Thief,
Yes, it really does happen to all of us. Can I take the thread on a slight tangent, though, and ask why you didn't talk to your instructor about these? Since I'm a student instructor at the moment, I'm particularly interested in the way students and instructors interact, and what I can do, as a future instructor, to get my future students to be as open with me about their flying as possible.
For example, has your instructor ever been chatting to you in the bar and talked about any f*$)-up's that he's made? Would you have been more likely to talk to him about your own mistakes if you'd known that he'd made the same mistakes once upon time?
As for me, I don't really know where to start.
- Mis-identifying ground features and thus busting controlled airspace (twice).
- Forgetting to raise flaps after take-off and flying a whole navigation leg, near enough, with flaps down (hence over-speeding the flaps) - twice. And, even worse, not reporting it so that the flaps could be checked by an engineer.
- Taking off in poor visibility for a cross-country. The forecast was for the weather to improve to the north, but a simple phone-call to my destination would have told me that the forecast was wrong, and saved me having to divert. It was, I think, three days before the weather improved and I could bring the aircraft home.
- Flying when far too tired. Result was running off the runway and bending the undercarriage.
- The common one (on this thread, at least) of pulling the mixture instead of the throttle.
- Getting back into an aircraft with a carb-heat control, after many hours of flying aircraft without one, and completely forgetting to use it.
- Flying the wrong way in the circuit. Or flying the circuit on the wrong side of the airfield.
Probably quite a few more that have slipped my mind for the moment. I think that the frequency with which I make these mistakes is reducing as I gain experience, but I'm a very long way off not making mistakes. In fact, I doubt anyone ever gets to that point. The important thing, though, is to learn from them - which I why the ones I am most embarassed about are the ones that I've done more than once. And which is also why I think it's important, especially for students, that we talk about our mistakes with an instructor or another pilot.
FFF
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