At 04:45 PM 12/13/02 -0500, Al Taylor wrote:
...we lost our 400 Hz (generators) and all of our navigation and communications were gone. We were headed to Jax but decided we should try to get into Mia since we knew we could find it. ;-) Mia was socked in with a ceiling of about 1,000 feet. At that altitude, at night, in the rain, you couldn't find crap. There is a harrowing story here about how we finally found sight with the ground, but that is too long. There was nothing but a sea of lights. We weren't high enough to pick out the rotating beacon from the A/P. We flew for what seemed like a week, all over Miami, at 1,000 ft or less, looking for an airport. A couple of times we flew low enough to try and read the street signs to find out where we were.OK, old joke.
Pilot of a corporate jet is flying some execs into Seattle at night in much the same condition as Al's story. Of course, visibility is always lousy in Seattle, and the pilot was having a hellish time trying to find SeaTac airport. Dropping almost to building-top level, he noticed a light on and somebody working with his window open in the top floor of a nearby building. So he rolled down a window and yelled, "Where am I?" The answer came back, "You're in an airplane!"
Immediately after that exchange, the pilot scooted back up into the clouds and, with compass and watch flew a straight course for the airport. Dropping out of the clouds, he was on a perfect approach to SeaTac. After the landing, one of the passengers who heard the exchange asked, "How did you get enough to navigate from that?"
The pilot answered, "Well the answer was completely accurate and totally useless. My map shows very clearly the location of the Microsoft tech support building, so I just navigated from there."
Cheers!
DaveT
