Lesson 60: The most important lesson yet…

…and I didn’t even get off the ground.

Having been cleared for solo on a Friday afternoon, I told Mac that I wanted to vanquish the “Second Time Boogie Man” and fly the next day.  The idea was simply to go back to Ramona and do some take offs and landings.  And I wanted to take off at about 7:00 am so that I could be back by 9:00 or so and have the rest of the day to do stuff with Ellen.

At this stage, I need to give either Mac or John my flight plan and get it approved before taking off, and I need to call whoever approved it upon safely returning.

So I put some time in Friday evening developing a flight plan that I thought might address all the issues: stay out of Miramar Class B airspace by staying south of Route 52…stay above Gillespie Class D airspace by flying at 2,500 feet…and so on.  The only missing piece was the weather.

On Friday night, Saturday morning’s weather looked marginal on the web sites I checked, but I got up at 4:00 am  anyway just in case.  Sure enough, it was no dice, although it looked better in the afternoon.  So I went back to bed thinking that I might be able to do it at 3:00 pm or so.

Now, as it happened, when I flew solo on Friday Mac had turned on a video camera in the cockpit without telling me, and all three take offs and landings were captured.  I wanted to get that video and post it on YouTube, so I called Mac late Saturday morning to see if he was going to be at the hangar.  He said yeah, he would be there about about noon.

At this point the weather was still crappy, and Ellen and I were in the midst of chores and whatnot, and I was thinking that perhaps I wouldn’t fly after all (this was the Second Time Boogie Man whispering in my ear).  I asked Ellen if she would mind driving to the hangar with me just to get the video, and she said sure.  So we went.

At the hangar we all sat around watching the video while Mac — a raconteur if ever there was one — regaled Ellen with little stories from the day before’s solo to augment the video.

I opined that perhaps it wasn’t my day to fly — still thinking about going to Ramona — and Mac said nonsense.  Just take the plane and do some take offs and landings at Montgomery.  Ellen and I decided to go grab a quick bite to eat, and then she would hang out for an hour while I did a few laps around Montgomery Field.

We got back and the weather was still overcast, but the ceiling was high enough for me to fly around Montgomery.  I prepped the plane while Ellen chatted with Mac in the office.

And then I was off.

Montgomery Field has two parallel runways that align with the prevailing winds (28 left and 28 right), and one other runway (23) that runs at a 50 degree angle to the main runways for those times when the wind is doing something unusual.  This was one of those days: runway 23 was in use for normal take offs and landings.

Being so used to runways 28 right and left, I always feel a slight twinge when 23 is in play.  I’ve used it enough that I’m not scared of it, but I don’t feel as comfortable or confident using it as I do the others.  But it was what it was, and I taxied to the run up area at runway 23.  When I got there I did my pre-take off stuff…called the tower…and waited…

…and waited…

…and waited…

For some unknown reason, every small plane on the planet Earth decided to fly into Montgomery Field that afternoon.  At one point I looked out and saw four planes on final approach.  The tower knew I was there, but I just had to wait.

The thing about waiting for take off is, it’s not like you can put on the parking brake and relax.  The engine is running and the propeller is turning, and you’ve got to hold the plane there with your feet firmly on the brakes.  And you have to listen…you have to maintain general situational awareness, and you have to be ready for a call from the tower.

So there I was, waiting and listening.  And I didn’t like what I was hearing.  That controller was juggling planes all over the sky.  At one point he told someone to loiter over Qualcomm Stadium.  The plane replied that he couldn’t loiter at whatever altitude he was at under Visual Flight Rules (VFR), and asked if he could descend 1,000 feet.  And I thought, “Man, I wouldn’t even know that was an issue if he told me to do that.”

And meanwhile, the wind was picking up.  Not just picking up, but changing directions frequently.  When he wasn’t directing traffic, the controller was spitting out wind conditions:

“Wind 220 at 16”

“Wind 250 gusting to 18”

“Wind 210 gusting to 20”

When he said that, I thought, “That’s it.  I’m not flying.”  I had been sitting there for 25 minutes, my feet and legs were tired, my mind was tired, and I couldn’t imagine trying to weave in and out of all that traffic and land in those winds.

As soon as I got the chance I called in, “Montgomery Tower, Skyhawk 622CM.  I’m going to cancel this take off and I’d like to taxi back to Marigold.”

The controller came back immediately and said he was going to get me off the ground soon.

“Thanks,” I replied, “but it’s a little too busy, and a little too windy for me today.”

And about 15 minutes later I was pulling up to the hangar.

I felt dejected.  For starters I felt a bit like a wuss to the controllers, and I assumed that Mac had been listening on the radio and had no idea what he thought.

As I was putting the plane away, one of the other pilots who had been doing take offs and landings — and who apparently knew Mac’s plane well enough to have seen it sitting there in the run up area — came bicycling by and asked me, “Did you ever get off the ground?”

I told him that no, it was my very first full solo and that I had decided it was too windy and too busy.

He beamed, “Good call!”  And went on to tell me that good judgment like that was the most important thing a pilot could have.

Hmmm…maybe I wasn’t so much of a wuss.

Then Ellen came out to the hangar and told me that not only had she and Mac been listening, but they had actually followed out to the run up area in his car and watched.

And then she went on to tell me that about 15 minutes into my wait, Mac had told her, “If I were Rick, I’d be thinking about canceling at this point.”  And that when I did cancel, he said, “That’s what I like about military guys…they have good judgment!”

After I got the plane put away we all sat around the office chatting…talking about how crowded the sky was…what everyone was thinking…and so on.  And Mac just kept emphasizing that that had been exactly the right thing to do.

Needless to say, when we finally left the airport I felt great.  Mac had seen that I could definitely make good judgment calls in solo situations; Ellen, too, could rest a bit easier knowing that I was not inclined to push it past what I knew I could do.  And most important, I knew that it was OK to walk away from a bad situation, and that I could do that.

It was a great lesson.