Saturday, March 24, 2007

Fly the Airplane or Dealing with Distractions

Following the successful restoration of my Cessna and Citabria currencies, I then almost lost my night student currency. I had seven of my night solo bookings cancelled in the span of 2 weeks. Five were due to weather and the other two due to major headache that was likely partially a result of rapid weather changes. Finally, 2 days before my night currency was set to expire, the perfect day arrived. It was really perfect - calm, unlimited visibility, warm and not a cloud in the sky.

I arrived earlier thinking I’d do the walk around in the last minutes of daylight. My instructor was actually there and he signed me off giving me the key to the plane that had everything working during the day. I grabbed the keys and went to the plane.

Given it was a night flight, I modified the checklist a bit by checking the exterior lights first – they all worked. I then checked fuel (full to the brim) and oil – within limits. The night was starting to look as perfect as it could be.

Walk around complete, I jumped in and started the plane. Almost immediately, I discovered the light that did not work – it was the low intensity red light on the ceiling behind the pilot that illuminated the instruments. I played with the remaining lights in the plane and discovered that if I ran the sidelight that came from my top left at low intensity red light settings, I get enough light on the instrument panel to be able to see but not too much to be distracting.

I followed the rest of the checklist to and past the run up and then called Ground asking for permission to taxi, which I was given. Staying glued to yellow taxi line, I moved across the airport to the Rwy in use, switched to Tower frequency, asked for takeoff clearance. The plane that just landed off the Rwy, Tower cleared me to take off and onto the Rwy and into the air I went, thinking that it’ll be a great flight.

Turning crosswind, my radio started making noise. Then more noise, and more until all I could hear was deafening hissing sound in my ears. I managed to communicate turning base, but I was deaf and mute afterwards. Struggling with the radio, and very distracted by the noise, I turned final and decided to overshoot as I was not sure I had my landing clearance.

The overshoot was not pretty as I was very distracted and let my speed bleed down to under 60kts in climb. Plane feeling very sluggish gave me the first clue and speed was second clue as to how distracted I was. At that point, I told myself to ignore everything else for a while and just fly the plane.

Once established in the downwind, I tried to reset all the radio controls to see if I can fix it. Due to the red panel light that did not work, although my flight instruments were well illuminated, the radio/ mic controls were not. In the process of trying to see the radio switches, I ended up climbing 150 ft. Turning base, I thought about my handheld radio and tried to pull that from the bag while reducing speed and re-trimming the plane at the same time which resulted to another speed decline and near stall, at which point I realized that trying to fix the radio in the air on a first ever solo night flight was definitely beyond my capabilities at that moment. I decided to just go and land and deal with Tower later. I was on final, when it finally occurred to me to look at the Tower and I saw the green light. Relieved, I landed, rolled to the nearest exit, parked there, turned off the radio, pulled my headset out, checked every wire, plugged it back in and turned the radio on. No noise – seemed to be working perfectly.

Puzzled, I switched to ground frequency and asked for radio check. 5x5 was the answer. I then asked if the Tower heard me in my last circuit (I was trying to transmit despite the noise). No, they have not heard me. I was a bit shaken by the experience, but not to the point of quitting. So, I pulled my handheld radio, set it to Tower frequency, placed it within easy reach, then keyed my mike and asked permission to taxi back to Rwy for another circuit. Before Tower cleared me to take off, they did another radio check which came at 5x5, at which point they gave me my clearance.

I did 7 circuits with the full stop landings then took off North for a while to fly over the training area that I know really well – it was there that I finally relaxed and actually started to enjoy the flight. Return to airport was uneventful.
I was later asked by my instructor why I did not turn the transponder to 7600 to indicate radio problem. I did not know the answer at that time, but I do now. Because I am still a very inexperienced pilot, and very new to night flying, at that particular moment, with all the noise in my ears, I was very stressed which led me to be able to only do one thing at a time. I made a good choice – I decided to fly the airplane.

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