While you're sitting in the cabin you'll never know the challenges the pilots might face while flying. Pilots have had to try to course correct these challenges while flying you. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't...
“My wife and friends were sleeping. Autopilot was doing its thing…”
“Private pilot here. We were on our last leg of a flight from Florida back home to Kentucky. It was nighttime, full moon shining down on us. My wife and friends were sleeping. Autopilot was doing its thing. I was flying VFR, meaning I was not talking to traffic controllers. Just killing time during the long flight home. I start my descent into my home airport. It’s an uncontrolled non towered airport. I start making my radio transmissions announcing how I’m going to land. Airports have landing lights so you can see the runway, most of them pilots can turn on or off by clicking the broadcast button on their radio 7 times. Here is where sh*t went bad. So I click, nothing. I click again nothing. I think to myself I know I’m close enough, weird I’ll just wait till I’m right beside the runway (on downwind) and try again. Click, nothing. Well damn. I switch radios and try to call the closest towered airport, nothing. Complete radio failure. Both radios. I’ve landed at my home airport probably 750+ times. Full moon shining down, I decided to land without the Lighting. Wasn’t my best landing, but not my worst. I woke everybody up as we were taxiing to the hangar nobody knew anything about the 10 minutes of terror I went thru.”
“I quickly turned on the fuel pump and…”
“I was flying into Oshkosh for the big air show with my (then) girlfriend in a Piper Archer. This was the first year that they had closed the field for being full. Everybody in the pattern diverted to nearby Fond du lac. I was on short final decent and remembered to do a quick pre-landing checklist. One of the items was to check the fuel was on the fullest tank. I looked at the fuel gauges and I had forgotten to change tanks and was sucking fumes. I quickly turned on the fuel pump and switched to the fuller tank and landed uneventfully. Lesson learned on distractions. We have been married for 29 years now and I never have told her how close I came to plastering us into a field in Wisconsin.”
“There are a few situations where pilots get scared…”
“Well if it’s something that scares me in terms of problems with the aircraft, it’s definitely going to be something the passengers will be told. However, there are a few situations where pilots get scared and don’t need to inform the passengers. I use to fly into a small airport that happened to be a resting stop for thousands of geese migrating south at the end of summer. Being a small airport, there was no wildlife control. It was not uncommon to see bears or deer on the field. The birds would all be settled in amongst the tall grass that surrounded the runway. As soon as you came in to flare on the landing, or started your takeoff roll, they would all be scared up into the air. These 12 pound birds would fly EVERYWHERE. It’s pretty much impossible to dodge, so you just have to hope that you don’t smack any. They could easily go through the windshield and take out my face. Somehow I never did hit any, but it definitely was a scary experience every season. I’m sure some passengers saw birds, but it was never anything that we needed to tell them.”
“Knocked me out cold…”
“I have been a commercial airline pilot for 12 years. A few years ago, during the middle of a transatlantic flight, we got into some bad turbulence. Nothing I hadn’t experienced before, but definitely something that’s not fun. My co-pilot was getting back into his chair, and right as he sat down we hit a bump and his elbow went flying into my face. Knocked me out cold for about 30 seconds. Thankfully my co-pilot was able to hold everything down and he didn’t panic. When I came to, it was the worst last stretch of a flight I’ve ever experienced. Terrible headache and bad weather.”
“Suddenly he pushes the throttle on full and…”
“I had 15 flying hours and was doing touch-and-go’s, and, for the first time, learning to use the on-board radio. This was an airport without tower, so you need to make your intentions known to other pilots by talking all the time. I say ‘Cessna XXXX going base to final’ which means: final left turn about 300m before the touchdown stop on the ground. Immediately after releasing the microphone switch, I hear ‘So-and-so going base to final.’ I turn to my instructor and say ‘base to final? That doesn’t make any sense?’ Another pilot in the pattern calls over the radio saying ‘guys, did you see each other?’ Instructor starts looking furiously left and right and tries to look above and under the plane (there is very little up-and-down visibility when the wings are above you). Suddenly he pushes the throttle on full and banks away: the other plane was now 20 feet right below me. I was about to land right on top of him. Stopped flying shortly after that. It just wasn’t for me.”
“It was followed by 12 consecutive warnings…”
“Pilot of an Airbus 320 here. Flying into a high elevation port in Asia 23000 feet on descent had a TOTAL loss of electrical power. All screens went dark including standby instruments and emergency lighting. To put this into perspective airbus designed this aircraft with three electrical generators in addition to power supplied by batteries and the emergency generator. It is designed NEVER to be without electrical power even if BOTH the engines failed, you ran completely out of fuel and the auxiliary power unit is in operative. It’s a scenario pilots don’t even train for because its never suppose to happen. After a partial recovery of our screens it was followed by 12 consecutive warnings associated with different onboard systems. We landed safely. Passengers didn’t notice a thing apart from the lights temporarily going out in the cabin. The car analogy would be you driving at 100 km/hr on a highway and suddenly all your windows are covered up, you lose your speedometer and all electrical systems, there’s no response from the brake or accelerator. But you can still feel the car going.”
“I didn’t tell the passengers about it…”
“We were preparing to land at an airport when part of one of the plane’s ailerons detached. Ailerons are small hinged sections on the back part of the wings and are used to bank the aircraft. I didn’t tell the passengers about it, but they’d be blind not to see it flapping behind the wing. It wasn’t scary for me, but if a passenger notices parts falling off the airplane, they might be concerned.”
“When it was investigated upon landing…”
“Something smashed into the windshield and there were many visible cracks. We had no idea what we had hit. Thankfully it didn’t go through every layer and we remained protected from the 600 mile per hour winds, but with the sound it made and damage it did to the windshield I bet it was pretty close to breaking through. We had absolutely no clue what had smashed into us; it was way too big to be a bird. My copilot guessed that we ran straight into a meteor and honestly I believed him, since I couldn’t think of any better ideas. When it was investigated upon landing they couldn’t find a definite answer to what it was.”
“The pilot accidentally broadcast ‘Mayday Mayday’…”
“My friend was flying a Icelandair plane, which had engine failure over Scotland and had to return to Glasgow airport. The passengers would not have been oblivious to it — apparently the plane shook lots and the engine shot a jet of flame out of it, and of course they knew they were returning to Glasgow. However any chance of remaining obliviousness was removed when the pilot accidentally broadcast ‘Mayday Mayday’ across the passenger intercom rather than to ATC. Oops!”
“We get ANOTHER alert…”
“Airline pilot here, going on 4 years now. I was flying into a small Midwestern airport in the middle of summer. On approach to the airport, we received an alert by the onboard equipment to climb immediately to avoid hitting another plane. Fair enough, climb as instructed, see the offending aircraft below us, and decide to continue the approach. On a 3 mile straight in final to the runway, we spot a wall of torrential rain rapidly approaching the field. Looks far enough away that we think that we can beat it to the airport. About 100 ft off the runway the rain hits us and we go complete white out, cant see anything out of the windshield. Immediately start a go-around, and we get as low as 20 ft before the airplane finally starts climbing. Upon exiting the rain, and at about 500 ft, we finally are able to see again, and get ANOTHER alert for a helicopter right in front of us. This time we are told to descend… All in all, the most hectic and terrifying series of events in my entire time in aviation (about 10 years total now).”
“We had thick fumes in the flight deck…”
“We had thick fumes in the flight deck after takeoff, captain couldn’t see his instruments. ‘Also due to performance (weight) limits we took off with about a ton less fuel than required to get to London. ‘We made it, though, by flying to Brussels, then nominating Gatwick as our alternate and deciding to divert before landing as we had enough fuel to do that legally.'”
“Over the radio I received there was a bomb…”
“I was flying across the ocean to London Heathrow and we get to a long stretch over the Atlantic Ocean with no land for a while. Over the radio I received there was a bomb threat on our airplane. I couldn’t do a single thing about it, except to wait it out and hope to god it wouldn’t come to pass. None of the passengers knew.”
“He was creepy and often talking nonsense…”
“For years I worked with a first officer known as the crazy guy in the company. He was creepy and often talking nonsense to himself. One day, the guy seemed increasingly agitated while flying with me. I felt scared that the pilot would attempt to dive the plane into the ground. So I started talking to him and shaking him a little to get his attention and get his mind off of whatever he was thinking about. When the guy snapped out of it, he whispered, ‘Not today…think happy thoughts…not today…’ Rest assured, the pilot no longer has his license.”
“Me and my instructor look at each other thinking, what the…”
“Commercial pilot here. During training was flying a Piper cub(single-engine). We had just taxied to the active runway and were doing our run-up(pre-takeoff check). Finished the run-up, everything was functioning normally, all gauges on the green. ATC advised us to hold short of the runway due to approaching traffic. Just as the approaching traffic landed and we were about to get cleared for takeoff, our engine dies with out warning. Me and my instructor look at each other thinking, what the f**k? Look at the gauges. All gauges still on the green, fuel pump on, mixture rich. So weird… Needless to say, we aborted the flight. If we had that engine failure a couple minutes later, we would have been airborne with too much altitude to land on any remaining runway and not enough altitude to circle around.”
“We flew directly into an ash cloud at 2000 ft…”
“Military pilot here. I was on a flight leaving Sigonella, Italy. Mount Etna had been erupting for the past 4 hours but ATC cleared the southern sector to be free of volcanic ash. We flew directly into an ash cloud at 2000 ft remaining in the volcanic ash cloud for over 20 minutes. We had no luck climbing and punching out of the ash cloud so we ended up doing an emergency descent to 1000 ft to get out of clouds. We started experiencing engine malfunctions and had to secure 2 out of our 4 engines. Unfortunately in Europe, ATC is not responsible for obstacle clearance and we received a vector that would have flown us straight into a mountain. We caught the error and navigated back to the field to conduct a 2-engine emergency landing without incident. I literally expected every engine to cut out. I didn’t expect to make it out of that volcanic ash cloud alive; look up what volcanic ash does to jet engines.”
“Sweat was pouring down my face…”
“I was flying from Boston to Columbus Ohio, and in between us was a HUGE line of thunderstorms. In events like that, ATC will, in short, let you draw your own flight path to dodge the intense weather cells. The plane has weather radar in the nose and gives us a visual map of red ‘spots’ to avoid. The flight was 3 hours long and the Captain and I were spending every second of that time flying up, down, left, and right, dodging lightning and turbulence. Sweat was pouring down my face as I was using my best judgment on which direction to fly. We must have done a good job because the flight attendant called up to the flight deck to say all the passengers were sound asleep!”
“I could make out the expression on the pilot’s face…”
“ATC (air traffic control) gave my plane clearance to take off on runway 35 (north) at airport GFK while simultaneously allowing for a similar aircraft to depart from runway 26 (west). These runways cross one another, we almost collided at 500 AGL (above ground level). The other aircraft was so close I could make out the expression on the pilot’s face.”
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