SCARIEST MOMENT

[Joshua949]

I have not done a take off in a thunderstorm but I have been in a plane landing on May 3, 1999, yes the day all the tornadoes hit the midwest & plains states..i was going to Honolulu from Raleigh/Durham & was just making a connecting flight in DFW & we got caught in a severe t-storm on landing...well...it was lightning & hailing & we had serious turbulence & actually i would say the plane dropped about a thousand feet in a like a second or two & well...we were all scared on that MD-80 on American Airlines....we never landed in DFW...after we tried twice so we made an emergency landing in Houston...then after the storm past went on to DFW..we were in that same plane for 12 hours that day & missed our flight to HNL so had to fly to SFO & spend the night their...also i have landed after a bad t-storm passed RDU & is was a pretty rocky, bumpy, ruff ride in...

well...i was exaggerating a bit...it wasnt a thousand..maybe 500 & it was just a little longer than a second or two..the drop make u feel sick & light headed...made me feel like my skin was going down with the plane & my bones were going no where...

 

[av8rmsu]

Flying into my home airport in MS KTUP, my friend (an instructor) and I are flying in to enter the right base of rwy. 18 from the southeast. A cropduster is on about a 2 mile final and a baron is on left downwind. We are cleared number 2....then the tower (not an FAA controler, no radar) tells us to do a 360 for spacing behind the baron, we asked which way and she got a little confused and said it didn't matter. We turn outbound. No problem because we were in a 150 and he was hauling butt. We do the 360 and report base again just like she said. By that time we were getting a little confused because she gets all fumbled up when more than 1 plane is in the pattern. She then tells us that we are #3. The cropduster already landed, the baron (#1) is on short final and we are now #3, where is the other plane (#2) that no one has heard a peap on the radio from. We turn outbound because the situation was getting a little harry, the controller was all confused and wasn't making a bit of sense to anyone, and we were past the turn to final. My friend catches movement out of the corner of his eye...pushes the yoke through the firewall (well he tried anyways) and yells oh "F". A 172 was on the left base (the controller put us on right base and didn't tell either of us that we were heading straight for each other) and was turning final. We were a little below him in his blind spot. We figured his prop missed our wing by about 150 feet, literally. He never saw us.

My "copilot", the instructor, gets on the radio and asks in a stern voice what is going on and she clears us to land.

We get on the ground and he calls her up. She was all apologetic and defensive...she said she couldn't see us...total BS without a doubt. The conditions were absolutely clear as a bell. A friend of ours, the line guy, also a pilot, was standing on the ramp watching the entire thing unravel. We were a little over a mile off the end of the runway. He asked her what the hell she was doing up there and she asked if he was cursing at her, that's when it really hit the fan. I was sitting the chair next to him, still shaking, literally.

She was being totally unsafe and something like this happens about once a week with her.

The thing that really pisses me off is that we would have been at fault because we were not keeping our own VFR separation. We filled out a NASA form. Just a totaly bad situation.

 

[stultus]

My scariest flying moments are always when my VISA bill arrives at the end of the month. However a distant second was when I was working on my PPL doing turns in the CMA pattern at night. My instructor was holding the flashlight because none of the interior lighting worked in our little 150--so it was pretty difficult to see what I needed. In a rush to clear the runway for a citation (or something like that...) on a pretty long final, I took off on my 8th stop and go and couldn't figure out why the plane felt so weird and I couldn't gain much altitude... turned x-wind, and let my instructor know things were not right (I my best poker voice, trying not to sound nervous at all...though I was more anxious than I'd ever been...in an airplane at least), he pointed the flashlight all over the panel...couldn't figure out what was wrong, but he took the controls and said "yeah, something's not right", by now we're on downwind and well below TPA, and he points the flashlight at the flap switch....on 30 degrees. Doh!