Lost stories here

Post your lost story here, so we can all laugh at them.

My first one is "The lake that shouldn't be there". I was flying from north
of the Dallas/Fort Worth area to my home port of Luck Field which is south
of Fort Worth. No radios of any type in my little Taylorcraft. All was
well. A nice day with reasonable visibility. Some haze but strong VFR.

About halfway to Dallas I come over a lake. A big lake. One that would be
HUGE on my sectional. It was not on the map. I had just been flying for
about 45 minutes on a magnetic heading and keeping close track of time.
There was NO way this lake could be on the ground but not on my map. The
vis was such I couldn't see the buildings of Dallas or Fort Worth. I was
convinced somehow I had gotten lost. I thought maybe the compass was stuck
on the wrong heading. I did a couple of small turns to see if the compass
moved. The compass passed this test.

But my training kicked in -- if in doubt, fly the heading needed and keep
track of time. I did this. After about 20 minutes I got to another lake
and this one was on the map. I was on course.

It turns out my mystery lake was new and not on the maps yet. My map was
current. I swear it was. I never use out of date maps. That's my story
and I am sticking to it :-)

Anyway I was where I thought I was, but very concerned for a while when I
saw that damned lake under me that wasn't supposed to be there.

What is your favorite "lost" story?

Danny Deger

Danny Deger wrote:

It turns out my mystery lake was new and not on the maps yet. My map was
current. I swear it was. I never use out of date maps. That's my story
and I am sticking to it :-)

Anyway I was where I thought I was, but very concerned for a while when I
saw that damned lake under me that wasn't supposed to be there.

A new LAKE? That's pretty big for a "new" thing.

I wasn't airborne, but roadborne with a satnav trying to get from Point
A to Point B in a new city, and was tooling along a massive divided
four-lane when suddently, the GPS started trying to U-turn me. Turned
out that the road was newer than my data...the navigator thought I was
going off-road for a good half-mile.

"Typhoon502" wrote in message
ups.com...
Danny Deger wrote:

It turns out my mystery lake was new and not on the maps yet. My map was
current. I swear it was. I never use out of date maps. That's my story
and I am sticking to it :-)

Anyway I was where I thought I was, but very concerned for a while when I
saw that damned lake under me that wasn't supposed to be there.

A new LAKE? That's pretty big for a "new" thing.


Yes. A new LAKE. They had just completed a dam and I guess the lake filled
up pretty fast behind the dam. As I said. My story is my charts were up to
date. That's my story and I'm sticking to it :-)

Danny Deger

On Mon, 8 Jan 2007 10:00:26 -0600, "Danny Deger"
wrote:

What is your favorite "lost" story?


Every IP knows that you have to let the students go a little bit, so
that they can see the outcome of their errors and then the lesson is
reinforced. The difficult judgement call is knowing how far to let
them progress and still be able to make the recovery without damage to
the airplane or the landscape.

I was watching a student doing a VFR low-level nav in a T-37 across
the desert of Southern Arizona. We'd headed outside of the Williams
AFB local training area and SW of Tucson into the area south of I-10.
He'd gotten overwhelmed with flying low and still trying to keep up
with map-reading and dead reckoning, and I was dutifully urging him to
ease it down just a bit more so that he could successfully penetrate
the fictitious enemy defenses. I knew we weren't going to be running
out of gas--we were headed generally north bound and we could easily
make it back to Willy.

What I didn't know (but should have) was that we were entering the
Gila Bend gunnery range and just over the next ridge ahead of us was a
conventional air-to-ground gunnery range. We crested the ridge, I saw
the target array, run-in-lines, strafe panels, control tower and a
flight of four Phantoms in the box pattern doing 30 degree dive bomb
drops.

"I've got the airplane..."

"Yessir, you've got it..."

"We're going to go a bit lower now, and watch how we use this ridge
line for terrain masking."

"Wow, sir, we're really low."

"Not really, this is about five hundred feet."

"But, sir, it looks closer to about fifty. That saguaro was higher
than we were."

"That's just an optical illusion caused by our speed."

"Don't you think we should climb now, sir?"

"No, not until I hop over this semi, and we get north of the
Interstate here. Ahhh, that looks good. You want to tune in Chandler
VOR now and get ready for an instrument approach when we get there?"

"Is my low-level over, sir?"

"Yep."


Ed Rasimus
Fighter Pilot (USAF-Ret)
"When Thunder Rolled"
www.thunderchief.org
www.thundertales.blogspot.com

On Mon, 08 Jan 2007 18:00:20 GMT, Ed Rasimus wrote in
:

... "Don't you think we should climb now, sir?"

"No, not until I hop over this semi, and we get north of the
Interstate here. Ahhh, that looks good. ..."

LOL!

Great story. Thanks for sharing it!

Marty
--
Big-8 newsgroups: humanities.*, misc.*, news.*, rec.*, sci.*, soc.*, talk.*
See http://www.big-8.org for info on how to add or remove newsgroups.

"Ed Rasimus" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 8 Jan 2007 10:00:26 -0600, "Danny Deger"
wrote:

What is your favorite "lost" story?


Every IP knows that you have to let the students go a little bit, so
that they can see the outcome of their errors and then the lesson is
reinforced. The difficult judgement call is knowing how far to let
them progress and still be able to make the recovery without damage to
the airplane or the landscape.

Correct of course...............and this can no doubt take on some real IP
"decision making moments" as he sits in the back of a T38 on final with a
student up front starting to develop a rather LARGE sink rate :-))))))
Dudley Henriques

Danny Deger wrote:
snip

What is your favorite "lost" story?

Danny Deger


I won't say where this happened or when in case any of the offending
crew is still married I will say it was back in the day when we could
get away with pictures of naked women under the plexiglass on the
plotter table of HC-130 aircraft. I was sitting in the left scanner seat
listening to the flight deck discussing the latest copy of Hustler. We
were heading in the general direction of a place where the locals would
not be happy to see us. Pilot asked nav where we were. Nav replied "we
should just be passing a large village near a river at 9 o'clock." Pilot
looked and couldn't see it. I stated that we had passed a small village
about 10 minutes before, but there was no river. Nav and pilot agreed
that must be it and went back to the discussion at hand. I decided I
didn't want to hear anymore and a bunk had just become unoccupied so I
crawled in. Not much later things got noisy as we did a very sharp 180.

I never did ask how far we had been off course It never was
discussed when we got back to the states.]

The running gag in that unit was you could tell how confident the nav
was by the width of the lines on his charts.

Dan, U.S. Air Force, retired

Danny Deger wrote:
Post your lost story here, so we can all laugh at them.

My first one is "The lake that shouldn't be there". I was flying from north
of the Dallas/Fort Worth area to my home port of Luck Field which is south
of Fort Worth. No radios of any type in my little Taylorcraft. All was
well. A nice day with reasonable visibility. Some haze but strong VFR.

About halfway to Dallas I come over a lake. A big lake. One that would be
HUGE on my sectional. It was not on the map. I had just been flying for
about 45 minutes on a magnetic heading and keeping close track of time.
There was NO way this lake could be on the ground but not on my map. The
vis was such I couldn't see the buildings of Dallas or Fort Worth. I was
convinced somehow I had gotten lost. I thought maybe the compass was stuck
on the wrong heading. I did a couple of small turns to see if the compass
moved. The compass passed this test.

But my training kicked in -- if in doubt, fly the heading needed and keep
track of time. I did this. After about 20 minutes I got to another lake
and this one was on the map. I was on course.

It turns out my mystery lake was new and not on the maps yet. My map was
current. I swear it was. I never use out of date maps. That's my story
and I am sticking to it :-)

Anyway I was where I thought I was, but very concerned for a while when I
saw that damned lake under me that wasn't supposed to be there.

What is your favorite "lost" story?

Shortly after the end of WWII, I had a flight from Capodichino (Naples, Italy)
to Orly outside of Paris in a C-47. In those days, enroute services were kind
of minimal, so I was tooling along FD&H until I reached what should have been an
enroute checkpoint and I couldn't find it. Maps, pilotage, etc. and still
couldn't recognize anything on the ground that'd give me a clue.

Finally, I spotted what looked like an active airfield, which I gingerly
approached and circled, hoping to see the name of the place painted on the top
of a barn roof or something similar, but no such luck. Finally, I tooled into
the landing pattern and set down. Taxiied up to what appeared to be a Base Ops
of some sort with people standing around out front watching me. I shut down and
got out to approach one and the conversation went something like this:

"Qu'est-ce que c'est le nom ici?. Je suis perdu." (What's the name of this
place? I'm lost.)

"Monsieur, ce place s'appelle Rheims." (Sir, this place is called Rheims)

"Merci, beaucoup.........au revoir!" (Thanks........bye!)

I'd been bucking a hellaceous and totally unexpected headwind and really wasn't
very far off course or far from my destination. I hadn't called to ask for
permission to land, nor had I filed any sort of additional clearance on leaving
to resume my flight. The funny thing about it was that I never heard another
word about that impromptu navigation maneuver from a single soul.....the only
people who knew that it happened were my crew and the Frenchmen on the ground,
and none of us talked.

I shudder to think of what I'd have had to go through if the same thing happened
to me in the States, even at that time.

George Z.

On Mon, 8 Jan 2007 13:38:16 -0500, "Dudley Henriques"
wrote:


"Ed Rasimus" wrote in message
.. .
On Mon, 8 Jan 2007 10:00:26 -0600, "Danny Deger"
wrote:

What is your favorite "lost" story?


Every IP knows that you have to let the students go a little bit, so
that they can see the outcome of their errors and then the lesson is
reinforced. The difficult judgement call is knowing how far to let
them progress and still be able to make the recovery without damage to
the airplane or the landscape.

Correct of course...............and this can no doubt take on some real IP
"decision making moments" as he sits in the back of a T38 on final with a
student up front starting to develop a rather LARGE sink rate :-))))))
Dudley Henriques


I've not done the UPT thing in a T-38, but spent about 1500 hours (in
..9 increments) as an IP (and IP's IP) in the AT-38 at Fighter Lead-In.

Generally the landing wasn't much of an issue. The flight attitude
would tell you most of what you needed to know--if you had the right
pitch and the airspeed was ball park, you were OK. But, things happen
occasionally.

I had an old friend who had been a UPT student of mine, come through
Holloman for a fast jet requal after a staff job. He'd been a Raven
and was generally crazy, but a good aviator. First traffic pattern,
just as you describe. He falls back on his old FAC flying patterns and
goes to "flare"--not the thing to do, in the Talon which responded to
holding constant attitude until entering ground effect and then when
the airplane tries to lower the nose in response to the increased wing
effectiveness, simply adding back pressure to hold the landing
attitude.

He flares at about 40 feet AGL. I sense impending doom and calmly
adopt a mezzo-soprano tone as I scream "I've got it!" Grab the bird,
freeze the stick and simultaneously reach for a yard of throttle.
Bottom falls out, we impact and bounce into the air about 25 feet just
in time for the burners to light and I gingerly milk it back into
controlled flight.

"Let's try another one, and this time lets do it like the briefing,
OK?"


Ed Rasimus
Fighter Pilot (USAF-Ret)
"When Thunder Rolled"
www.thunderchief.org
www.thundertales.blogspot.com

Ed Rasimus wrote:
Every IP knows that you have to let the students go a little bit, so
that they can see the outcome of their errors and then the lesson is
reinforced. The difficult judgement call is knowing how far to let
them progress and still be able to make the recovery without damage to
the airplane or the landscape.

Ye olde learning curve!

Didn't happen to me, but to a friend while we were in Basic
Jet in Kingsville, TX. Late in the Fam series, one each student
and IP in a Tango Two, IP in the back. There was a dingus
back there which let the IP slew the directional gyro in order to
test the S.A. of the stud up front. Approaching the end of the
hop, said IP applied said dingus, and said "let's go home."

Stud makes the initial callup to homeplate ("Ready or not, here
I come," more or less), tunes up NASKINGS on the TACAN,
and turns until the arrowhead is at the top of the DG. Time
passes. IP waits. More time passes. Irritation grows in the
back seat. Finally: "Sure looks dry out there." (NASKINGS,
for the uninitiated, sits a few miles off an arm of Baffin Bay,
near the Gulf of Mexico. The bay is visible for mucho miles
prior to arrival). "Yes sir." More JP-5 becomes
smoke and noise. Kingsville Approach, accustomed to this
sort of thing, hasn't commented on the fact that Our Hero hasn't
reported the 5-mile initial yet. "Some kinda drought down
there, huh?" "Yes sir," as before, but a bit nervously, as the
hapless stud begins to twig that Something Is Not Right.
Doesn't usually take more than ten minutes to start seeing signs
of human habitation once headed toward the home patch from
the MOA. IP begins to wonder if Mexican Air Force
interceptors (T-28s) are warming up on the tarmac. Finally,
inevitably: "Doesn't much look like downtown Kingsville down
there, does it?" "No, sir." "Happen to notice the DME lately?"
Student notices that the numbers in Mickey's face are in high
double digits and getting bigger (it's only 100 miles from
NASKINGS to Nuevo Laredo). "Urk." The light dawning,
the stud finally looks at his wet compass and cross-checks
against the setting sun in front of him, says "Toto, I don't think
we're in Kansas any more," and pulls a fast 180. The recovery
was nominal from that point onward. He got a Below for SA
and an Above for making his instructor laugh.



Jeff