By popular demand in another thread.. enjoy the lively discussion
On that charity tour around the country I did in May, we had a couple of well-meaning farmers with their Jabiru's as part of the contingent, and their antics made me soil my pants on more than one occasion
Now I'm not having a go at the chaps in question, they are bloody nice, very generous and all that, and the experiences I am sharing here are more than anything a reflection of their standards of training, which we should all know about to be able to factor them into our planning
Firstly, the radio calls were what you would expect of a five hour PPL student, if that. I don't think I'd exaggerate if I said they probably simply wouldn't make any calls whatsoever going in and out of the rural strips they normally use. I guess most of the time they don't really need to as they're by themselves in the great outback, but they really couldn't make a call to save their lives, literally
By the end of the tour, I am happy to report, they could actually navigate controlled airspace with some degree of confidence, so we've saved at least a few souls
More worringly, they didn't have the foggiest clue about even the simplest circuit procedures, let alone other things every pilot should know: We had guys barreling down the wrong direction runway with traffic coming down final the other end, taxiing down cross-runways thinking they were taxiways after they made calls for the runway they didn't land on, taxiing down the active runway making calls for a backtrack on the inactive one, they'd be going round the circuit the wrong way, and these are just a few instances where I made a sharp turn and got the hell outta there..
Now, we'll probably be pushing this thread majorly off topic, but I would seriously question the training and testing standards of the RAA in some cases. According to their own publications, this is a known problem they're trying to address, but I am questioning why, in this over-regulated country of ours, these guys are sharing the majority of airfields with IFR traffic, often even RPT?!
Rant over
