Thursday, July 10, 2008

I.F.R. Flying

Well, I bet you thought this post was going to be about IFR, Instrument Flying Rules, as opposed to VFR, Visual Flying Rules. Actually both types of flying "rule", although I do all of my flying VFR. I do that for one reason. I fly to enjoy the view and to get to somewhere fun.

Anyway, this story is about I.F.R. which I did with my Dad early in my flying life. I.F.R. stands for I Follow Roads (or Rivers). On this day, my Dad wanted to know what it would be like if we turned all of our navigational aids off and just followed the roads to our destination. We departed Manchester NH, climbed to 3500' and got on Route 3 heading south. My Dad thought it was fun to be going south in the northbound lane, so we did that all the way into Massachusetts. We turned right onto I-495 and just enjoyed the ride. We were enroute to Bradley field near Hartford CT. I planned to fly I-495 to the Mass Turnpike, turn west (in the eastbound lanes of course). Well, we are flying down the Mass Pike as the locals call it, fat dumb and happy. What a great day to fly.

About this time, I feel like we are aboiut 15 miles out from Bradley, so I call the tower. They tell me to expect a straight in for runway 27. Everything is A-OK. Life is good. We continue flying but the airport does not come into sight as expected. Then the radio calls become a little crackly. I switch radios, but it's still crackly. Finally, we see the airport and call the tower. He says that he does not have us in sight, on the crackly radio. I continue and see the runway is 24, not 27 as I thought, so I call and tell the tower, 3 miles out for 24. He comes back and says, what color is the runway? Thinking that is an odd question, I respond, "black". He says, our runway is white (concrete), and it's runway 27, not 24.

Well it seems that Dad and I mistakenly exited the Mass Pike on I-84 and found our way to an airport somewhere in Connecticutt, but that was certainly not Bradley Field. We decided to land since we were hungry, and decided that we would not go to Bradley that day since we didn't want to get teased by the controllers. Since this field was uncontrolled, we felt like nobody would know our mistake. Well as we pulled up to the little terminal, an older guy comes out and welcomes us to "the new Bradley airport", and then started laughing at us.

We flew home with our navigation aids turned on.

1 comment:

DrivingMeNuts said...

Ha! You're lucky you made it out in one piece. Those thugs in Connecticut can be BRUTAL.