My first emergency?? Com failure

[Morgan3820]

This is one of those situations where it would be good to have a handheld in the flight bag. I have had a Sportys handheld (the older model without the ILS) for years, and needed it only one occasion flying IFR from the Charlotte area to Raleigh. The audio panel had a freak out, but I managed to talk with Greensboro approach on the handheld and within 15 minutes, the Nav/Coms were back up and working fine (wound up being a bad diode or something like that). Anyway is was handy to have. The radio still works fine, I just replace the AA batteries the same time as annual every year and do the occasional radio check.

I had a similar issue. Both coms went down within 5 min. Of each other for unrelated reasons!? Anyway, I had a handheld but it would not turn on, which was frustrating to say the least. Turns out that the battery connections had developed an invisible oxide coating. So now I put a light coating of dielectric grease on the connections. Now it always turns on.

 

[midlifeflyer]

Did you call ATC and declare an emergency?

No, but after I landed at my diversion airport way later than expected, I ran to the FBO to call Flight Service, which had already been looking for me. The nice guy behind the counter said, as I walked in, "I'll call Flight Service to let them know you are here. Call your instructor, NOW!"

 

[midlifeflyer]

According to AIM 6-4-1b, that's up to you:

"Whether two-way communications failure constitutes an emergency depends on the circumstances, and in any event, it is a determination made by the pilot..." [emphasis added]​

If you read the Pilot/Controller Glossary definitions of emergency, distress, and urgency, you will see that you have wide latitude in making that determination.

Yeah, I actually did that once.

I was doing a discovery flight and lost comms. Once I started to hear a local radio station over the VOR (not the ADF) I figured there was some weird short in the system and started wondering whether the next thing would be the smell of burning insulation. So I landed at my towered home base (closest airport) NORDO, without even receiving a light signal. My explanation when the Inspector called me the next day was that, if not an emergency, I was concerned with it becoming an emergency, especially with a potential new student on board.

But a pure comm failure with nothing else amiss when comm isn't required to begin with? Might as well declare an emergency for a hangnail.

 

[AuntPeggy]

Well if there was ever a "first emergency" to have, I was hoping this would be it. Now we wait.

Close enough to find out how you react to an unusual situation. Sounds like you did well. You recognized and accepted the problem. You did your best to communicate the problem. You selected a safe solution and executed it safely.

Next time, when the engine quits, you know how cool you'll be in handling it.

 

[midlifeflyer]

Close enough to find out how you react to an unusual situation. Sounds like you did well. You recognized and accepted the problem. You did your best to communicate the problem. You selected a safe solution and executed it safely.

Next time, when the engine quits, you know how cool you'll be in handling it.

That is an excellent point. Even if the loss of comm was not a "true" emergency (whatever that means), one's reaction to any stressful situation can be a pretty good indicator.

 

[iWantWings]

Although it was not an emergency in your case, you might have been one step closer to having one. Here's what I mean.

Close to 3 years ago during the private pilot checkride, during the flight phase, my DPE was telling me how studies have been done concluding that pilots are unable to handle 3 concurrent failures while in flight. Two they can handle, yet when a third pops up, the pilot usually screws up majorly.

(At the time of my checkride my DPE had been in the past a flight engineer on a Lockheed L-1011 for TWA - when they used to have those - and then she became first officer on another wide body aircraft. Point being she is an experienced pilot [and was an awesome DPE]).

With that threshold in mind, i thought about your loss of generator failure which gave you a bunch of other things to do in addition to the basic VFR flying. And i think you did it very well. Now add to that another failure of sorts - which might have been related to the same generator failure or a different point of failure. Would you have handled that, and the previous failure? And now "the final straw", the third failure. According to the study my DPE was telling me about, this is when the pilot (generally) falls apart. And none of these 3 hypothetical failures by themselves would have been a problem for the pilot to handle on their own, but when they all compete for your attention at the same time, the pilot screws up.

So that's what i mean by your generator failure as not being an emergency by itself, but a failure that got you closure to an emergency (that a pilot might not even manage to declare).

(And thats why i like to usually give myself some extra lattitude when flying).

 

[Palmpilot]

Yeah, I actually did that once.

I was doing a discovery flight and lost comms. Once I started to hear a local radio station over the VOR (not the ADF) I figured there was some weird short in the system and started wondering whether the next thing would be the smell of burning insulation. So I landed at my towered home base (closest airport) NORDO, without even receiving a light signal. My explanation when the Inspector called me the next day was that, if not an emergency, I was concerned with it becoming an emergency, especially with a potential new student on board.

But a pure comm failure with nothing else amiss when comm isn't required to begin with? Might as well declare an emergency for a hangnail.

I guess the OP's example was a VFR flight, so comm was not required until he entered the class D airspace. For an IFR flight, one example where I think that exercising emergency authority might be appropriate, even without evidence of other malfunctions, is if the weather were such that following 91.185 would require continuing nordo flight for a long period of time. Another would be if it required entering a holding pattern in very busy airspace. Those would be situations where being "concerned about safety," in the words of the urgency definition, might be enough in my mind.

 

[midlifeflyer]

I guess the OP's example was a VFR flight, so comm was not required until he entered the class D airspace. For an IFR flight, one example where I think that exercising emergency authority might be appropriate, even without evidence of other malfunctions, is if the weather were such that following 91.185 would require continuing nordo flight for a long period of time. Another would be if it required entering a holding pattern in very busy airspace. Those would be situations where being "concerned about safety," in the words of the urgency definition, might be enough in my mind.

Yep. I agree. That's why I included "when comm isn't required to begin with" in my post.

 

[gitmo234]

Although it was not an emergency in your case, you might have been one step closer to having one. Here's what I mean.

Close to 3 years ago during the private pilot checkride, during the flight phase, my DPE was telling me how studies have been done concluding that pilots are unable to handle 3 concurrent failures while in flight. Two they can handle, yet when a third pops up, the pilot usually screws up majorly.

(At the time of my checkride my DPE had been in the past a flight engineer on a Lockheed L-1011 for TWA - when they used to have those - and then she became first officer on another wide body aircraft. Point being she is an experienced pilot [and was an awesome DPE]).

With that threshold in mind, i thought about your loss of generator failure which gave you a bunch of other things to do in addition to the basic VFR flying. And i think you did it very well. Now add to that another failure of sorts - which might have been related to the same generator failure or a different point of failure. Would you have handled that, and the previous failure? And now "the final straw", the third failure. According to the study my DPE was telling me about, this is when the pilot (generally) falls apart. And none of these 3 hypothetical failures by themselves would have been a problem for the pilot to handle on their own, but when they all compete for your attention at the same time, the pilot screws up.

So that's what i mean by your generator failure as not being an emergency by itself, but a failure that got you closure to an emergency (that a pilot might not even manage to declare).

(And thats why i like to usually give myself some extra lattitude when flying).

Reminds me of a time on a solo flight as a student pilot. I landed at summit(KEVY). At that critical time when I was going too fast to stop but to slow to go around quickly, a deer ran out and stopped about 10 feet in front of me. I quickly realized there wasn't anything I could do, then I heard my CFI in my head repeating his famous line "your first priority is to fly the plane". So I realized the best I could do was safely hit the deer. About 2 second before impact it jumped out of the way and my wing went over its head.