When I landed my fist flying job as a station pilot, the ink had barely dried on my licence, my logbook was nearly empty and I was all but broke. Things were working out though, nothing like the horror stories I’d heard of tired old planes, poor conditions and difficult bosses.
The plane was a pretty reasonable Cessna 182, a bit of a workhorse but well maintained, and in total I had logged over 500 incident free hours, which in my estimation made me something of an aviation guru.
This vast wealth of experience allowed me to dispose of cautions, like pre-flights and flight planning, and negated the need for weather and notams. But my opinion was about to be altered somewhat.
When it did I was out checking bores, a routine and fairly boring task. This entailed flying at a few hundred feet over all of the station’s bores, checking their level and the water troughs that they fed, as well as keeping a bit of an eye on where the cattle were watering.
This information was then written down on a sheet of paper. Repeat the exercise in excess of 50 times over several hours in the heat of the day while being constantly buffeted by thermals and dust devils and the mind tends to wander anywhere and everywhere.
Usually we left at first light to beat the worst of the heat, but this particular day I got away late and subsequently was being bashed all over the sky. About halfway through the run I failed to see a trough at a bore surrounded by dense and fairly low timber.
Rolling my eyes, I cranked the 182 around in a tight turn, letting the nose drop to lose height. I skimmed the trees, buzzed over the trough and pulled up into a climbing turn.
Keeping the turn going, I rolled in a bit of nose up trim and, with confidence at an all-time high and care at an all-time low, buried my head into my bore sheet.
I looked up again to find the windscreen full of trees closing at a rate they really had no right to. Definitely not in the script, to say the least. I reefed back on the yoke – HARD.
For a second the plane seemed to mush. The stall horn flickered. I sat frozen. It seemed inevitable that we would hit. Trees flashed by in my peripheral vision – above me! No chance, none at all. I waited to hear the first scrape as we hit the branches.
But then, amazingly we were clear and climbing upwards. I wasn’t taking any chances though. I kept that climb going right through 500ft, and then some. It was then I think I remembered to breathe. At least I still could, thankfully. My legs shook and my teeth were sore from being clenched so hard. I felt nauseous.
I scratched my head and stole a look through the back window. An old road, long abandoned and completely overgrown, curved through the timber leaving a slightly lower area in the timber. It ran straight only for a short section and this was where I had narrowly avoided becoming an airborne bulldozer. More than a bit rattled, I continued on what probably set a world record for the highest flown and least accurate bore run ever seen!
Back on the ground that afternoon I decided I’d definitely have to give up the flying as I was simply too hopeless. How many times and by how many different people had I been warned about overconfidence?
Nonetheless, I didn’t give up flying. But I did have a pretty drastic change in attitude – one that continues to this day. I’m now a bit further down the track with more experience and a few more jobs under my belt, but I’m a lot more careful.
Now when I start to get lazy, careless or rushed I know to pull my head in. It seems pretty common for us pilots to get a bit cocky once we get some time up. Unfortunately it seems to get most of us at some point and often seems to take a bit of a scare to put us back in our place – unfortunate because there isn’t always a road out.