Lucky
And benefitted from some excellent instructors, mainly military, who knew how to fly and teach and allowed me to dig holes and climb out of them. Debrief was often a wry smile “that will learn you” look. Fortunately I’m still trying stuff 50 years on and learning whilst most of my course mates stopped flying when the salary cheques stopped and started walking the dog.
My most boring flying was flying heavys although the VC10 in the old days could be fun.
Two deciding moments in my early career were discussions with crew members on trident incidents; one night Malta when the take off calculations were wrong and the captain rotated early took out the approach lights then flew below 50ft over the sea on radio altimeter and the second was another three that diverted to Madrid after an engine failure on take off out to Malaga not realising that they would be out of the WAT limits; late on the approach ATC lined up an aircraft and they had to go around but continued going down..captain realised and lowered the nose, cleaned up and flew the valley which allowed him to get to min drag and fly a circuit. We had lots of incidents then and far too many accidents.
Last edited by blind pew; 8th Sep 2021 at 06:20.