Never again on PE - share your mistakes

[arb65912]

Very simple mistake but important one, I hope I will not repeat it.

Listen to the recording. http://assets.pilotedge.net/recordings/ ... _18011.mp3

I was practicing closed traffic at SNA, then I went for VFR local flight from Shelter Cove , touch and go at Garberville and back to Shelter Cove .
Everything was great except ..... I left the COM1 on the SNA Tower frequency .... no comments.

Cheers, AJ

[arb65912]

Here is another one.

Last night I requested VFR with Flight Following to John Wayne KSNA from Ontario KONT.
I received the clearance, squawk code, I contacted ground, then tower, took off per departure directions and contacted Socal Departure.

I was told to resume appropriate VFR altitude turn right to proceed on course.

I was not aware that proceed on course would be expected as a heading straight toward SNA.

I was flying toward PDZ and I was going make a right turn to join PDZ 214 Radial from the station.

I was contacted by the Controller and asking very politely where I am heading?
I explained my intentions.

I was given a very nice and detailed explanation that in a case like mine, I need to let the Controller know that I will be flying to PDZ first and than joining the radial.

Thank you very much for taking time ( I do not know who was the Controller for Socal Departure last night ) and explaining things to me.
It sure was a great lesson for me.

I flew ONT-SNA again last night and this time, I said my intentions right after I contacted Socal Departure.

Great lesson and thank you all PE team for an outstanding job.

Cheers, AJ

[Keith Smith]

I don't think it's a requirement to tell the controller how you are getting there if you are vfr. If they ask, it's fine, or if you make a big deviation, sure let them know. The controller can ask how you are navigating for his own planning but it doesn't mean you blew it by not furnishing that info at the outset.

[arb65912]

I am not the one to judge here but I think the critical part was " resume appropriate VFR altitude turn right to proceed on course"

I did not turn right, I was flying toward PDZ.

Even if I did not blow it totally, I think that in the future, it will not hurt to make Controller aware of my intentions, just for the safety sake.

[Alex Stjepanovic]

One thing to note, is that while used even in real world, "on course" is not a valid ATC instruction. So when used, it can be interpreted however people feel like.

See this thread for the type of confusion that can arise, simply because the controller decided to make up some logic in his head, as to what "on course" 'means'.

A lot of people disagree with a lot of other people(Me included), on this, but official phraseology's there for a reason!

[arb65912]

Alex, thank you for the response. As you know, I have a hearing problem and it was probably all my fault, I just stated what I think I heard and shared here.
The Controller was very nice to me, explained that it is nice to let them know if I plan on flying something that is not expected.

Guys, I am not trying to start any complains or bad discussion here, the opposite, I love PE and the professionalism, the reason I posted here is because I want to learn how to do things properly.

Thank you for the response and the link.

Cheers, AJ

[Keith Smith]

AJ,

Nobody said you were complaining or starting a 'bad discussion'. This is a great discussion. I agree with Alex, "on course" can mean many things. It's used by many r/w controllers, but I'm not a fan.

[Ryan Landis]

AJ, just curious, was he telling you to turn right to proceed on course towards the airport direct? I only ask this because maybe he thought you would fly direct rather that fly via the PDZ radial...well, just checked the charts, looks like PDZ is pretty much direct from SNA. I probably would have made the same move in that case since it was just a turn right command and not a turn right "heading" command. Weird.

[arb65912]

Ryan, I have listened to the recording and I believe that what I have heard.

I think, the Controller was thinking about me flying direct to SNA instead of heading to PDZ and then intercept the radial from PDZ that would put me straight into SNA.

I think the words used were very close to :" turn right, proceed on course".

After reading the comments, I would fly like I did (flying certain heading toward SNA after passing PDZ in case X-Plane visual references were not good enough to spot the airport ) BUT, I WOULD explain my intentions briefly to ATC which I actually id flying the same flight again.

[NM Doug]

Mostly good was not good enough today - doubly flaming arrival (short of) Torrence this morning...

I had flown the ILS RWY 29R into KTOA and the published missed, though I had severely botched the entry into the hold at LIMBO due in part to a bad choice of navigation settings. I'm trying to get used to PFD navigation, and I programmed the LAX VOR into the the GPS to help me get to LIMBO (the published missed uses the LAX 170 radial to get to LIMBO). In retrospect, I would have had it much easier just programming LIMBO into the GPS...)

After getting Socal's help in getting to the hold (good choice), I was on vectors to the ILS again and had recovered my head and felt back ahead of the airplane. I was IMC, but then I noticed that the clouds looked funny. Yes, they were *inside* the cockpit. I had been cleared for the approach and was about to intercept the localizer.

I'm flying an interesting plane of Jason Chandler's: the XHawk, which is a single engine, complex piston that can cruise 160+ (helps in adding workload to practice flights) but which has a slow stall speed, so I can slow down the action on approach if I want to. In one of his comments on the instrumentation, Jason writes:

It has the avidyne pfd's, but it also has the actual requisite minimum standby gauges. Ironically.. artificial horizon is not a required instrument. observe turn from turn coordinator gyro, and magcompas. vsi is not, altimeter is. note descent rate by the direction on the altimeter. required panel gauges. asi, alt, turn coord, compass. aats it.

With a cabin fire, I should have turned the avionics off right away and gone to standby instruments to see if the smoke stopped. I didn't feel I had the luxury of turning off the avionics and the battery/generator, because without a vacuum-driven artificial horizon, the only bank information would have been via the whiskey compass, which wouldn't be helpful enough. The turn coordinator is electric, so shutting off battery/generator would have taken that away, too.

What I did instead was continue the descent (with avionics and battery/generator on) on the ILS until I broke out under the clouds, which I knew would happen from my previous approach. By this point, the smoke was very thick, and visibility was quite poor. I told the tower I was going off radio and looked down to turn off the avionics and battery/generator (top three switches on the image below):

XHawk switches

switches.png (97.68 KiB) Viewed 8486 times

Not being intimately familiar with the switch layout, not having gone through emergency scenarios in my mind with this aircraft, and unable to just glance down in the sim (I had to swing the whole view down), I was heads down for about four seconds. Not having trimmed well (I had been unable to do so while peering through the smoke to catch glimpses of the PFD), these four seconds were not available. I clicked the sim view up just in time to see my flaming demise.

....

After I recover a bit, I am going to try to set up some emergency scenarios to think through and practice. Or maybe I'll tweak the x-plane settings to make random failures at an abnormally high rate...that's one way to come up with emergency scenarios.

- Doug