Personal Dread of Flying

[Randy Rizzo]

Wow Randy that was a night to remember and thankfully you can.

jtk

yeah, quite a night indeed. I had trouble keeping out of the corn that month. Not 2 weeks later I'm giving a checkout in a Cherokee Arrow. Last item, obstacle clearance takeoff. Gear up, high angle of flight, and the engine begins belching large volumes of black smoke and not enough power to maintain flight. We had taken off on runway 33 at DPA, northwest, Rt 64 just a short distance off the end of the runway, lowered the nose, glided across 64 into a cornfield, thankfully the crops had been harvested and there was no damage to occupants nor aircraft. There was a intake duct that ran thru the nose wheel well, slipped off, at the high angle of attack there a low pressure area created in the wheel well, the engine was starved of air, running extremely rich. The next 42 years relatively incident free, unless you include the Africa fiasco!

[Randy Rizzo]

No kidding. So, Randy, what was the resolution of the fire? It looks like you set the ground on fire, but not much fire damage to the plane.

The fire was brief and for whatever reason never amounted to anything and self extinguished. Could have been just fire shooting out the exhaust stack. There was no fire on the ground.

[Neal Clayton]

Being in the 500 mph aluminum tube of potential death at 30,000 feet is fine.

Being packed like a sardine with strangers for interminable hours gives me the willies.

Evidently a personality defect..

As a pilot, I agree completely. I'm fine with me, it's the rest of you that are awful sketchy .

I've been in the shop for the past few months so had to fly commercial for Christmas. After we got to the bus station (southwest gate) I yanked out the ole iPad to check out the weather in DFW, and lo and behold it's pretty shady looking. This was the post-christmas tornado that killed all those people at the end of 2015. So being the helpful person I am, I go ahead and take over the role of the jerk at the gate who tells everyone not to listen to this yahoo working at the counter, we're not getting a clearance to Dallas because there's a tornado warning for two more hours.

After they manage to get all the cattle on to the slaughterhouse truck, we did get a clearance about an hour later, only to wind up in a hold around Quitman. When the game was up (in terms of fuel) they brought us to Houston instead of DFW. As we're getting off they tell everyone to go stand in line at the next gate and see if they can get on another flight. So I make my way out toward the end of this line of sheep, and the first thing I see is ALL of the SWA line guys walking through the crowd with a coke and a burger headed for the exits. Again, I'm the jerk, but in my mind doing everyone a favor by pointing out "hey, all the line guys are going home, you're not getting another flight, game is up for tonight." To which I got eyes rolling and scowls, but no verbal response.

So yeah, my one commercial flight a year reinforces my opinion that I'm surrounded by cretins who are only capable of doing what someone tells them to do.