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There I was...when Suddenly!

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Head in the clouds

Well-Known Member
Joined
Mar 11, 2012
Messages
1,981
Location
Gold Coast, East Coast of Australia
In another thread a friend asked me to elaborate on a rather ‘interesting’ first solo that I had when learning soaring and while thinking of writing that up it occurred to me that we all have incidents from time to time and it is the lessons learned from them that make us into better and safer flyers.

Back in the 1980’s when our club flying scene was very active we used to have a saying ‘There I was’ which preceded the telling of anything out of the ordinary that happened during the day’s fun.

‘There I was’ actually stood for ‘There I was at 500ft when suddenly…’ because we weren’t allowed to fly ultralights higher than that so that anything that happened, in the story it happened at ‘500ft’ regardless of whether it was 5000ft or 6000ft, if you follow me.

Anyway, I’ve had dozens of ‘there I was’ situations, some silly, some dangerous, some stupid, some circumstantial and so on. Naturally I find some of them to be embarrassing because I was dumb while others bring me some pride because I acted well in the circumstances.

Thinking about them, they all have a valuable lesson, just as everyone else’s also do, so I thought it would be good to share some of these valuable stories if they don’t cause too much personal discomfort.

Interestingly, while making a few notes to see if this would be worthwhile I found that most of my ‘there I was’ situations occurred in helicopters. Maybe that’s because I have many times more rotary hours than fixed wing but I think it’s also because the kind of work I did required more pushing of the boundaries than my recreational fixed-wing flying has. So there will be more rotary-wing stories from me but I think they offer the same lessons that apply in fixed wing.

When posting your stories please don’t forget to describe what you learned from the occurrence and thanks for telling and helping us all to be better aviators, which is why I’ve put this into the ‘better pilots’ category.

My first contribution follows -
 
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