Aviate, Navigate, communicate
Had an interesting incident yesterday, nothing bent and nobody hurt, but some useful learning points. It might be worth a CHIRP report in the fullness of time, but at the moment I'll share it with you fellows.
To set the scene, I'd done a long but enjoyable afternoon's aerial sightseeing, which at this point had amounted to about 3 hours of navigation around SE England. Whilst a little murky in places, with a less than distinct horizon, visibility was mostly 10km+ and my passengers were well behaved.
The last leg of the trip was Beachy head - Selsey Bill - Popham (two straight lines, more or less). It was late afternoon, and I'd made a call to Shoreham just before Beachy Head, who had passed me details of their local traffic and asked me to let them know before changing to my next frequency. My routing was parallel with the coast but about 5nm out to sea, the reason being that Shoreham was having it's annual airshow, and I needed to keep clear of that airspace.
No problems so far, I passed safely, and as I passed the airshow closed. At this point however the controller at Shoreham became clearly severely overloaded as she had to handle multiple traffic either trying to get into Shoreham, or get out in the few tens of minutes immediately after the show ended. I tried for about 5 minutes to get a call in to change frequency, but was unable.
So, as I was now skirting Solent Zone, I changed to their frequency, called, asked for flight information, and informed them that I had been able to establish 2-way with Shoreham to hand-off. On this, Solent instructed me to return to Shoreham and try again to get a hand-off.
So, flipped frequencies again, and tried again for another 2-3 minutes with no success. Eventually, I gave up and returned to Solent, re-established a FIS, and informed them that I'd still been unable to achieve 2-way with Shoreham (to be honest, by this time, I was probably too far away).
At this, Solent agreed to contact Shoreham on the landline (fair enough, if a bit late in the day), and then informed me that I had inadvertently entered their zone, and instructed a roughly 90° heading change to leave it.
This all got sorted out within the next minute or two, and apart from a slightly raised stress level on the part of myself and the controller, no damage was done. However, let's examine what happened here:-
- My initial attempts to contact Shoreham for a handover had raised my personal stress levels somewhat, degrading my concentration a bit.
- Being told by Solent (who, relatively speaking, were not busy) to return to Shoreham's frequency, then my frustration at still being unable to establish 2-way raised it further.
- This, and my concentration on communication, degraded my concentration on navigation, which should have been a higher priority. This, and the poor visual horizon, meant that I allowed my course to drift into Solent's zone. (Basically, I'd stopped navigating for a minute or two, and failed to appreciate a significant drift of heading). As a result I caused an infringment.
There isn't a villain of the piece, but two people could have done a better job than they did.
(1) Firstly and most importantly, I shouldn't have allowed a communication problem to degrade my navigation. I should probably have refused Solent's request to return to Shoreham frequency (look, if I didn't achieve 2-way first time, it's hardly surprising I didn't when I was further away and they were just as busy).
(2) Secondly, the Solent controller should have appreciated that (a) Shoreham is **** busy and hard to get a word in edgeways at the best of times, and (b) if a pilot reports an inability to establish 2-way with another field he means it, so don't make life harder for him than necessary - this is what the landline is for.
In the end, no damage done, but a valuable lesson learned for me and (I hope) a controller as well about airmanship.
G
N.B. Of course I may just be making all of this up, and this is an anonymous forum, so I'm sure nobody anywhere would be enough of a a*****e to make trouble for anybody over a post on Pprune.