What is your "oh Sh*t" moment?

[barnyard]

Holy Thread Resurrection, Batman!

 

[FlyingBuckI]

#1 I was instructing a few years back when my buddy was unable to fly one day. I volunteered to take his student up, who I later found out has ADHD among other things, and found myself inverted and nose down just after reaching 1000agl during the climb. Turns out, he had wanted to "roll" the plane and didn't bother to tell me...got scared and let go while we were upside down.


#2 Just south of DAB heading north, I heard a jump plane announce his position west of us...never heard a 2 min call, so I was surprised to see a jumper zoom past our right wing less than 50 ft away (close enough to see the look on his face for a split second). Soon after he pulled his chute...I'm guessing he was more shocked than we were. Needless to say, the DAB controller never heard the call either. She didn't sound very happy.

 

[dseagrav]

Except for the e-drama earlier, this is a pretty fun thread! I don't have an airplane-related story to relay, but I do have two good ones from other things - one being due to a temporary lapse of good judgement on my part, and the other being inflicted upon me by others.

First one - It's the early 90s, I'm in high school. A good friend of mine is having problems with his grades, and his grandmother has threatened to DESTROY his computer if he doesn't score Bs or better. She means business, too. The computer was a present from his mother, who was deceased. Anyway, the report cards come out, and he's got two Cs and a D on there. He's crushed. I says, "You know what, we have a nice laser printer here at the school, why don't we just scan the report card into a computer and edit it?" It sounded like a great idea at the time. We stayed after school (which wasn't unusual for us computer dorks), scan the card in and I set to work. About an hour later we had a new version of the report card with Bs in place of the offending grades. I was really proud of it, it looked spot-on. As we're packing up to leave, one of the computer instructors comes in. "Guys, we need to have a talk." "Why what's up?" "We wondered who was using the laser printer after-hours, so we redirected it to the computer manager's office, and you need to explain these prints..." and he holds up about 5 copies of various versions of the report card... "OH, SH..!" So they dragged us to the office, called our parents on speaker-phone, and made us explain to them what we were up to... My buddy took it pretty well until he heard his grandmother (with portable phone) go into his bedroom and take a hammer to his computer. He started crying. My parents didn't say much of anything, but when I got home my stepdad beat me until I couldn't walk. They did something with my computer too, but I never found out what. I never saw it again. It was a very expensive mistake!

The second one is somewhat funnier. My company used to do repair work for random sections of the US government in the area, most notably telephone repairs at a prison a few miles away and printer repairs for Social Security. At one of the SS printer calls, the (very large, very expensive) printer was acting very strangely such that the manufacturer could not identify what was going wrong, so to determine the fault they dispatch out a Diagnostics Controller. Now, we get these calls from a national aggregation service who gets the calls from a subcontractor who gets the calls from a contractor who gets the calls from the government. There's a lot of chances to screw up along the way, and someone usually does. The Diagnostics Controller is a very expensive, very rare piece of equipment - It has a computer inside of it, a bunch of plugs, and it's capable of acting as any board in the printer. Basically, if you have one, you can simulate replacing anything in the printer, and keep cycling through parts until you find the right part to replace. Then you order the part you actually need and return the DC. The bad side of this is that the DC has one of EVERY PART IN THE PRINTER, and a complete listing of the printer software, and complete blueprints of the printer. A person who has one can completely disassemble and reverse-engineer the target printer. These things are a big target for theft and sell for hundreds of thousands on the black market. Officially you can't buy them but HP sells theirs to certain parties for about $2M apiece. Hong Kong loves them, beause it makes the creation of compatible knock-off printers several orders of magnitude easier. Anyway, they ship one to me after I sign off on about a foot thick of paperwork. HP sends it down the food chain, and it arrives at Fedex in Peoria to be shipped to the SS office. I show up at the office, get checked through security, and start trying to figure out where the package is. Fedex says "It was delivered and signed for by Mr X." SS says "Wait, no Mr. X works here!" I call the dispatcher. "Mr X. doesn't work for us either. Try walking around to the neighbors and ask if it was misdelivered." So I go walking around the block. Nobody's heard of a Mr. X. By chance I run into the fedex driver for this area, and he says he wasn't at the SS office today. The plot thickens. I go back to SS and call the dispatcher back. They says "We called up the food chain and we are going to charge the SS office for losing the DC. It was apparently stolen. You need to sneak out of there without being seen." "You mean sneak back out through the security?" "Yes, because we're going to call them in 15 minutes and they aren't going to be very happy when we tell them they owe us $2M. They're going to try to stick you with the blame unless you're gone. I hope you can afford a lawyer." "OH, SH..!" So now I'm freaking out. I definetely can't get back out through security unless I want to abandon my car, and there's no windows. I take another look at the printer. Having exhausted every other possibility, I start following the printer cable back to the host computer, and about 3/4 the way down the line it passes by a big black thing connected to the PA system. It's the PA system's power supply. So I move the power supply away from the cable. This was their problem - The radio noise coming from the PA supply was getting into the printer cable and confusing the communications board. Nobody else knew what the box was so they didn't touch it. With about 30 seconds to go I call the dispatcher. "I FIXED THE PRINTER!" I explain what I did. "Really? Cool, now we just have to find out where the DC went. We called fedex and they're supposed to call us. You go back to your office and wait." So I split before anything else can screw up on me. Turns out later that HP requested that Fedex hold the package at the airport until someone came to get it, and the mysterious Mr. X that signed for it was a fedex employee. The DC was returned to HP without any problems. At my wage, it'd have taken me about 400 years to pay off that DC if they stuck me with the bill!

 

[Mmmmmm Burritos]

Back when I had a few hundred hours I was flying near Newburgh NY in a 152 after coming back from Danbury CT... well they have a ANG base in Newburgh with C-5's and C-130's. It was noon and a clear day and I was flying over the hills when I saw a very bright cluster of lights off my left and just below me. I've heard sometimes the C-5's would fly in the valleys quite low and that's exactly where I was...

All I could think of was that a C-5 was barrelling down on me with his landing lights ablaze and I was about to become the equivalent of a smashed bug on his windshield so I cut the power, banked hard right and dove down toward the ground. The lights disappeared so I recovered and after raising the wings and looking around not seeing anything, I found the source. It was a friggin huge greenhouse which had reflected the sun off it right at me. Took a couple minutes to get my heartrate back down!

Had a con rod snap in a 182 which caused chunks of it to fly up through the crankcase and cowl causing some good sized holes... lost all oil and had to put it down on a grass strip. But that was after many hours of dual given and practicing engine out landings. That was no big deal at all (no fire or smoke luckily!).

Nothing so far involving a turbine

 

[urflyingme?!]

Taking off and staring directly at an oncoming 152 on an uncontrolled field.

 

[Mr. Irrelevant]

I had about three with the last Captain I flew with. Each time he was in operation of the aircraft. Scary......I won't go into detail. Have had an electrical fire but thankfully had an airport only about 5-7 miles away. Had just broken out after being IFR for an hour. ATC was a big help. Turned out to be a non-event other than a lot of burnt wires and melted circuit breakers.....

Mr. I.

 

[91100 100 set]

Flying with a transition student a few years back in a 172. Late afternoon, about 5 or 6ish, it was supposed to be my last "day" flight of the day. This guy was kind of a problem, and he didn't want to go along with the very specific profiles and procedures that my school preached. Specifically for the "emergency approach and landing". After a few flights with this guy, I was getting frustrated (mistake #1). He just couldn't get the basic "ABC" stuff that we liked to teach in this situation. Airspeed to best glide, Best field (you are always looking for one right?), turn towards it to get over it, and Carb Heat, yank it on. Pretty simple before you start the checklist stuff. So I decided, in my frustration, to give him another surprise engine failure shortly after we finished some other airwork and started back home. It was getting a little dusky (mistake #2). He set us up towards a decent field and I decided to let him play it out a little lower than the mandatory go-around at 500 feet (mistake #3) . So he does okay and I tell him, "okay, you've got the engine back, lets go-around". No problem and we begin climbing out. As we are climbing out, I'm checking out his field. And only then do I notice the powerlines we are clearing by maybe 200 feet. Pretty dumb. I was very upset with myself. I pointed them out to my student and his reaction was pretty much shock.

I guess it was getting a little dark for low altitude work, and I let my frustration get the best of me, both in respect to the darkness and my disregard to the 500 foot altitude restriction. We talked about the whole thing at great length in the debrief, and I think we both learned more from that little adventure than 100 hours of slow flight, stalls and ground reference would ever teach. Later, I would relate the whole incident to my other students, hopefully so they would learn from my dumb error of judgement. And I can still see those power lines. Never again.