FLY THE AIRCRAFT
This close encounter of the first kind was pre-solo, thank Heaven, and I learned not only what to do in that situation, but also how to proceed later with others in my care.
We were midway on final approach and I was staring at that aim point with the tunnel vision of a student pilot when abruptly my instructor Eve said, “Look up.” I did, and froze. There was a Cessna coming from straight ahead at our height, landing the other direction. If neither vessel changed course we were seconds from a head-on collision near ground level, and squeezing the stick harder didn't help.
With deliberate calm Eve barely more than murmured, “Slide to the right.” After the bogie roared past, her normal voice returned with a gravity unfamiliar, “Now get back over the runway while you still can.” We landed a moment later, long but normally, and the other pilot landed... somewhere else I guess.
You can be doing everything right (or think so) and the next moment your fat's in a fire you didn't know existed. Eventually just about everything will try to tumble toward that fire, and the only certainty is it always happens at exactly the same time: NOW. To pilots who've seen them before, most of these contretemps should present only interesting, if inconvenient challenges, more worthy of welcome than fear (and great material for stories later). But what about the newbie? You that is, for whom among us will live long enough to train for every possible one-of-a-kind predicament?
Advanced courses in this field are always available at the world wide campus of my alma mater, Hard Knocks University, where the tuition is high but payable in a currency that even I can afford: time and sweat. Go HKU! In decades of study at that venerable institution (I'm slow, but I stick with it!) there've been more landing emergencies than I can recall, though none more salient than this first one. What stands out is not just Eve's striking cool but her conscious effort to instill that in me. While much of what we do in soaring can be taught on the ground, the kind of insight we need when the fat in our fire flares is best gained by actual real-time involvement. And by the way, surprise usually augments such contemporaneous learning, but like some exotic spices, just a pinch too much can ruin the stew. What I learned that day was more than standard collision avoidance. I saw the need to always maintain two essentials without which flying is one of the more deadly activities on earth: practical ALTERNATIVES and rock-solid SELF-CONTROL. When you have both of these they enhance and support each other. Lacking either makes you an accident – not waiting to happen, soon to happen! The question is when.
This was also a classic example of the single most profound maxim in aviation. Superficially it sounds too obvious to repeat, but for me the phrase always congers an image of some rosy cheeked kid retreating across the Channel in a B-17 with smoke in the cockpit, shrapnel in the gut, one engine aflame and another faltering, tail shot up and fighters attacking from all sides. What should one do in these circumstances? Observe this priority above all else, for if you fail to, none of the other stuff matters: FLY THE AIRCRAFT.
* (For today's critic, no we weren't using radios where I learned to fly, don't blame me. And yes this was tacit indictment of everyone's visual scanning efforts. Again, whom among us?)