I don't know if I've ever met a pilot who didn't believe they were above average. If any one who is reading this is a pilot - you know what I mean - you're probably thinking it too. I know I am. I can't say that I would even consider myself less than an above average pilot. I can admit my instructing skills can still use much improvement - but that's easy to admit, I'm new to it. But when it comes down to the skills of flying, I really do think I'm good. I'm being honest too. I know inside that it is entirely possible that I'm wrong and I'm not above average, maybe I'm just average (I don't think I can bring myself to consider below average...). Even in everyday situations in life - we feel that given a situation we can handle it. We can handle it better than most. Until you experience a situation that was said to be tough first hand you don't think it's as tough as it's made out to be.
Have you ever heard of a black hole? I'm not talking about those holes out in space that scientists say we get sucked into and I'm not talking about internet black holes that drop clients (I really don't know what I'm talking about there...), but I'm talking about the black hole in aviation terms. The black hole you were warned about by your flight instructor or your ground school instructors (if you went to one). The ones you encounter when flying into an airport that has little surrounding features to help guide you to touchdown. For those who have no experience flying - it's basically featureless terrain. If an airport is surrounded by fields, and those fields are snowed over, there's nothing to use to judge distance and height. Same thing can happen at night. Take a look at the following short video.
The video was a landing I did at Georgetown airport in the Sierra Nevada mountain range at night after one of our famous trips to Willows airport for greasy food and chocolate pie. There were absolutely no visual references to judge where I was at on my approach. Lucky for me, I had been there earlier in the day and knew where the obstacles were (by that I mean pine trees!) - so the whole way down I at least knew I wasn't going to hit anything. I was being so cautious that on the first approach I ended up coming in way too high. I was past the half way point and still floating (3000' runway). At that point, I thought, well, I'll just go around and do it again (probably a bad decision). I added full power and began slowly retracting the flaps. I lifted the gear handle to bring the gear up. The gear wasn't coming up.
My 1972 Piper Arrow had an old gear switch that didn't allow the gear to come up below a certain airspeed as what was considered a "safety precaution" (I wasn't so happy with it at this point). You could chose to change that manually whenever you wanted (located just by the flap handle) - but it was hard to tell sometimes which way you had it set up. Apparently mine was activated! Fun time to find out. From earlier that day, I knew there were trees off the end of the runway, this time on the departure end, and I was worried. With my little Arrow fully loaded (all 4 seats filled), it wasn't climbing out as fast as I wanted it to. I was nervous. For the first time, I was thinking, "what if we didn't make it". With a little bit of light from the moon I could see the outline of the trees on nearby hillsides, but in the pitch black I had no idea where I was in relationship to the ones below me. To this day, I don't know how close I came - maybe I cleared it by a lot, maybe just barely. I nursed the airplane to traffic pattern altitude (maybe not the proper way to say it since it was my pride that was hurt and not the plane) and waited for the airspeed to increase until I could bring the gear up (in the darkness I hadn't been able to find the override switch and defaulted to just flying the airplane).
When I finally landed the second time around, I was close to shaking, and my friends had surprisingly landed ahead of us (that's another long but funny story I may have to tell later). I had always been warned about the ominous "black hole", but I had always wondered why anyone made a big deal about it. After all, could it really be a problem for such a great pilot as myself? Don't let that happen to you, you may not be as lucky as I was. The factors sure set me up for disaster - night time, in mountainous terrain, no lights, a full airplane, and an incomplete knowledge of my airplane's configuration. Don't be caught by surprise. Sometimes, situations are tougher than you think, and I'm still learning that!
Fly safe,
Up in the Air
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