Know Lost Comm Procedures!

[Theotokos]

It's been a long time since I have been able to get on the internet for a good lenght of time, thus my lack of postings.

However, I got a gentle reminder the other day on why we should always be prepared and know the procedures for lost comms including the light gun signals. Luckily my radio problem happened when I had already landed with the ground frequency so I was able to have tower taxi me but I thought to myself, "What if I had this problem with tower while coming in?" Basically, when I tried to tune into ground after clearning the runway, 121.8 would not tune in. To make a long story short it was showing a 121. somthing but I could not tell if it was a 5 o4 an 8 because part of the number was not visible. It had only 3 of the lines, and when no one answered I assumed it was a 5. I tried to go up to 8 but it went to 7 and then 9. After trying a few time and fooling around, I gave up and told tower of my problem. He cleared me luckily but again what if that had been tower when I was coming in? My CFI looked at it when I landed and he could not figure it out. He assumed it just got to hot. But I hope this little story might remind students and even privates that somthing wierd can happen with the radio at anytime and you are going to have to do somthing about it. The mentality that, "Oh, it'll never happen to me." must be avoided.

 

[777]

Theotokos,

I couldn't agree more....I myself experienced lost comms ( it was a VFR flight ) during a stage check while in the CSEL course. I rolled out of a steep turn and and couldn't speak out of my mike....so I swithced my plugs to a different jack in the plane. That allowed me to speak to my check pilot and I thought all would be ok. But to my surprise he could'nt transmit after about a minute. So this was the scenario...I couldn't transmit on my side because I could'nt speak out of the original jacks which were tied in to the radios and the check pilot just couldn't transmit..but we were able to dial in and listen in on the freqs. The airport that we trained out of was Class C, so we couldn't ask approach for permission to enter the airspace. We did some trouble shooting and verified that the radios were at least recieving and that the transponder was still squawking. So after dialing in 7600, the check pilot made the decision to come back to the airport under the Class C shelf and land. As we were coming in, we heard tower recognize us as lost comms over the frequency and now all we had to do was look for some light gun signals. Well we didn't see any until we were on final and from what I saw was a flashing green light...if I was by myself I would've gone around and circled in for another one, but the check pilot went ahead and side-stepped it in on a smaller runway. After we landed, we got the signal to taxi back to the ramp. It was definatley a learning experience. I brought this up to a couple of different instructors and they all had different ways of how they would deal with this particular situation. The truth is that each particular scenario will require different adherance to....I guess there's no one way of dealing with something like this. During all of this I kept referring to my knee board because I wrote all of the transponder codes and all of the light gun signals and their meanings on paper and filed it. This may seem like an additional "pain in the ...... " but I thought it was well worth the extra 5 minutes it took me to get it together. I'd rather be over-prepared than under prepared. Hope this helps in spreading your info !!