Uninvited Guest

[ukatco_535]

Widger,

That reminds me of quite a funny and true story from a while back.

An ex colleague, controlling LARS on a busy friday afternoon.

One of the A/C on frequency was callsign 'Exam 01'.

Said controller observes the A/C, under a RIS, trundling towards some major danger areas. He passes on a call;

"Exam 01, XXX danger areas 10 miles to the north"

Instructor - "No navigational assistance please"


A minute or 2 later

ATCO - "Exam 01 danger area now 5 miles north, is active, turn left heading XXX to avoid"

Examiner - "No navigational assistance please"

The A/C continues to trundle towards the danger area, before penetrating, then making a hasty retreat.

ATCO - "Exam 01, adopt the callsign 'Failed 01', squawk XXXX and contact XYZ Radar on....."

[Irish Steve]

For he who asked...... ATC attempts to provide separation from unknown traffic and it's usually possible to keep the landing sequence going, even if people are routed all around the sky.

Very true, and they do it well.

A VERY LONG time ago, as a very low hours student pilot, with a lot less experience than I have now, I had an opportunity to do a long cross country flight for business from the west country to Leeds and back, with (essential at that time) an instructor in the right hand seat. I jumped at it, it would be 5 hours flying in a touring aircraft I'd not flown before, and I thought it would be worthwhile experience as well.

At the time, I didn't realise just how true that was going to be.

The trip didn't go quite according to plan, the weather wasn't as good as we'd been led to believe it was going to be, but in the initial stages, as the instructor had instrument flying qualifications, I wasn't too worried, even though I was doing the handling. The trip up wasn't too bad, and we managed to get our business done quickly, so the return trip was looking OK as well, albeit time limited, as the home destination didn't have runway lights, and we were flying in February.

On the way back, we flew IMC over the Pennines from Leeds, heading back to the west country.

Due to some very inept navigation over the hills in IMC, (I was P/ut, and fully stretched to fly the thing in IMC, so the instructor was supposedly navigating and communicating), we ended up a good bit further north than we were supposed to be, and after getting back into VMC, which reduced my work load some, we ended up going right through the active approach at Manchester, and at the worst possible height, 1500 Ft, and to compound the felony, the instructor maintained radio silence.

The radio was tuned to Manchester, and once I'd got things my side back together again as we were VFR again, I realised what was happening, and to my horror, worked out that the gombeen in the right hand seat was taking us through the active runway approach at about 5 miles from the airfield at 1500Ft, which explained all the vectors and other avoidances that were being given to the heavy jets that were at this stage visible. To say that I was less than happy was putting it mildly. At the time, I wasn't able to say or do much about it, as there were other people in the aircraft that were not aware of what was going on, and I didn't want to alarm them even more than they already were by the weather conditions, and as a low experience student, I wasn't about to get into an argument with the instructor with at least 2 hours flying still in front of us.

We continued on our way, and eventually, after several more hairy moments with deteriorating weather conditions, we scraped into a diversion alternate just before it too was weathered out by a front coming in off the Atlantic. Once we were on the ground, and there's a lot more to that than I'm going to talk about now, the instructor was "invited" to visit the control tower, from whence he returned about 30 minutes later, looking very shaken and unhappy, and rightly so.

I learnt several things from that experience.

First, I resolved that day that whatever the cost, I was going to make sure that I never got caught in the same situation again. A subsequent multi engine CPL with Instrument rating was a big help in that direction. An exceptional Multi instructor at Shoreham who made very sure I was safe in my own (hot ship) twin before he let me loose with it was also another major factor. I never did get to use it professionally, due to other circumstances like Saddam, but I have no regrets about making sure that I was capable of flying safely and correctly.

Second, I resolved I would never fly with that instructor again, and I didn't. About 3 months later, probably as a result of the inquiry into that flight, which I'd reported in writing to the CFI, and I'm sure that several controllers on our route has also made appropriate reports, the instructor concerned was "advised" by the CFI to find himself alternative employment outside of the aviation industry.

In all the flying I've done before and since, I don't think I've ever been as unhappy and unsettled as I was during that flight, the scary thing being that personally as a pilot, when I looked back at what I'd actually done on that trip in terms of aircaft handling in IMC, the way I'd flown the aircraft was way beyond what I should have been capable of at that stage of my training. That was simply down to the fact that I'd spent time simulating instrument flight on whatever computer I had at the time, so at least I had some understanding of what the instruments were telling me.

OK, I'm the first one to recognise that what we ended up doing was way out of line, and I was very lucky not to get my a**e royally chewed out. I guess the redeeming aspect was that I had recognised the things that were wrong, even if I didn't have the knowledge or the skills at the time to resolve them, and as such, as pilot under tuition, the instructor was responsible for the conduct of the flight. Nuff said.

Bottom line is that while there's no excuse for trying to land on the wrong airfield, there are times when circumstances will combine to produce a result that causes all sorts of problems, and the only way to solve that is to try and make sure that the training provided is sufficient to ensure that if someone gets it wrong, they are prepared to admit to it then, rather than continue blindly in the hope that they'll either get away with it because no one noticed, or that they'll be able to bluff their way out of it when they've had chance to think of a suitable excuse.

Our mistake was not just that we were where we were not supposed to be, it was in then trying to ignore the situation, rather than communicate with the already stressed controller. If we'd talked to him, at least then he would have been able to get us out of his hair in the most expeditious manner, rather than have to cope with an aircraft in a place that was causing him huge grief.

Part of the problem at the club I was flying at back then was that the previous CFI had a very old fashioned approach to radio. His attitude was simple, and might have been effective 20 years earlier, and it was simply, "if you're not close to an airfield, turn it off, it's one less noise to have to listen to". OK, in that part of the world, there were not many airfields, and even less controlled airspace, but as things changed, and got busier, that attitude was less than helpful, and it took a long time for that attitude to get changed, and where larger airfields with controlled airspace was concerned, to ignore them was folly of the highest order!

To coin a well used phrase from an aviation magazine I used to subscribe to "I learnt about flying from that"!!!

[davedek]

Nice story Steve, must have been terrifying at the time...

One question - when you realised the terrible position your instructor had led you to (and I understand not wanting to tell him at the time if you had pax), did he realise as well? Or was he not aware of it at all until he was 'invited' to the tower afterwards?

[Irish Steve]

Nice story Steve, must have been terrifying at the time...

Got it in one. If I'd not flown with the CFI the following day to take the owner so he could position the aircraft back to home base, I'd probably never have flown again! Even now, some 20 years later, I've looked back at that day and realised that I was VERY lucky to still be alive at the end of it, and that it was luck and nothing more that kept us alive, as I didn't have the skills to completely cope with the situation, and the instructor wasn't coping either.

One question - when you realised the terrible position your instructor had led you to (and I understand not wanting to tell him at the time if you had pax), did he realise as well? Or was he not aware of it at all until he was 'invited' to the tower afterwards?

The scary thing is that I think he was sort of aware of how serious things were getting, but he was out of his depth at that stage, and unable to come up with alternatives.

My reason for that comment is that much later in the flight, after a while VMC, we were nearly home, but once again IMC, and we were offered vectors to the ILS for the approach and landing, and he "declined", asking for an SRA, and it was painfully clear that he wasn't able to deal with setting up and flying an ILS, which should have been a lot simpler and safer!

It was also by that stage very clear to me that while he had a paper instrument qualification, his ability to use it adequately was very much in doubt, to the extent that I became the autopilot, obeying the instructions we were given by ATC, and he was sitting there almost visibly twitching, which did nothing at all for my confidence in what we were about to try and do.

I declined to try and fly the approach, as I'd never flown any form of instrument approach, and at this stage, I'd been flying IMC for close on an hour, and was feeling the strain of it.

His "handling" of the aircraft on instruments was worse than mine, even though it was my first time in the aircraft, and we were sent around before even breaking cloud because we were so far from the approach profile. To say that I was aware of the stress in the approach controllers voice was putting it mildly, it was clear that we were nowhere near where we should have been, and I was just glad we had headsets on, so the pax couldn't hear what was being said to us.

The second time round, I realised that ATC were allowing us to continue as we were relatively safe from a terrain point of view, and we broke cloud at 900 Ft QNH (about 800 QFE), and fortunately, due to a very good local knowledge of the road structure around our destination, I was able to instantly pick up where we were, (about half a mile north of the approach centre line and about 2 miles from the runway, ( Yes it was that bad!!!), and able to point "There's the runway!" to the instructor. At this stage, not only was it IMC, it was also night, which had not been the plan!!!

So yes, I think he was aware of how badly things were going, but he was unable to cope with coming up with a Plan B.

I'd already decided that if we didn't get in off that approach, as we had the fuel remaining to go elsewhere, a diversion 70 miles east to another airfield close to the coast that was not yet weathered out was looking like our best chance of staying alive, and I use that phrase in the full knowledge of the implications of it!

In hindsight, he was a relatively new instructor who had got "the basics" some while earlier, then spent too long flying in Rallye 110's in VMC around the circuit with relatively low time students, and for whatever reason, he'd allowed his other skills to deteriorate to the point of being dangerous.

If I'd realised just how little real decision making he was going to do, we'd not have gone, as I was more than well aware that the trip we were doing was not just a little local hop, and that it had the potential to go wrong if the weather wasn't in our favour.

When it came down to it, if he'd been current on instruments, and more importantly, IFR navigation, we would have had no problems, in that I was capable of the basic flying of the aircraft on a heading altitude and speed, but I didn't know enough at that stage to be able to set up and correctly interpret the relevant aids to get us to where we were supposed to be.

Much later experience, a lot more training in a much more capable multi engine aircraft with a highly experienced instructor (at a different airfield) proved that it could be done, and now, with that training and experience under my belt, IFR in IMC with the right aids and equipment doesn't bother me in the same way, but that day was for sure one I shall never forget, both for the worry it caused me, and more relevant to this thread, for the massive hassle it must have caused the controllers at Manchester.

I still prefer to be mutiple crewed even when flying light aircraft in IMC, if only because it means that there's another pair of eyes and a different brain processing what's going on, and that's a very valid safety consideration. I will happily fly single crewed in IFR/IMC, but only when I am comfortable with the workload that imposes, and there are some areas where it's not so comfortable.

Hopefully, if nothing else, this section of the thread will have given a few GA people "pause for thought", and that's no bad thing. When we set out that morning, there was no way I was expecting to be causing massive hassle to a significant number of commercial flights, and no way I was planning some of the other events that followed, but the experience was a big learning curve, and one that I didn't enjoy, in that so many things went so wrong, and in such a dangerous way.

If others reading about it now look at this and at some stage in the future remember it, then I'm happy that it's served it's purpose. At the same time, I guess it's a salutory reminder that it's all too easy to get badly in other people's way without even realising it at the time, which is where we came in.

Happy New Year

[Downwind.Maddl-Land]

Northolt: 1974-ish.

Story 1. Baby ATCO (me), in at crack of sparrows-f@rt for the airfield inspection and opening-up checks. Go into the Approach room to check Tels have got the AR-1 on and warming-up, and to check which RW Big Brother is on, so that we follow suite.

Oh Dear (or words to that effect) its 23! Nice long line of maggots on the approach herald a 'challenging' day.

Proceed upstairs to the VCR, open log book, select all the airfield lights prior to leaping into the Landrover to do the airfield inspection. Having just selected all the AGL, as I turn for the stairs, I notice a set of landing lights – previously en-route to 23 - much brighter than the rest. Reason is soon quite obvious, as he's not en-route for 23 - he's on Final for my 5,540 ft of Tarmac; and – judging by his size - he’s gonna need a hell of a lot more than that to stop in.

Thinks! - Cause and effect? Promptly hit the airfield blackout knob and EGWU is plunged into anonymity. Landing lights decrease brilliance and then disappear as Captain Speaking presumably starts following the 23 ILS again! A check of the said AR-1 showed one maggot’s afterglow with a distinct 30º right and 120º left dogleg in it! Which, of course, didn’t do much good for the sequence separation against the track behind either. It also took days to get the AGL working properly again! Those of you that remember the RAF’s old ‘Organ Annie’ lighting panel (and the effect of using the blackout facility) will know what I mean.

Story 2. Fellow ATCO in VCR watching landing RNAF F27 on RW 26 (as it was then) on VERY short final with his hand over the West End Road traffic light switch, ready to flick these to green as soon as it was safe to do so. The wrath of God would descend upon you, with questions being asked in the House, if you didn’t. His concentration was rudely interrupted by his AATC pounding on his shoulder; he replied with words to the effect

‘Not now, son - I’m watching the F27’

to which the pounding got more violent and increased in intensity!

‘What is it?’

allied to a glance to his right, gave the answer as he followed the gawping, frozen in fright, mouth and outstretched arm that was pointing at a French Navy PA 31 just touching down on 08!

‘Break off the approach, IMMEDIATE right turn’ bellowed down the ‘Squawk Box’ to Talkdown fortunately had the desired effect, as did the PA 31’s Landing being rapidly converted to a Touch and Go followed by the initiation of the Rule of the Air that states ‘aircraft approaching head on (or nearly so) will each turn to the right to avoid collision.’

For a few seconds the circuit (such as it was) resembled the closest thing to an Air Display that Northolt is ever likely to see!

The F27 completed a right-hand circuit and landed visually, whereas the PA 31 must have realised where he was, and executed an equally violent left turn to exit the Heathrow CTZ to the north at height that he obviously thought could not be followed on radar (and would have done credit to 617 over the Dams) and at a speed that Mr Piper probably had not considered was feasible for his pocket rocket. Unfortunately for the PA 31 our low level coverage at Leavesden (his real destination) was good! However, what follow-up occurred I never did find out.