The one where WMAP fails to identify….. well pretty much anything really.

WMAP and JES have just returned from yet another epic adventure. This one was all kinds of eventful and all kinds of fun.

Believe me there are a gazillion blog posts about this journey on their way. The short story is that JES and I managed to get through all three legs from City to Waterloo and on to Tillsonburg before heading home back to city, without crashing or annoying anyone too much.

In the interests of full disclosure though, here are some of the things that WMAP failed to identify on this flight. And yet despite this , she had the most fun, ever!

Go figure.

1)      The “Ident” button on her transponder. I know where it isn’t. It isn’t the “Standby” button that I pressed the first time ATC ever asked me to “Squawk Ident”. Despite this my gaze failed to locate the button in question. Leading to a very embarrassed “Standby” given to ATC while I tried to locate the damn thing. For the record, it is on the top left hand side of the transponder (not the radio which is where I think I was looking). It is difficult to miss and somehow I managed.  There’s kind of an “inception” like quality about someone who can’t identify the identify feature!

2)      Waterloo airport – Yup another one to add to my list of “airports-that-elude-WMAP’s-not-so-watchful-gaze”. This one is a major embarrassment.  It’s a large international airport. It shouldn’t be able to hide. Except that this one decide to send out a decoy industrial estate to pretend to be an airport. Yet again WMAP had to ‘fess up and say to the Tower once she’d been handed over “errr be advised Waterloo tower, JES does NOT have you in sight”. I figured that I’d rather tie up the frequency for a few seconds than screw up the traffic for several minutes. Tower probably agreed, they kindly gave me pretty good directions until I spotted them.

3)      Tillsonburgh airport – Yeah, if Waterloo was elusive, I didn’t stand a freakin chance with this little strip. As advertised I had real trouble with this one.  I kinda, maybe cheated a little. More in another post but I didn’t upset anyone on the way and landed without clipping any trees either.

So if I spectacularly failed to identify pretty much anything I needed to do this trip, how did it actually go so smoothly, I hear you ask.

Well the things I did manage to identify were probably the most useful things a pilot can use. I correctly identified when I needed help and I successfully identified where I could get that help from.

So this trip wasn’t exactly my own work but I’ve a reasonable suspicion that I didn’t do anything that other pilots don’t do.

Of course I didn’t. I’m practically one of them now. BTW this flight, I believe, marks the end of the official number of solo hours (total and cross country) that I need to get my PPL.

Yes, you can probably hear me celebrating from wherever you are!