Okay, here’s one more installment in my run of flying adventures that had the potential for disaster. At the time I was still a student back in the early 1990’s and flying with my instructor Blaine. On a nice sunny afternoon we took off from Madison, WI and headed out for a small airport about a half-hour west of there to work on touch-and-goes. (It was the same little airport where I emergency-landed with my buddy Chris to locate the missing/burning cigarette butt in my 9/2/11 blog entry).
It is a single-runway no-tower airport, so again—when you enter it’s airspace you are required to announce your intentions, location, and all of your turns on the assigned frequency for that airport so that all of the pilots in the area will know where each other are and avoid any ‘mishaps’. Well we flew into the airspace, noted the wind was out of the north, and we announced our intention to do touch-and-goes landing into the wind on runway 35.
We announced ourselves on the radio with every step of the way and never got a response so we assumed we were the only plane in the airspace. Sweet, we had the whole airport to ourselves. So on our very first approach I am on final just a few feet over the ground and about to set her down when suddenly we both notice another plane heading right at us! This moron is landing on the same runway but from the opposite direction and he’s bearing down on us fast! Not only did he never bother to announce that he was in the airspace much less announce that he was landing, but he was landing with the wind on our runway. He was just wrong on so many levels it was mind-boggling.
I didn’t know if I should abort the landing and pull up, but we thought he might do the same thing so Blaine had me finish the landing and slam on the brakes while taking a hard left off the runway. Just as we were sliding off into the grass next to the runway this idiot landed, rolled right past us and then took off again. Blaine got on the radio and yelled at him, but no response so who knows if the guy even had his radio on or was turned in to the correct frequency. My heart was racing and I was pissed. I wanted to report him to the FAA but neither of us caught the tail# of his plane. Lesson learned…eyes wide open at all times because even if you are going by the book and doing everything perfectly, you never know when some dumbass might ruin your whole day with a head-on collision.
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