? I shared mine, now it’s your turn.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
First solo cross-country: I moved the mixture lever back too quickly when leaning the mixture in cruise and the engine started sputtering, as if it was about to die on me. It lasted just a split second but for that was enough for me to believe I was having an engine failure.
My scariest moments involved flying into clouds that did unwanted things to my plane. Like the time when French ATC vectored me into a CB and I picked up half an inch of ice in about 30 seconds; while instantly doing a 180 turn and putting on the de-ice. Another time, on an IFR flight across the channel, flying into a cloud and getting bounced about and about a million strikes on the stormscope (I suspect it was more static than lightning). Again an instant 180 and diversion. Apart from that, other people, other planes and gliders (especially around High Wycombe) are a big worry. I remember flying back to Denham near Wycombe and some maniac was doing aeros in a Pitts about half a mile outside the Wycombe zone and about two miles west of the Heathrow zone right under the flight path. I was on frequency for wycombe but this guy wasn’t and he did a loop right around my plane. If I had got a good look at his registration I would have reported him. Scary stuff.
Being a newer pilot, I haven’t had a whole lot of chances to be in scary situations. The scariest was being close to max weight in my Cessna 150, and taking off with my fiance on a hot day. I knew it would be a slow take off, but didn’t want to show any fear in front of her. I didn’t know if it was ever going to get off the runway, and the climb was about 200-300 ft/min. I should have checked to make sure we were well under weight before attempting it instead of guessing. Lesson learned.
Addition to above post: It wasn’t because of my fiance that we were close to weight. We had luggage. I just thought I’d clear that up.
A very clumsy short-field takeoff from a grass runway, a few years ago. Lifted off my front wheel a bit too heavily, and the rotation happened much too early. Left the runway axis quite a bit at a low altitude while regaining my speed. Lesson learned: practice short-field takeoffs much more often. PS: I have no idea how it looked from the ground, at least I didn’t hear any screaming.
Oh, and there was that (twice-rejected) landing on a field in France. Later, when discussing our “arrival” with local pilots, they told us that they generally avoided flying while the wind was of the kind it was that day. Mende LFNB (“La Grande Vadrouille”), gusty wind from the northeast, RWY 31.