Things My Flight Instructor Never Told Me
The Belt and Suspenders Approach
Here’s an exercise. Go look in another pilot’s flight bag and tell me what you see. The contents found in a pilot’s flight bag tells a story. That story is the story of that pilot’s experiences and offers an insight into what that particular aviator perceives is the most likely threat / problem / circumstance that he (or she) may have to deal with. Six flashlights? Maybe that aviator had an electrical failure at night, or maybe he or she just fears one. Spare sunglasses? Spare reading-glasses? Maybe the first pair had got left behind on the FBO counter.My partner carries GE 33 and 331 lamps in his flight bag. Those are 12 and 24 volt bulbs commonly used in post lights and gear indicator lights. I don’t know what’s in your flight bag, but two items you will find in mine is a hand held nav-comm, and a hand held GPS. I’ve carried them for years.
I had my first communications failure early on in my flight training. On one of my first cross-country flights, the single King KX -170 in the little trainer I owned at the time, ate the gears that change the frequencies. Unfortunately, it chose to do so right in the middle of the then Philadelphia TCA (now class B). When I had left Morristown, New Jersey that afternoon, it worked fine. Half way to my destination on the Jersey shore, I was proud of how I had negotiated my way through the busy Philly air space. Then, with no warning,… crunch, crunch, crunch. Not sure if I should press on or turn around, I decided to return to my base at Morristown. I even remembered to squawk 7600, to signify communications failure to the radar controller. Upon arriving at MMU, I circled the field just like my instructor told me, waiting for the light gun signals, which never came. I circled long enough to be able to tell what color shirts the guys in the tower were wearing before I decided to drop into the pattern and land before I ran out of fuel. While I was tying down my plane, the follow me truck came roaring across the ramp. The line guy, a kid about my age jumped out of the truck and ran up to me, half out of breath. “The tower wants you to call them ….. right away!” At this point, the adrenaline, which had been pumping with the boost pump on high since I crunched the radio, ran dry. I was tired. “Fine, what’s the number?” I asked the frantic lineman. This being the pre cell phone world, I finished putting the covers on my plane, and drove across the ramp to the FBO office where I could use the phone. “Morristown Tower” the voice on the phone answered on the 1st ring. “Yeah, this is Grumman 9797U, you wanted to talk to me?” I said in my best, “I don’t want to sound too annoyed” New York accent. “Yeah! You landed without permission! You can’t land on my airport without permission! What the #$@% is wrong with you!” “Oh! Which one are you?” I said. “The controller in the red shirt or the one wearing blue?” I shot back. There was a pregnant pause on the phone. “What do you mean” he queried, his tone of voice changing dramatically. “I mean I circled the tower for more than 10 minutes watching you guys, waiting for a light gun signal like the AIM says I should. I couldn’t wait any longer, so I landed”. “Did anyone know you were coming?” he asked. “I don’t know, I left here two hours ago, lost my radio in the Philly TCA, so I came back. I had 7600 in the transponder.” “Hold on” he said. A million things were running through my mind, including how much I could live without this, when the controller came back on the line and said “O.K., never mind, have a nice day…..” then click….he hung up
The next day I ordered my first hand held radio. The early 1980’s vintage ICOM was huge by today’s standards, and it only comm-ed. The Ni-cad battery was expensive and unreliable. I carried it for nearly 10 years before I bought a newer model that ran on dry cells and added a nav function. The ICOM A-2 also came with a jack that lets me plug in my headset directly to the radio. In 20 years, I have had to pull it out of the bag exactly twice. The first time, just a few months after I had purchased it. On my first night cross-country, the radios in the rented Cessna just died. My instructor was very impressed when I reached down onto my flight bag and pulled out a working radio. The second time, again at night when I had a regulator run away and we were forced to shut down the electrical system or risk a battery melt down. The other thing I carry is a portable GPS. In 20 years I have owned several airplanes that didn’t have an electrical system of any kind so I got some use out of that investment. The first GPS I purchased was a Garmin 65. It was the size of a brick, but it ran on dry cells and like most handheld Garmins, it featured an antenna that could be remotely mounted. I traded up to a Garmin 89 a few years later, and a few years after that, I traded up again to a Garmin 92. The 92 is the same size as the 89 but uses a more powerful satellite engine, tracks more satellites, locks on faster and does a better job on battery consumption. It has resided in the bottom of my flight bag for the last three years. The last time I had it out was to do a data update back in 2000. In the last four or five years I have been flying some pretty decent equipment, much of it turboprop, and everything always works. That is not always the case for those of us who operate IFR in singles and light twins. So here I am, 140 nautical miles off of Jacksonville, Florida on Atlantic Route 7 going to New York, when the always reliable Garmin 155 in the panel of the King Air I was flying, decides to have a little electronic temper tantrum. I have 8 passengers in the back eating lunch and talking about the Springsteen concert I was taking them to see. I reached down into the bottom of the flight bag and pulled out the trusty Garmin 92. It hadn’t been run for three years. Would it lock on? Would it find any satellites? I let it run for 20 minutes but it couldn’t find what continent it was on. I went to the manual set up mode and told it to look in the South East United States. It started looking for satellites again. Meanwhile, I dialed in the Carolina Beach NDB and then the Dixon NDB, the next fix on my clearance. I silently chastised myself for not taking that GPS out of the bag and letting it lock on to the satellites every once and a while. Twenty minutes later, the little 92 locked on and gave me a position report. It verified that we were within 2 degrees of where we were supposed to be. Situation averted, and no one in the back knew the difference. We flew on, picking our way through a line of thunderstorms, shot a 400 and stinko approach in the pouring rain onto TEB, using the little Garmin for secondary position information. A few hours after we landed, the skies cleared, and Springsteen was awesome. A few weeks before his 54th birthday, Bruce rocked with 40,000 of his closest friends in Giants Stadium, just like he did when I used to go listen to him as a teenager, at a Jersey shore bar. The next day was glorious, but of course, we weren’t flying that day. Nope. Departure was set for Monday 7a.m. Just as when we arrived, the weather sucked and we flew the D.P. for real, not breaking out of the clag until well south of Philadelphia on the way to 28,000 feet. The little handheld worked like a champ, locking on in under a minute. We flew all the way home, 4 1/2 hours, without missing a beat or killing the batteries. Was it a life-threatening situation? No. Did we have to have it to complete the flight? Again, no. The plane had dual everything else. Was it nice to have the GPS back up flying into and out of the busiest airspace on the East Coast? Absolutely! The same could be said about the comm. The failure I had experienced happened years ago. Had I had a handheld on that day, it would have been a routine, no stress situation.
When I got home from my New York trip, I decided that the next thing I wanted to do was update the database in the Garmin 92.The last time I did that, you needed to send the unit back to the factory. Now it is all done on the internet. All you need is a serial cable to attach the GPS to your computer and access to the internet. $35 and 15 minutes later I had a current database installed in my GPS. Ya just gotta love the technology. So, back into the flight case, along with a 12 pack of fresh batteries for the GPS and the ICOM A-2 waiting for the next time, if there is a next time, that I have an in flight nav or comm. failure. No, I’m no boy scout, and yes, my flight bag is heavy enough, but the ability to communicate and navigate in the event of a total or partial failure mode lets me sleep at night. While I have heard the cell phone argument, and agree it might work, I‘ll ask if you have you ever tried to hear a cell phone in a running piston airplane, much less fly at the same time? If you look at the accident reports, there is no doubt that a handheld radio or GPS would have changed the outcome of more then a few instances. When I learned to fly, this type of portable technology just simply didn’t exist. In 1980, what passed for a handheld radio was made by Terra, and it was the size and weight of a one-quart milk carton.
But now, I make a point of showing my instrument students how a few hundred dollars worth of technology can take a potentially catastrophic situation and render it totally manageable. Maybe carrying all that equipment seems like overkill. Particularly, since it is almost never utilized. But that’s the point isn’t it? Like the guy who wears a belt and suspenders, (that would be me) I feel that the redundant capability, even if unused, reduces the chances of finding myself in a potentially fatal situation.