Alistair Mayer is a brilliant science fiction writer and all around nice guy whose stories regularly grace the pages of Analog magazine. He shared this story from his flying days in Canada and kindly allowed me to share it with you here as a part of my I learned from that series. You can find out more about him on Alastair Mayer’s T-Space.

There were a bunch of us that regularly hung out at the local flying club, we’d gone through the same ground school together and were still pretty new pilots. We sometimes did some pretty stupid things. One guy, Terry, once came back with a small tree branch in his landing gear.

Anyway, one fine Saturday afternoon I was taking one of the planes out for some practise and invited Terry along. This was near a small town in southern Ontario, lots of farmland. I’d been practising approaches and — not sure whose idea it was, probably both of us — decided to try a soft-field landing on a large grassy field. The landing was no problem — except that as we rolled out I realized that there was a slight slope to the field and where we were headed was getting softer and muddier from the rain we’d had a day earlier. I was worried about getting stuck, so made a (in hindsight, ill-considered) decision to just turn around and take off before I lost more speed.

So, there we are, rolling along on a very soft, grassy field, slightly up-slope, trying to get flying speed. There are trees at the end of the field — not a problem on landing, potentially a serious problem trying to take off with the drag of the soft field and wet grass slowing us down. But there’s a nice wide gap in the trees, and I’ve almost got flying speed. Terry is starting to look nervous. Then I see the wire fence across the end of the field, between the gap in the trees. The kind that probably eats landing gear for breakfast. Crap.

Actually at that point I was pretty confident I had the airspeed to lift and clear the fence and maybe even the trees (but there was room to go between them), but Terry is getting really nervous. Just to bug him, I took one hand off the controls and crossed myself (I’m neither Catholic nor particularly religious), then pulled back and cleared the end of the field.

I’ll say one thing — I never heard any more stories of Terry coming back with leaves in his landing gear after that.

Bio: Alastair Mayer was born in England, raised in Canada and now lives in Colorado. He grew up reading science fiction, and got serious about writing it a couple of years ago. He builds on a good base: he majored in life sciences and computers in college, has sky-dived, earned his pilot’s licence and done hundreds of scuba dives, served in the reserves and been a member of the L5 Society, National Space Society, Planetary Society, and probably a few other things he doesn’t remember right now.

It seems to be fairly well understood these days that planes have slots – it’s common for the flight crew to announce delays because the flight missed its slot or was given a bad slot. However, I’ve noticed a tendency to blame the airport, passengers mumbling about overcrowding and bad organisation. Slots are not about sharing the runway with other planes – I’ve flown from some very busy airfields including Málaga, and I have never been allocated a slot. That’s because I am VFR traffic, I fly visually and choose my route as I go, much like a sail boat. IFR flights, including but not limited to commercial passenger flights, are based on routes which they must apply for in advance and which are then approved. An IFR flight is not working on a basis of see-and-avoid and so the traffic must be managed to ensure that no two flights are at the same place at the same time. A slot time or a slot is a part of this flow management.

So if Cliff files a route to fly IFR from Málaga, he will be allocated a slot, even though he’s flying the same plane as I am out of the same airfield. He will be given specific clearance and expected to stick to his route. I am following instructions and getting permission to enter taxiways and use the runway at specific points, but I don’t have a detailed route. I am not given a slot, although I may cause someone else to miss their slot (by not getting out of the way in time).

I’ve struggled to explain this in the past (as I think you can tell) but this week I stumbled upon a perfectly brilliant explanation on the PPRuNe Forums.

A journalist asked about a rumour that an airline could not get enough ATC slots for the flights because the airline didn’t have enough staff available to man the planes due to staffing cuts. A further poster commented that an airline wouldn’t advertise a schedule unless they had already secured the ATC slots for the flights. This exhance shows fairly typical confusion regarding how slots are allocated for commercial flights. Luckily, Jumpseater came to the rescue and set everyone straight.

It seemed a shame that the guide would only be available on PPRuNe. I contacted Jumpseater, who blogs at Norven Munky’s Weblog, and he kindly allowed me to share his explanation with the rest of the world.

Idiot’s Guide to ATC Slots

by Jumpseater

ATC slots are issued as a function of airspace capacity.

It’s very simple: if you have a room that holds ten idiots, you can’t put eleven idiots in the room, as much as you might like to.

Idiot number eleven has to wait until one or more idiots come out or the room is made bigger, so the idiot (No11) is given a slot time. This is the time the idiot has to present himself to commence his journey to the room.

If there’s only seven idiots in the room, then you can get three further idiots in there without restricting their progress at all, but the fourth idiot and any subsequent idiots will have to wait their turn.

If that room is in fact a corridor joining two rooms, then you can only get so many idiots down that corridor at any one time, even if the room at either end has a limitless supply of idiot capacity. Therefore any idiot wishing to pass through the corridor may get a slot time for the corridor, depending on how many idiots wish to use the corridor at any given time.

If there is another different corridor joining the rooms, you can send the idiots down those corridors, which may mean that the idiots will not be restricted at all.

So using the above Idiot’s Guide, you should be able to see that ATC SLOTS do not get secured by an airlines schedule or their staffing levels, they are a tactical daily/hourly response to airspace capacity.

Any questions?

It’s been a while since the day I missed the runway at Oxford Airport. I’ve done a lot more flying and I’m a lot more competent. But my first near-miss (no damage was done except the loss of a runway light) is not an incident I’m likely to forget in a hurry.

The Saratoga is fast in the circuit and if it’s busy, I spend half my time trying not to sneak up on the 152s pottering along downwind like a Sunday driver in a tweed cap.

On that fateful day, I was thrilled to see that Oxford circuit was nice and quiet: there was a touch of a crosswind which meant that most of the students were grounded for the day.

I spoke to a friendly instructor at PFT who confirmed that it was fine for circuits, just not optimal for new flyers who were still trying to get their confidence up. I’d done crosswind landings in much worse weather so I wasn’t very concerned.

It was a beautiful day, brilliant blue skies and clear views of the Cotswolds below me. I hummed to myself as I zipped around the circuit a few times. I knew there was a crosswind and I was taking it into account but I wasn’t particularly worried.

Except then I missed the runway.

I’m still not quite sure what happened. I called final as I bore down towards the threshold. The approach was a little bit messy but tolerable; I decided to carry on. I pulled up as I reached the transition point and noticed a slight float.

I considered full power and going round as I knew the plane would lose speed fast and she could be a pig to land. Then I felt her begin to sink back to the ground and I thought, “No, this is fine, I’ll land it.”

Nose up, wheels about to touch, everything seemed OK. Then I blinked. Where did the runway go?

I was lined up perfectly but 10 feet to the left of the numbers. There was no time left: I touched down with the left wheel on the grass and the right on the runway, the nose wheel bumping along the edge.

There must have been a slight gust of wind that shifted me sideways as the plane was low and slow. I steered back onto the runway and vacated at the first opportunity.

Once parked, I crawled under the plane to see if the tyres and connecting bits looked normal. It slowly began to dawn on me that, although I looked at the underside of this plane every flight, I didn’t actually feel that confident about how it all hung together and whether it still looked right.

Ben, an instructor who I’d flown with previously, happened to be in Oxford that day and walked out to the plane. “ATC just phoned. You took out a runway light. Are you OK?”

“I’m fine, I just don’t know about the plane.”

“Go to Operations and apologise. I don’t know if they will charge you or if it’s covered on their insurance or what. They want to talk to you. Take responsibility. Afterwards I can help you find someone to check it out.”

Luck was with me: while I was waiting to cower before a random air traffic controller, I saw Mark, the engineer who services the plane.

“Hey, good to see you flying, no time to chat, I’m on my way to Brittany,” he said as he rushed past me.

“I broke the Saratoga,” I said. He froze mid-step. I knew he would.

“Come on, show me.”

He looked it over, shook his head at a nick in the nose wheel, then pronounced the plane airworthy. “But watch that tyre, we need to get that fixed soon. Look at it after every landing, if you see any spreading or fraying, stay on the ground and call me.”

I was amazed he has that sort of faith in me; deep-down I felt that I had proven that I was still a student, not to be trusted with responsibility. I nodded seriously and he smiled at me. “It happens. You must have come down soft, those lights crack easy, they don’t want there to be any resistance. The nick happened after the light cracked and you rolled over it.”

A couple of pilots were standing around me now, I re-iterated what happened, no one seemed to think I deserved my licence ripped out of my hands. “It happens.”

“Plane’s in one piece, you’re in one piece, well done,” a man with a Scottish accent said with a pat on my shoulder.

I almost smiled.

I still had my apologies to do, though. I went to the man in Operations to tell him what happened.

“Where?”

“Just past the numbers. Left side.” It seemed important to me that he knew I was landing on the numbers, even if I was, well, off-set a bit.

“Just a second. ” He called ATC, nodded a few times and hung up.

“It’s OK,” he told me. “They’ve already cleared it up.”

I blinked at him. I wasn’t actually offering to dash out to the runway to clean it up with a bucket and a broom. “Oh. Good.” I wasn’t sure where to go from there.

“There might be a bill. Never had this happen before.” I winced as he tutted at me. “Anyway, we’ll let you know. Taking her up again for more circuits?”

I shook my head. I’d had enough for one day. What I really needed was a stiff drink. It wasn’t that I always landed perfectly but, if it looked questionable, I’d always gone around. This was my first truly bad landing.

“Plane’s in one piece, you’re in one piece.” I recited the words to myself as I walked away. At the end of the day, I knew I was lucky.

Not long after the Paris Trip I decided to take the same girlfriend to Perranporth on the north coast of Cornwall.  I hired a Grumman Tiger from LSF at Elstree.  The flight down was unexciting and we had a good weekend.

It was on the return journey we had problems.  For some reason, Perranporth had no fuel available.  I calculated what we’d burnt on the way down and worked out that we had just enough fuel to get back to Elstree and thence, if necessary, to divert to Luton.  At that stage of my flying career, I’m not sure if I had never learnt or if I had forgotten about "reserves" but in any case, it didn’t occur to me.

We take off and I’m talking to Plymouth who asked me whether I was flying North or South of Dartmoor.  I said I couldn’t see Dartmoor on the map to which I got the reply, "That large danger area right in front of you.  I assume you’re not going to fly right through it!"

I’d managed to overlook it completely and yes, had planned straight through it.  "North," I said, picking one at random.  Now I had to turn left and work out where I was going next.

All the way back, I was keeping a very close eye on the fuel and was surprised to see both tanks showed a quarter as we approached the outskirts of the London control zone, I’d expected less.  I had noticed, however, that there was a definite tendency for the right wing to drop when the plane was in trim which was very frustrating as it meant paying constant attention,

Just as we approached Greenham Common and I was about to call for MATZ penetration, the engine spluttered and started to die.  I switched to the right tank and it picked up again.  Back to the left and it spluttered.  The left tank was clearly empty though still showing a quarter.   The right tank also showed a quarter but I had no idea how much was actually in it.

I had been talking to London Information so called them and calmly asked for urgent permission to land at Greenham Common.  The controller was more panicked than I was: Greenham Common had nuclear missiles at the time and was at the highest level of security.

Meanwhile the plane was flying fine on the right tank but I still wanted to get down as soon as I could.  I downgraded the emergency and was transferred to London Radar.  They pointed out that I was almost overhead Booker (now Wycombe Air Park) and suggested I land there.  They said they’d rung them and the airfield was closed but that it would be OK to land there and they’d give me vectors.  You could hear the relief in the controller’s voice that I would not be flying into Greenham Common.

As taught when landing at an unmanned airfield, I carefully overflew the runway and did one circuit.  "Would you mind just landing it this time," asked my passenger on the second final approach.

Of course, with the airfield being closed, there was no fuel available so our romantic weekend away ended with a friend having to drive out to pick us up.  He grumbled all the way back.

I felt somewhat vindicated though.  I recalculated the fuel burn and found exactly what I’d expected but all in the right tank.  When I complained to the CFI at LSF, he simply shrugged it off with, "Fuel gauges are never that accurate."

An old friend of mine, also a pilot, mailed me recently saying:

Hey, how about you tell me a tale of the day you really learnt to fly, you know – not when you got your licence, but an occasion, when you really learnt to fly, come on, I’ve got some, I’ll tell you if you tell me. :) And don’t tell me you don’t have one, cos every PPL does – promise not to tell!

I immediately remembered my screw-up the first time I flew in IMC. As I started to write it down, Sylvia said, “That’s a great story for Fear of Landing” and insisted I share my failures with the world.

Many years ago when VFR on top was legal and I had about 10 hours post qualification, I hired a C182 from Leicester to fly my new girlfriend to Paris for the weekend. In those days, you had to land at a customs airport on the way out, so I planned Southend.

Weather at Southend was clear, at Leicester was overcast at 1000′. We sat at Leicester for hours waiting for a break in the clouds; Brigitte was not known as the most patient of people. Finally a break appeared and I rushed off, without checking Southend again.

Arriving at Southend, it’s totally overcast between 700′ and 1200′, also for miles around. “What are your intentions?”

“Request half-mile radar to final,” I reply, fully confident after my four hours’ “Instrument Appreciation” that was part of my PPL. No autopilot so I’m about to hand-fly in IMC.

ATC are unfazed and give me headings and descent. I’m trying out that scan I was taught and all seems to be going well. “Fly 260 degrees and descend to 700′.”

A few moments later, I get a call, “Please confirm current heading.”

I look. It’s drifted to 250 degrees but I respond, “260 degrees” and adjust my heading.

ATC assume my DI is 10 degrees out and come back immediately with “Turn right, heading 270 degrees”. Now it’s too late to come clean and tell them that, actually, it was I who was 10 degrees off, not the instrument.

So I’m flying in IMC, trying to keep the scan up and having to add 10 degrees to all further headings. Or is it subtract? My work-load just doubled!

Breaking through at 700′ and seeing the runway ahead was an exhilaration I remember nearly 25 years later. If that didn’t teach me anything else, I learnt not to lie to ATC!