IHAVE, as you may have gathered by now, a fetish about pre-flight briefing, be it a formation aerobatic display at the Farnborough Air Show or a quiet toddle round the local area on a sunny afternoon. I like to have everything pre-ordained as far as possible. On a team I have one rule straight out of the charm school of J. Stalin – when I bawl “Briefing!” I expect total attendance in five seconds – six if a particular pilot’s pre-occupation is especially curvy. Then it is briefing, and all hands listening to what you’re bloody well told.
I view pre-flight briefing as being the most important single component in all the myriad detail with which we surround ourselves in the name of air safety. The reasoning is utterly simple – if you’ve thought about it beforehand, you go do it. If you haven’t thought about it beforehand you’ve got to think about it now, in the air, possibly under stress, and then do it. Safety-wise, no contest. However…. However, as an inescapable factor of the human condition, sometimes it is not going to work out. In fact, sometimes it is going to fail miserably.
One such time was when I was instructing on the West Indian island of Antigua. Antigua being a whole 12 miles long in any direction, student crosscountry exercises inevitably involved “international” flights to other islands. Barbuda was 20 nm away, Montserrat about 35, and the St Kitts/Nevis couplet – two close volcanic islands – about 60 nauticals.
That may sound ideal, but given that most Caribbean days have visibility of 100 nm – which meant that you could see your target from your bedroom window, never mind on climb-out – as a navigation exercise they did tend to be ever so slightly pointless. So I used to wait until the visibility deteriorated to a mere 20 or 30 nm and do the “cross-county” exercises then, on the grounds that the aspirants had to spark-up at least one
brain-cell to actually navigate instead of just staring at the target from take-off to landing.
Now any instructor will tell you that every once in a while you get a student who is grimly determined, but …. well, shall we say, not obviously genetically suited to aviation. “L” was one of these. He was kindly, charming, and possessed of a natural sense of rhythm which eventually, after nearly 50 hours of earnest endeavour on the part of sweating student and several exasperated instructors, resulted in his being able to levitate an aeroplane by himself and subsequently return it to its point of origin in a still-serviceable condition.
He had bright, intelligent brown eyes fronting a brain with the keen cutting edge of a three-week dead gerbil. If anyone could ever find a new way of doing something wrong with a flying machine, it was L. I approached the task of preparing L for his solo “cross-countries” with some circumspection. We plodded the simple straight line from Antigua to St Kitts and back several times while I watched, mouth firmly shut, for any new, unthought- of error he could manage to pluck out of the firmament. After about six goes at it there was no error, and I was fresh out of excuses – I had to send him solo.
“Okay L – briefing. Today you’re going to go to St Kitts by yourself. Just do exactly what you’ve done before. Go file your flight plan, clear customs and immigration, fly to St Kitts and land at Golden Rock. Okay?” “Yessuh”.
“At Golden Rock you relax, have a cup of coffee, file your return flight plan, clear outbound, and come back here”. “Yessuh”. “Navigation’s to be dead-reckoning, but if you have any difficulties you can use the ADF. Should you need to do that, you tell me about it when you get back so we can sort out what the problem was”. “Yessuh”. Half an hour later I watched uneasily as the little Cessna lifted off the runway and disappeared to the north east. I told myself to stop worrying, there was no way L could get it wrong. Thirty-five minutes outbound, an hour or so on the ground, 35 minutes back – he’ll be back in two, two-and-a-half hours time.
So stop worrying. I didn’t stop worrying. It’s a Chief Instructor’s job to worry. Fifty minutes later the Cessna reappeared and landed. Thoroughly puzzled, I walked over to shake L warmly by the throat and find out what had happened. “Well Suh, after 25 minutes I can’t see Sain’ Kitts, Suh. So I turn round an’ come back here”. “You used the ADF?” “Oh no, Suh. I know you said you wanted it to be dead-reckoning”.
I closed my eyes for a moment. “L, let me get this straight. You got three-quarters of the way to St Kitts. Nevis and St Kitts are a big target, about 30 miles long. So instead of using the ADF, instead of pressing on at least to your ETA, you turn round and fly that same three-quarters of the way by dead reckoning back to here, back to Antigua, which is a very, very much smaller target”. “Yessuh”. Later, in a thoroughly deserved bout of self-flagellation, I realised that what he’d done was the one thing I hadn’t specifically told him not to.
Even taking into account the L factor, such a scenario had never even entered my head. And so it had never entered my pre-flight briefing. I was going to have to do something about my pre-flight briefings…. Roll on 20 years, and we come to A. Based in Ireland, A was a larger-than-life character. He flew solo displays in a Pitts S2, was notorious for under-cutting other display pilots’ fees, but was forgiven all because when he received his own fees he immediately took every penny to an orphanage he’d taken under his wing.
A and I had both been flying in the Dublin International Air Show – a wonderfully Irish event in that it was held not at an aerodrome but at a major horse- racing track, with the light aircraft participants taking off and landing on the home straight.
The fact that a goodly percentage of the spectators were under the vast roofs of the main grandstands, and therefore much hampered in the small matter of looking upwards, apparedntly did not appear to bother anyone, at least no one we could see.
As we prepared to leave A said: “Brian, Oi’m going to do an inverted fly-by on the way out. D’you want to join me?” “Okay”, I said. “Let’s brief it”. “Oh – roight, roight. You do the briefing, then”. “Okay. We’ll start up on display frequency, and you will lead. We’ll do a stream take-off, and after take-off you will turn 45 degrees left and then dumbbell right to run down the display line. I’ll cut the corner and join you in line-astern”. “Roight, roight”. “When you’re lined up, you call ‘Rolling in now’, and roll slowly left to the inverted. When we’ve passed the crowd-line you call ‘Rolling out now’, and roll slowly left to erect. I will then move out to loose battle and follow you into Dublin. Okay?”
“Oh roight, roight. I call rolling in, rolling out, and roll left each time. Roight”. And so it transpired – or, well, bits of it did, anyway. After two years in the Rothmans Team I was well accustomed to rolling in tight line-astern – but after a quarter-century in aviation I was also deeply and instinctively suspicious of anything new. And following a man I’d never flown with around a low-level roll-invert definitely came under the heading of something new. So I caught A halfway round the right dumbbell, tucked in with my prop six feet below his tailwheel, and tensed to react like a cat if he did anything sudden. Which he did. “Rolling in now”. The first quarter went reasonably well – and then, quite suddenly, A’s roll speeded up and dished out. Not horrendously, but enough to be distinctly un-followable.
I pushed up 20 feet, muttering, then sank back down into the inverted box position when he’d stabilised. As we snarled past the crowd I noted in my peripheral vision the interesting fact that a none-too-distant line of pylons ahead of us was moving up the horizon, suggesting quite definitely that A was slowly losing height. “Rolling out now”. This time I was even more ready for it. As the roll speeded-up and dished out I shot out sideways, rolled level independently, and sat above and behind A as he pulled up to clear the pylon-line.
“SORRY ABOUT THAT” Cut to later, to a beer in the bar. A said: “How did that inverted fly-by go? Was it okay for you behind me?” “Well, A…” I teetered my hand gently… “Well, truth to tell, you did kinda dish-out the roll-in a bit…” “Oh, you’re roight, you’re roight. I t’ought oi might have done”. “And then you did lose height during the fly-by….” “I t’ought I did, too, so I did. Sorry about that”. “And then you dished out again in the roll-out”. I grinned. “Which makes it your round, my friend.” “You’re roight, you’re roight. Sorry about the roll-out. Hope it didn’t embarrass you”. “Well, spat me out like a pip, to be frank”. He turned from the bar. “Eh, spat you out like a pip? What d’you mean?”. “Well….” I shrugged. “If Lead suddenly speeds up the roll and slices-out there’s no way you can follow that in line-astern so you can only break out…”
“Oh!” A’s jaw dropped. “Oh Bejaysus! You weren’t in formation, were you? I t’ought you were following half a mile back!” When later I thought about it I realised that ‘formation’ was the one word I had not used in the planning session. One day I’m going to get pre-flight briefing thoroughly sussed.
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