you, sir, are an idiot, in addition to a troll.
Yep, that could be.

but you are not as good as that guy a few weeks ago. ;-)
He gave it to me and a few others quite good. He shut
up as quickly as he arrived. He was an ass but I gotta
give him credit for dishing it out with style. grin

ok, now seriously.

As a matter of fact I do, as a rep of the FAA no less. Every pilot
meeting we have with the college I speak of I reccomend that they talk
less and look more, just from a personal preference standpoint.

I'm a low time pilot but I have to say it is somewhere in between
both of you. We're talking about uncontrolled airports. personally
they scare the hell out of me because while everyone is giving
position reports and can't get a word in and thinking about
what to say and when to say and just trying to fly the damn
airplane, there are those planes that do NOT even have radios
forget the pilots that have them and don't know how to use them.


Everyone has their comfort level. If an uncontrolled airport
is that busy, I'm outta there. I don't like it one bit. 3
people in the pattern is no big deal. 4 starts getting tight
since that 5th person might be on approach. 5 forget it. bye
bye. That is my comfort level. If you are at airports with
all trainers, it gets even more hairy since the students
workload is quite high already, they aren't flying very
tight patterns, they are 100 feet too high, 200 feet too high,
all over horizontally, make your reports. If there isn't
room to make one, land and get out or fly away to another
airport.



going onto base or final, and you have yourselves an error chain fit
for a midair.
Are you looking outside? Ever?

correct, for the plane that doesn't have radios. Hopefully
the other pilots behind you are watching as well.

Also as they say, there is a reason why you have two ears (and
two eyes) and one mouth.

I fly a 182. At 10 miles out one call every midfield downwind would
allow me to hear 3 or 4 calls. That's plenty enough for me. How about
you?

I'd recommend more than that. At least say you are on approach for the
pattern to give heads up for people and then announc you are on downwind
so people know you are there. From there, announce if there is space
on the frequency.


Now for my story, on my PPL checkride we did the emergency engine out in
2 parts. First, the initial part including checklist and setting up for
a landing. We descended from 4500 down to about 3000 feet by the time
we decided I did everything, now time to land the plane. The 2nd
part was to do a short approach which was at an uncontrolled airport.
Well I turned too early and was high on base. I lined up for final
and started my slip. Well as I am about 1/2 mile out a Cessna who
was in the pattern, landed, taxied back, decides to take the runway
without making a radio call. he didn't call and probably didn't look
as I was in a slip and probably very visable. Well I had to
go to the side of the runway, slipped some more was just about to add
power and go around when the DE said, ok land it long and we'll call
it ok. I did that. Nevertheless it got a touch hairy with idiot who
did not use his radio when he should have and didn't use his eyes either.

Gerald