Solo student's mishap
- Thread starter pmanton
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As they should, they forgot to teach her ADM. She'll do ok if she keeps flying.
douglas393
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It is easy to blame the instructor, but we do not know what they did or did not teach her, but I suspect it was not her training that was lacking. It seems to me this is more an issue of her not realizing that she was not where she was supposed to be and becoming complacent with the increasing inconsistencies of her flight than anything else. An instructor can teach you a lot, but if you ignore the obvious then no amount of teaching the instructor is going to give you is going to save you. She is alive today because of dumb luck nothing more and if the stars were not all aligned in her favor, the discussion on this thread would be mighty different.
NineThreeKilo
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+1
You can teach common sense?
How about this concept called personal responsibility.
Sometimes when someone really screws the pooch, it aint, society, obama, video games, CFIs, wind gusts, or whatever, it's them, they screwed up.
I dont know the girl, but she seems nice in the video, but that aint good enough.
Add to her HUGE errors in judgement on the flight, with her comment on when things looked really bad her reaction was “I was screaming.”. That folks, does not lend it self well to acting as Pilot In Command.
skynewbie
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Were you in the Central CA/Bay Area basin, or were you in the middle of nowhere Wyoming? Granted she messed up, but she was not prepared properly.
e.pie
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MAKG1
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Henning, have you flown around here?
It's pretty easy to navigate around the Bay, but not around the really common Central Valley student solo destinations south of Stockton. Every cattle feed shed looks like a hangar, there are a lot of straight bits of pavement that look like runways, and visibility can get less than perfect (with all the mountains out of sight) fairly easily. Especially now, with all the fires. Having followed the wrong road on my own long solo cross country (realized within a few minutes and recovered -- VOR backup and a checkpoint that wasn't in the right place; heading was similar to plan), it's not hard to imagine problems like that there.
And there are some VERY isolated parts of northern California. It isn't all beaches and cities.
And the student pilot at hand did the equivalent of flying over the Sierra near its highest point without realizing something was wrong. Clearly no backup, not even ded reckoning, nor even studying the route of flight.
Yep, lived and flew up there for several years, rare location you can't pick up a VOR. The fact remains the girl was not prepared for the flight she undertook, and that is the responsibility of her instructor to assure. She can't know what she doesn't know, her instructor should.
NineThreeKilo
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She should have known better then to fly into "hostile terrain" as she put it
Yes she should have, yet she didn't. There were several things here that she should have known, yet didn't.
david0tey
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I remember perfectly how unprepared I felt prior to my cross country solos. You almost have to take the instructor's word for it that you are prepared enough to get it done. I can only imagine how that must have felt for her when she got lost and realized that she really wasn't prepared. If it was me after an accident on my solo XC, I don't think I could finish out the PPL. Good for her for sticking with it.
koehn
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That was a damn hazy day. I can imagine my 17 year old self getting discombobulated and ignoring the DG, or forgetting to align the DG with the whiskey compass in the first place.
Luckily for everybody, I didn't get my pilot's certificate until I was almost forty.
Luckily for everybody, I didn't get my pilot's certificate until I was almost forty.
Ateaist
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I don't understand this - why fly if you feel unprepared? I did my short solo XC last weekend, and will do my long in the next few days weather permitting. Granted, I fly next to the Pacific Ocean so there is no chance in hell of me getting lost, but if I had any uncertainty about my ability to complete the mission by myself I would not get into the plane.
david0tey
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There is a huge difference between 'uncertainty about your ability to complete the mission' and being 'unprepared'. I don't know of a single pilot who would say that they felt completely prepared and confident going into the solo cross country phase. Unpreparedness, at least for me, was a concern more because I was afraid that I would make a fool of myself, not because I thought I was incapable of safely operating the airplane. The bottom line is that every student pilot puts a considerable amount of stock into the instructor's opinion on their flying abilities. In this case, the instructor was wrong.
stratobee
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I think people here are very harsh on the young lady. It's easy to sit in a warm chair with your slippers on and condemn her actions. Have you flown in Wyoming? There is no such thing as flat or low lands there. Even the flat bits are at 5000ft+. There is almost zero radio reception below 10000ft and as mentioned the VOR's don't work well there either. Maybe she didn't have a GPS? Maybe she was taught not to use one, so as to learn the basics, just like most of us were back in the days. Maybe the weather had closed in behind her? Maybe the canyon wasn't wide enough to turn around in, or at least she didn't think she could turn around in it. Unless you've had some mountain flying experience, this is a a real possible scenario. Add to this a rolling mountain gust, and she ran out of options.
Yes, there are multiple things she should have done, but we've al been lost, overworked, stressed out of our minds and been inexperienced. It seems to me like the young lady has a level head and it was because of her good speed management that she walked away from that crash when the inevitable came.
I hope she doesn't stop flying and gets back in the saddle.
Yes, there are multiple things she should have done, but we've al been lost, overworked, stressed out of our minds and been inexperienced. It seems to me like the young lady has a level head and it was because of her good speed management that she walked away from that crash when the inevitable came.
I hope she doesn't stop flying and gets back in the saddle.
douglas393
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I have been flying for only three years, and still remember my first solo, first cross country, first long cross country, and first flight as a newly minted PPL quite well. I have close to 500 hrs now(which really is not that many), and can tell you I still learn a lot from every flight. The biggest lesson I have learned is that though every flight is different there is one thing that is the same on every flight; there will always be something new that has not happened before and there is no way you can anticipate what that new thing will be, and thus can never be fully prepared for it. I have never done a dead engine landing for example. I am trained for it, but every "engine off" landing has been simulated, and has always been to a real runway typically paved but a few times grass. That is very different than what I would experience if I had to land in a field with no engine. So every time I fly there is always some sense of uncertainty, and unpreparedness. It is knowing your abilities and limitations and understanding them and staying within that envelope, that separates those of us who fly safely, and those of us who fake it.
Thinking that there is no way you will ever get lost because you fly next to the Pacific Ocean is probably the thinking that will allow you to become complacent, and not be prepared when you actually do get lost. I fly in Florida, and if there is a place you would think you cannot get lost flying around this would be it, and I can guarantee you pilots with loads of more experience than you or I have gotten lost here, and will continue to get lost, even with all we have at our fingertips to help with finding our way. And sometimes getting into trouble may not mean being lost as in you do not have the foggiest idea where you are, but may mean being a few miles off your path and 500 ft too low and meeting that tall tower head on. Look up crashes concerning the weather balloon off of Key West to see what I mean.
douglas393
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I hope she does not give up either, but I am not sure we are being harsh as much as trying to learn from her unfortunate incident. It is far too easy to become complacent, fall into false security, let your guard down, and fall behind the plane. She had a number of clues that should have been quite apparent to her that something was wrong, and yet she did not realize it and take appropriate action. This can happen to any of us. In medicine they call it surgeon's denial, and many a patient has suffered because of it. It is too too easy to make the facts fit your version of the reality, and miss the glaring fact that they do not fit and it is not the data that is wrong but your premise is wrong. By seeing what I think is an example of this, and discussing it, it may help one of us not end up in the situation she ended up in. That in my opinion is the value of threads like this.
