John Farley started this thread by talking about overwhelming feelings that have no rational explanation but which should not be ignored. This little story is about remaining totally aware of one’s surroundings and noticing all those little tell-tale factors which give rise to uneasy feelings that need investigating. It is certainly not rocket science.
Some years ago, back in the late 1970s, I was the captain of a VC10 taxiing out for take-off from Entebbe, bound for London, at near maximum weight. The airfield is 3,780ft above sea level therefore there was not much margin for error. As we taxied out I gradually became aware that something was not quite right, and then it dawned on me that the grass, which fortunately was fairly long, was all leaning the wrong way. Needless to say the windsock was a tattered rag and of no use at all.
I asked the co-pilot to ask the tower what the wind was and they confirmed it to be the same as the one we had used for our take-off calculations. I asked the others on the flight deck what they thought and we all agreed that the wind we had been given had to be wrong. We asked ATC again and got the same answer. So I stopped the aircraft, put the parking on, and told them we would hold position on the taxiway until we had sorted it out. There then followed a long ‘discussion’ with the tower controller who was eventually persuaded to inform us that the anemometer had been broken for several days and the wind we had been given was three days old!
So each of us made an assessment of the wind direction and speed – we did it independently and wrote it down so that we would not influence each other. Then we averaged the result, re-did the take-off calculation and told the tower controller we would be taking off in the opposite direction. He was not best pleased with this but allowed us to do so when we informed him we would be filing an air safety report when we got to London.
Just one small example of how necessary it is to keep one’s antenna well tuned all the time – especially in Africa!