A sagacious pilot once observed: “You know you forgot to lower your landing gear when it takes full power to taxi back to the terminal.”

Let me tell you, if you’ve ever spoken to an experienced avionics technician, and he tells you that he’s never been shocked by electricity, he’s lying. If a carpenter tells you he’s never hammered his thumb, he’s lying. If any pilot tells you he’s never made a mistake on the flight deck, he too is lying. And so it has been with me (not the lying part, dude); I’ve made my mistakes.

If you read one of my first blogs, it was on learning to fly. Well I’ve had my pilots license for some years now and yes, I’ve made mistakes. Some pilots, like some doctors, seem to want to portray an air of infallibility, but as any humble person will admit, as long as we’re in this flesh there will be no such thing as being perfect. I’m glad to report however, that none of my faux-pas’ has resulted in safety compromises. Here’s few samples:

I’m used to parking my aircraft rental in a tie-down area, where I have to tie-down or loose the aircraft depending on whether you’re coming or going. One day I picked up the aircraft from the front of the terminal, were there is no tie-down area, but instead chocks are used. Of course I saw the chocks as I walked up to the aircraft, but by the time I had accomplished my preflight inspection and sat in the cockpit going through the engine start checklist, those seldom used chocks were long out of my mind. I had the engine running and was ready to call ground control for taxi instructions when a lineman came running out to inform me that the chocks were still installed! Embarrassed, I had to shut down the engine to so he could remove the offending obstacles. It probably would have taken me a couple of minutes to figure out why the plane was not moving despite the full throttle.

Then there was the time that an instrument rated friend asked me to be his safety pilot. He would practice flying instrument approaches under the hood (a visual restriction so he only sees the instruments, but can’t see the outside), while I would assure by reference to terra-firma that he was not doing anything unsafe. We were both current in this aircraft and we both would split the rental costs. At the aircraft he did a little of the exterior preflight inspection, and I did a little of it. But we did not coordinate our efforts too closely, as we both would soon learn. Shortly after takeoff, when we were well on our way to the destination airport, we heard loud banging noises on the top of the wing! It would come and go intermittently. Although alarmed, there were no indications on the instruments of anything wrong, so we proceeded to land at the destination airport, which was not far. It turns out that the last time the wing fuel tanks were filled, one of the gas caps was not fully secured. It came off, and because it has a lanyard connected to it, the tethered cap was banging the top of this high-winged aircraft. Normally, during the preflight exterior inspection, you pull off the caps to check for full fuel, then re-secure it, but none of us had done that. On a long flight the fuel in that tank could have siphoned off, ruining your whole day! We had plenty of fuel, so we secured the cap and went on with the exercise.

On another flight I was approaching my destination airport on a beautiful, windless day. This airport has an ATIS, which is a frequency you tune in to listen to recorded messages about weather, or any other important information you should know about before contacting the control tower or ground control. Part of the message said to “Expect arriving and departing traffic runway 18.” I took out my airport diagram and started to prepare mentally to land on runway 18. When I contacted the tower however, she instructed me to enter “ left traffic for runway 36”, which is the opposite approach side of the same runway. I read back the instructions precisely, but despite that, I was already mentally fixated on landing on runway 18. I only thought it odd that I was given left traffic instead of right, as would have been expected for my arrival direction to runway 18. I started to fly a pattern for left traffic to runway 18 when the lady in the tower gently called my attention to the fact that runway 36 was at the opposite end. Chagrined, I was fuming mad at my fixation despite having read back the correct instruction, which I initially did not follow. Fixation continues to be an intriguing discussion in Human Factors training, and I lived it! I’m sure there were more that a few laughs at my expense for those listening on the tower frequency, silly boy.

Of course there’s lessons to be learned here that are quite obvious, so I’ll discontinue these pesky revelations. To say that these mistakes will never happen again, really means that I’ve learned from them, as I’m sure you do from yours. These are the types of mistakes you know will only happen once to you, because you’ve silently taken a vow to that effect.

That same sagacious pilot once was heard to also quip: “If you’re having a perfect flight, you’ve probably overlooked something.”

Roger.