Where Else!

Three weeks ago I witnessed and listenned to the radio chatter during prior to a crash-landing. I took a couple of pictures as usual and the deficiency of my tools came out plainly. I was airborne once again. Solo. Why do these incidents always happen at these times? For a moment, I wondered whether I had made a mistake taking a break from the making of an Actuary out of myself to fly.

Anyway, I flying happily around an airfield working an perfecting my landings. On one of these circuits a distress call came on the radio. A Yak-52 (A Soviet-era aerobatics-trainer) had a mechanical problem. {Now this is one machine I wish I could get into, but that looks like it’s beyond the current realm of possibilities}. They could only fly straight & level and couldn’t pull-up or make the plane dive. The landing would be tricky. I did not want to believe what I heard but crying wolf is all but unheard of in aviation. One remarkable thing I noticed with the distress call was the calmness with which the pilot made it. He made it sound so routine, one could mistake it for a joke. But, this was serious stuff. You don’t get 16,000 Hours’ experience for nothing!

With the limited control he had the pilot managed to make a controlled crash and the two pilots made it out alive and safe despite the plane bouncing wildly on the runway three times and then crashing into a ball of fire by the runway.
Now that is a situation I would not like to find myself.