I Don't Know How To Ident!!!!

[Lrjtcaptain]

Another good one. A fresh private pilot who passed his checkride within the last month takes his family flying today. While calling inbound to land I ask him to ident because he's in a cluster of VFR aircraft and I need to know if he is going to beat my Gulfstream on left base 10 miles out or not.

ME: "Cessna XXX ident, traffic a gulfstream 10 Northeast on leftbase for Rwy14 descending through 4,500.

PILOT: "I don't know how to ident."

ME: "You mean to tell me your flying a plane and you don't know how to ident?"


This particular pilot did all his training at our airport, got his private and doesn't know how to ident.

Im just in awe that something that basic yet important goes unnoticed during flight training and a checkride. We are just outside a major Bravo and a private pilot doesn't know what IDENT means. My opinion of today's private pilots has hit rock bottom. Position and hold means nothing to them, they don't understand it. Position reporting. Phraseology, proper radio ethics such as monitoring a freq for a few seconds to see if anyone is speaking. Do the DE's these days even use a PTS or do they just collect their 350bucks and sign the ticket. Truley amazing.

 

[mynameisjim]

It is a license to learn. I didn't know everything when I got my private pilot certificate.


Though I did know how to Ident, and I could easily navigate class Bravo, I had trouble entering traffic patterns at uncontrolled fields. Good enough to pass a checkride.

It's all what you're comfortable with.

 

[gkrangers]

Did you tell him to press the button marked IDENT on the transponder ?

 

[ToiletDuck]

True you never know it all when you get the ticket but that should have been an automatic fail. My question isn't so much the student because they only know what they've been taught. My question is the CFI that flew with him that many times and he never pushed that button infront of him. You don't do that here in waco and they scramble something with guns to see who you are.

 

[Lrjtcaptain]

No, I usually don't have problems with people identing....its just amazing a private pilot flying in California doesn't know how to ident. I just don't understand where the standards have gone.

 

[ToiletDuck]

Is there anything someone in your position can actually do about it? Like call the FSDO on him or make a report? I wouldn't want someone up there with that little knowledge.

 

[Lrjtcaptain]

Well, its not a pilot deviation, its just amazing how some pilots really don't know a damn thing.

 

[BushwickBill]

Dude just wait until sport pilot!

 

[ToiletDuck]

I don't know if a sport pilot will really be all that big. I'd think a CFI would be a little hesitant to put his name on it.

 

[HMR]

How about the two guys flying from SoCal to Vegas at 7500'. Joshua App. asked them to "squawk altitude".



Guess what # they put in the box?

 

[NookyBooky]

No, I usually don't have problems with people identing....its just amazing a private pilot flying in California doesn't know how to ident. I just don't understand where the standards have gone.

No shortage of idiots here, but to the credit of Californians many, if not most, of them are foreigners.


What airport was it? F70?

 

[MDAutry]

I want everyone to have the opportunity to solo an airplane but most private pilots do not realize their inadequacies for a while after passing thier checkrides. Note: I have never flown to an EAA breakfast (fly in) that I did not wish I had driven to instead. When you almost get clipped by a twin exiting the pattern at midfield it makes you think...

 

[PastFastMover]

ATCing and flying are two completely different birds. One is here for the other and not vice versa. If a newbee pilot does not know it all.... so what. They paid for their flying all on thier own, and it may take awhile to learn it all. The ATC system is here to assist the pilots (new or old) and not vice versa. I remember after the ATC strike the ads in the paper. High school graduate, no experience needed, 50K after just a couple of years. What really cracks me up is the huge amounts of fuel that we expend while the governement trained ATC folks get thier OJT at our expense running thier radar as if they were in a simulator back at training with absolutely no sense of the big picture or what is really happening. When you are new, there are still huge amounts of things to learn no matter what endeavor you are in.

 

[ATRedneck]

The thing that really gets me is the number of of pilots, when told to ident, will read back, "Roger, identing."

I guess they don't know that the ident itself is acknowledgment of the instruction. Like the frequencies aren't congested enough.


.... another XPDR story:

A couple months back a pop-up VFR guy called ZHU on the frequency we were on. Center told him to squawk "x-x-x-5" which the guy read back as "x-x-x-niner."

After about a minute, ZHU called him and said, "Hey Cessna ###, have you found the nine on your transponder yet?"

 

[Mike man]

Apparently none of you have ever made a mistake...

Is there anything someone in your position can actually do about it? Like call the FSDO on him or make a report? I wouldn't want someone up there with that little knowledge.

--From the guy with ~300 hours

300 hours and this guy wants to report him to the FSDO....just wait. With 300 hours you are just starting to get dangerous. I remember a stat that said pilots with 500-1000 hours are the most unsafe. Because they comfortable flying but try stupid dangerous stuff. After 1000 hours they become more safe because they have scared themselves to death once or twice in the 500-1000 hour range.

Be safe and take your own advise (I guess) and don't make any mistakes because you all know it all and were never a new private pilot.

Cut the guy some slack...it is a certificate to learn.

 

[Brett Hull]

This is like arguing with my wife.

This:

ME: "You mean to tell me your flying a plane and you don't know how to ident?"

could have easily been replaced with: "Push the Ident button on your transponder".

He would have learned something (yes, that he should have already known). I guess it doesn't make for as good of a story of laying into some big-headed private pilot. Now we know who's boss!

 

[dseagrav]

After about a minute, ZHU called him and said, "Hey Cessna ###, have you found the nine on your transponder yet?"

Do you know why the transponder digits stop at 7? ^_^

 

[erj-145mech]

Do you know why the transponder digits stop at 7? ^_^

Duh, cause there's no number eight?

 

[DaveJ]

Well, because they're octal (base 8) numbers. There are 12 bits in the mode A pulse for the 4 octal digits which take 3 bits each.

 

[ATRedneck]

Well, because they're octal (base 8) numbers. There are 12 bits in the mode A pulse for the 4 octal digits which take 3 bits each.

How 'bout that... I went and learned something today.

The only problem is that every time I learn something new, it pushes out some of the old stuff... like the time I took that home winemaking class and forgot how to drive.