lost comms with Pt Mugu

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Keith Smith
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Re: lost comms with Pt Mugu

Post by Keith Smith »

Steve, you shouldn't be in the least bit embarrassed. Think about the fact that you've been doing a respectable job of flying around in the IFR system when you don't hold a real world PPL or an instrument rating. It's really quite incredible to begin with. Every now and then you're going to run into a situation that's new and unfamiliar and won't necessarily know the best course of action. That's not something that should be a surprise, or cause for concern. Continue to pick up all the nuggets of information that you can and keep at it!

I'm not sure precisely what freq you actually tuned to, but generally speaking, if you were getting responses from the controller at first, and then you stopped hearing him, it means that you ended up out of the range of the transmitter. If you were assigned the correct freq and read it back correctly, then perhaps you simply mistuned it. As I mentioned above, when you checked in on the wrong freq, we'd normally catch that through our system monitoring tool, but depending on controller workload, it's possible that the subtle fact that you were calling the expected facility but on the wrong freq was missed by the controller.

This is a good one for everyone to learn from, it's interesting stuff! It speaks to the 'accident chain' theory, where there isn't a smoking gun, but rather, a series of small links in the chain that lead to an undesirable outcome....in this case, a loss of communications. The two links were (I'm guessing), tuning the wrong freq, and the controller not realizing that you were checking in on the wrong freq. Remove either one of those conditions, and the error would not occur.
arb65912
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Re: lost comms with Pt Mugu

Post by arb65912 »

Today, thank to my hearing problem, I switched to a wrong frequency and of course could not hear anybody.
I switched back to the previous one but I could not reach the controler either, I have tried maybe 2 times and I have reached the controller who repeated the frequency digit by digit for me.
I am a student pilot and do not hear too much of a real raios talk but I believe that even in real life , there would be time when controller would not respond immediately, even on proper frquency.
I think giving it several seconds while trying to reach the controller is nothing to be alarmed about. Just my opinion.
Cheers, AJ
Alex Stjepanovic
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Re: lost comms with Pt Mugu

Post by Alex Stjepanovic »

Steve if you indeed did use 128.6, then you were possibly talking to LA Center again, as that's the frequency around the San Diego area. As KS alludes, you would have gone out of range of one of these transmitters soon, as they are both well east of SAN.
cotton
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Re: lost comms with Pt Mugu

Post by cotton »

I have a question.What should've happened is that when you checked in on the LAX Center freq, a bewildered center controller should've said, "go back to your previous frequency and ask for a new frequency," or perhaps, "say location..." followed by, "try Pt Mugu Approach 128.65, you're on 126.65." etc. However, that didn't happen, and the voice behind the mic responded as "Pt Mugu approach" so you had no reason to suspect an issue.
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