And back to my original point -- "aw crap, stupid happens for no apparent reason."
Story time. I was a very good student naval aviator during Navy (Coast Guard) flight school in Pensacola. My Marine/Navy fighter flight instructors nicknamed me "Airline Pilot" because my landings were so smooth. One day we came in for some cross-wind touch-and-go landings [sorry guys, I know I am way off topic here but bear with me]. I am a tall, strong guy and my flight instructor at the time was about 5'4" and 120 lbs. That, by the way, is the size of the typical fighter pilot. We touched down, the T-34C started to veer violently to the left, I applied take-off power, yanked the stick back and got the plane into ground effect, and then got really airborne somewhere near the end of the runway. After we got some altitude the instructor tapped me on the helmet (he sat behind me) and said, "I've got it." I said, "Your plane" and put my hands on my helmet so he knew (standard procedure) that I'd relinquished control of the aircraft. We both thought we had a rudder malfunction and briefed on emergency landing procedures. He tested the flight controls and nothing was wrong. He then went in for a full stop landing at home base. Flight over, tag the aircraft for possible control surface issues. On debrief, we talked thru it -- and having the light bulb go off above my head -- I had to admit to him that I'd had a brain fart and had applied opposite rudder to the wind. He laughed and said he thought the controls were binding, but in fact I outweighed him by almost 100 lbs and could just kick the rudders harder than he could. One of us, and to this day I don't know which it was, actually pushed on the top of the rudder pedals (which activate the brakes) and flat spotted both main landing gear tires. I think it was him panicking. He didn't accuse me. So ... crap happens even in the best of circumstances. Sometimes you sit in the "pre-flight shack" afterwards and laugh about it and sometimes you end up dead. On 9/28/06, Steve MacSween <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
So maybe neither of these guys had ever got themselves on the wrong runway early on. Who knows. God rest the souls, anyway.
-- Proudly marching to the beat of a different kettle of fish.
