Runway Fun
With due respect to the originator bit of thread creep, but....
Taxying out one blustery day, front seat elects to re-engage gust lock in a Tucano as it's a long old taxi and the ailerons are windsurfing. Let's narrow this down to say, Yorkshire and the back seat name, well let's call him P*ps, as that's his name.
Line-up, cleared to go, look at the mental hares running about, hand of respect to geezer/geezerette in the caravan. Two hours to Happy Hour. Sweet.
Noise increases. Normal. Speed too. Normal.
Then all of a sudden, not normal anymore. Most of you reading will have been there. It's not normal, it's not in the f*cking FRCs and some bastard has just inserted a four foot icicle of terror up your jacksey.
P*p's day went from kushti to 'stan in about a second. Luckily for the slower amongst us, God stretches time in these situations and generously extends it to anything up to 3 days (7 if you involve the Home Office) while you can contemplate your forthcoming demise at your leisure, light a fag, bang off a Harry Potter sequel, fill in the blanks.
All P*p's got was the bizarre sensation of the aircraft trying to bunny hop down the runway. Right wing trying to get airborne, failing, the tricycle undercarriage giving it full-on Riverdance action, and a strange detached voice concealed by a bright light announcing that the more the speed thing increased, the more this was going to end badly for a certain P*ps.
Well, with Agatha Christie-like powers, all you rock stars have concluded it was Colonel Mustard in the front seat with the gust lock. Quite right! Spare a thought, if you will for P*ps. He is not idly perusing the net on his third glass of merlot. Oh no. He is approaching Vmakeabloodydecisionthathasn'tbeencovered. Apart from the icicle sensation, P*ps has 2 inputs that are prominent in his decision-making 'circle of need' or whatever other crap the hippies have come up with.
They are visual and audio and occur simultaneously. Visual is the disappearance of the flying helmet in front of him in a downwards direction. Audio is the gabbled, 'F*cking Hell! F*cking Hell! F*ckingHell!', which should be the preferred international distress message but is not, thanks in part to liberals and the UN.
This did not help P*ps, who had adopted the callsign 'Oh Well That's Just Fantastic' and had come to the conclusion that Colonel Mustard, having committed attempted Murder on the Runway, was making good his escape courtesy of our mutual friend Martin Baker. (Ed's note: the capital letters in Murder on the Runway are intentional, reflecting the author's intention to publish his memoirs, 'What Bloody Runway? I Was Flying a Helicopter!' and use the runway murder thing as a sequel. If that Andy McNab can do it, so can we.
Well, you can just picture it. There's P*ps, hand on yellow and black, blank seat in front, Tucano fairground ride in progress, and let's face it, the Tuc seat is no guarantor of life at 100 kts.
Got to crimp this short as I can hear mortars. Anyhoo, in standard fashion, the Handling Pilot announced the end of the emergency iaw SOPs and the Tucano got kind of gracefully airborne without ATC twigging a thing. It was, after all a Friday.
True though, most of it