i learned 2 lessons from the above:
- be prepared in advance to divert at any time during your flight (from takeoff to landing)
- don't forget the K when putting an airport into the GPS, i had never realized how easy that would be to do
Friday, September 26, 2008
(another) dumb mistake last weekend on a short flight
last sunday a couple of us were going to fly down to south boston airport, virginia (w78). visibility was poor immediately out of leesburg (kjyo) so we elected to divert to martinsburg (kmrb). i was the pilot not flying so i had to pull out the AFD and sectional to get freqs,course and so on (because i hadn't planned on a potential divert so early in the flight). i also set the new desination into the GPS (here's where the mistake was). in my hurry, i put in a destination of MRB (note the missing K). we continued on our way getting setup for the approach. after a little while we were looking for the airport which should have been right off the nose and wasn't.... eventually, we realized the airport was off to our left. this was because MRB is the VOR and KMRB is the airport so we were on a direct course to the VOR, duh. there was an airshow at KMRB and the airspace was closing about 30 minutes after we landed to we had to head right back out again and go home or else stay for another 5 hours.
i learned 2 lessons from the above:
i learned 2 lessons from the above:
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1 comment:
Done that (going to a VOR instead of an airport, and vice-versa) more than once, I'm afraid.
Thankfully, VORs and airports that share an identifier are usually close enough that it doesn't matter, or at least close enough that you start getting vectors before anybody notices the mistake. :-)
You'll dig the instrument rating, it's a tough rating but it's incredible what you can do safely in a small airplane when you have one.
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