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Working as a pilot is stressful enough as it is. But over a long enough time frame, you’re bound to run into some serious emergency situations. The hope is that you’ve got nerves of steel and enough experience to get the entire plane to safety. And when everything is said and done, your passengers might even be blissfully unaware there was a horrendous problem in the first place.

We’re featuring the most captivating, riveting stories about the scariest mid-air moments, as shared by pilots in a series of AskReddit threads. Keep scrolling to find out what challenges these brave and capable men and women had to overcome in their line of duty.

#1

Got struck by lightning the other day, that wasn’t fun. Scared the [hell] out of the both of us. Radar wasn’t painting anything either :/.

#2

Yes am a pilot and CFI. Scariest moment was when on intro flight and coming back into land. Student is doing super well everything cool. We were cleared to land, number one, from 4 miles out. On short finals (less than a mile out) another plane appears over to top of us and lands on our runway. Trying to keep cool, I take the controls, ask tower what’s going on, start a go around, simultaneously side stepping to get out of their wake. Turn to my student and say, so shall we try that again?

#3

The first time I flew a plane, I nearly crashed into a helicopter I went heli skiing on the day before. For some reason they only operate on their own frequency so we didn’t know they were there, and they didn’t know we were there. The flight instructor took over and it ended up being fine. Quite a shock though.

As Aerocadet notes, airline pilots hold the safety of their passengers in their hands. So, they have to be experts in handling flight emergencies.

Great pilots will be able to stay calm and composed under pressure, act quickly in stressful situations, and adhere to emergency procedures, guidelines, and protocols.

Having a backup plan (or, well, multiple) is vital if your Plan A doesn’t work out. And, of course, as a pilot, having the right technical skills and knowledge base will allow you to make the right decisions.

What’s more, if you spend more time practicing with simulators, you can get partly used to actual emergencies.

#4

Flocks of birds like to appear out of the grass when rolling down a runway for takeoff. It happens a lot more than passengers would like to know but usually it’s a non event. Every once in a while though that flock will appear right in front of us near rotation speed and we just hope they’re gone by the time we moving through that space.

#5

Anyway, I am a pilot with ~300 hours. I own a 1967 Cessna 172 (single engine, 4 seats), and I absolutely love my airplane. First flight after my check ride, I was flying my mom to visit my dad in another state. Up to this point, everything is going great. Smooth flight, no winds, not a cloud in the sky. My mom is sleeping in the back seat. We are descending into our destination when the plane starts shaking like crazy. Scanning my instruments, I notice an immediate RPM drop. The airplane is shaking so much I fear the engine will come loose from its mount. Luckily, there is an airport less than five miles away. I land, shut the engine down, and sit quietly, and calm my nerves. It is at this point I hear my mom remark, “Oh, we’re here…”. Turns out she had slept through the whole thing, and woke up as soon as I shut the engine down. I explained what had happened, and she was rather grateful she had slept through it!!

For the curious, my engine (a Continental O300) was nearing TBO and had a piston that had begun to disintegrate. $20,000 and an engine overhaul later, we were back in the air…

Edit: yes, that $20,000 repair was expensive, but it was not like I just had $20K lying around…I’m a broke college student…it took a year to pay it off…lol

2nd edit: Perhaps I should mention that we did indeed have a TBO fund, so over half the engine overhaul was paid for. It took me a year to pay off the rest of it.

#6

My father was a pilot, he tells a story of “I only earned my paycheck once my the last 10 years of flying.”

You see, normally, the computers do most of the work of flying a plane. The pilots, largely and increasingly, are along for the ride.

The pilots are there for when things go wrong. They’re paid and trained to be on-hand emergency operator technicians.

They were flying a 767 ATL to Amsterdam when someone smelled electrical smoke. The autopilot computer actually caught fire. Copilot goes to into the belly with a fire extinguisher, Dad takes manual control over Halifax or Iceland (can’t remember which) and flies the plane to an emergency landing in Laguardia. Best part is my Aunt lived on Long Island and was hosting a fancy cocktail party that night. Instead of a hotel Dad decided to crash with Aunt and showed up in uniform with a hero story and drank the bar dry (his itinerary was cancelled and he was on his way home). My Aunt’s friends still talk about it.

Dad flew A4s in Vietnam and was known for his appetite for stunts and taking the harder itinerary. He found commercial aviation incredibly boring by comparison to flying tail through a valley at 500 feet taking fire from the hillsides. (The tail plane is an easier target because the gunners have already aimed when firing at the lead plane).

Tldr: Commercial pilots generally don’t have [these] moments, they generally have years of boredom punctuated with occasional “this isn’t and emergency, I’m trained for this moments. At least that’s how it is according to my Dad.

Meanwhile, Pilots Academy points out that pilots can get better at managing stress by regularly exposing themselves to it.

“Every flight you complete, especially flights that challenged you, builds resilience. This is why consistent training matters more than cramming. Flying twice a week for three months develops better stress management than flying once a week for six months, even though the total hours are similar. Frequency creates familiarity, and familiarity reduces stress.”

#7

My biggest moment was when my windshield shattered at 26,000ft. The passengers did know about this one because you could see right into the cockpit from the cabin.

There is a saying in aviation about learning to fly, “You start out with a full bag of luck and an empty bag of experience. The trick is to fill up the bag of experience before you run out of luck”.

#8

I was giving my sister and a friend a tour of the Chicago skyline over Lake Michigan. We are all having a good time. Suddenly, the engine goes quiet… a nightmare especially because I only have one of them. The silence was noticeable and my sister starts looks at me and starts to panic. The engine comes back within about 3 seconds alive and well, and I head for the nearest airport.

In a small propeller plane, it is hard to hide the silence of the engine, but since it came back, I acted like nothing happened. I don’t think they realize how critical of a situation it almost was.

#9

My dad had a wasp in the cockpit with him once, he said his first thought when he noticed it right after taking off was “oh, so this is how I [pass]”.

What’s more, pilots shouldn’t neglect the more physical requirements of their jobs. They must maintain their health and fitness if they want to get good results. That means regularly exercising, eating a healthy diet, getting enough sleep, etc.

“Regular exercise improves your ability to handle pressure, enhances cognitive function, and builds the kind of resilience that carries over into the cockpit. You don’t need to be an athlete, but taking care of your body makes managing flight deck stress considerably easier,” Pilots Academy advises.

#10

It was a flight from Kansas to Oregon, and as we were midflight, a hawk dive-bombed the wing and DENTED it. The pilot announced the subtle thud as minor turbulence, but the crew knew what had happened. No one knew how the hell the hawk was flying so high. It was a smaller plane, so we only had one and a half dozen people(not counting us crew members). The dent didn’t actually meds with flight too much, but it’s a hell of a story to tell.

#11

I’m an airline captain based out of LAX…

On a commercial aircraft, you generally have 3 sources of bleed air that take air from the engines (and a little device in the back of the airplane called the APU) and use it to pressurize the cabin. You can’t breathe the air at 35,000 feet, so the cabin is pressurized by these bleed air sources to a breathable altitude of at or below 8,000 feet. There are 3 sources because 1) redundancy increases safety and 2) you can still dispatch the airplane is one is inop because there are backups.

One of the bleed sources (on the number 2 engine) was already broken, so maintenance deferred it, indicating we were still safe to fly on the remaining two sources. Which is totally fine – you just take off with the APU running as a backup bleed source. Well on the takeoff roll, immediately after becoming airborne, our APU fails. Which leaves us with just one bleed source to pressurize the cabin; the bleed air from the number 1 engine. If that fails, we have nothing to keep the air inside the cabin pressurized to a lower altitude than the airplane is flying at; you won’t be able to breathe at high altitudes.

It’s a short flight, and we aren’t going up too high, so I’m optimistic that we can get up to our low cruising altitude, message dispatch and maintenance, and receive their agreement that the flight is safe to continue on one bleed source. I text our company a message describing the situation via ACARS, a satellite-based texting capability our aircraft has to communicate with people on the ground.

But they never had the chance to get back to us.

Passing through 25,000 feet, I feel the air getting sucked out of my lungs. I’m trying to inhale, but it isn’t working, and my lungs are emptying quickly. Unable to breathe normally, immediately my eyes shoot to the cabin altitude gauge, which is showing us at 8,000 feet cabin altitude and rising quickly. In fact, it is rising at the exact same rate of climb as our airplane…indicating the airplane has lost all pressurization capabilities and is depressurizing rapidly. At that instant, we get a warning chime and message on our EICAS (Engine Information and Crew Alerting System, essentially a computer screen that tells us when [things] go wrong) that says BLEED 1 FAIL.

With our Bleed 1 source now failed, our APU having failed on the takeoff roll, and Bleed 2 already deferred, we are completely out of ways to pressurize the aircraft. If we don’t descend to a safe altitude immediately, the cabin altitude will rise high enough that the air is no longer breathable. This is a serious problem.

Immediately I throw off my sunglasses and headset, and don my full-face oxygen mask and smoke goggles. It provides 100% pure oxygen under a forced flow, rated up to an altitude of 41,000 feet. My first officer does the same. This is the first thing you do because if the pilots die, there is nobody to fly the jet and everyone else dies. Then we immediately declare an emergency and initiate an emergency descent, nosing over to our maximum speed while deploying the speed-brakes to generate maximum drag. We receive clearance down to 10,000 feet and begin executing a 180 degree turn to go back to LAX.

ATC does a fantastic job vectoring aircraft out of our way…SoCal airspace is some of the busiest in the world, but we got priority handling all the way back to LAX. The cabin altitude nearly reached hazardous levels, but didn’t go high enough for the oxygen masks in the cabin to automatically deploy. It was definitely high enough that the passengers would have noticed, but wouldn’t have had a concrete idea of what was going on aside from “that’s odd.” The cabin also got quite hot because there was no more pressurized, conditioned air flowing to cool it off.

We landed at LAX on the longest runway with the fire trucks rolled to assist us, just in case. Fortunately, none of the passengers or crew reported any injuries from the sudden increase in cabin altitude. We parked at the gate and deplaned, and I made an announcement to the passengers about what had just happened, using small words and downplaying everything so as not to scare the [hell] out of everyone.

12 Chinese passengers on our flight were on a west coast tour, and they were very upset that their trip was inconvenienced by this emergency. No problem, I totally understand the frustration. So I spoke to their translator, who spoke in turn to her group, and I gave her the full and very detailed explanation of what happened. As I explained what happened, the expressions on these 12 passengers’ faces went from angry, to surprised, to fearful, and finally thankful. Before I walked away, all 12 of them bowed to me in respect. That was something I have never experienced before or since then in my entire aviation career.

We ended up swapping airplanes to one that wasn’t sick, and completed the flight as planned about 3 hours behind schedule. I slept well that night, and the passengers probably went on to complain about their flight being delayed several hours due to a “maintenance issue” :).

#12

Private pilot here. Flying a small 4 seater about a year after getting my license at 17 to take may parents to lunch at Harris Ranch in BFE central California. There’s a small runway next to a monsterous cattle farm that has a delicious restaurant that I swear they must walk the cow straight into the kitchen and out on a platter.

When we left Sacramento the seating configuration was my small framed mother and myself up front, and my 275 lb dad in the back. This led to a center of gravity to the rear situation that required me to set the trim forward to stay level our the nose would keep drifting up.

Flight to HR was uneventful and we had a wonderful lunch but for the return trip we decided that my dad would sit up front and my mom would move to the back. Stupid 18 year old me didn’t follow every step of the preflight checklist and I forgot to retrain the controls to neutral before taking off.

Started down the runway for takeoff and as soon as I hit speed I realized my mistake that with the new weight distribution the CG shifted forward, as well as the controls trimmed forward, I pulled back on the yoke to rotate and it didn’t budge. Never in my life has 1000ft of remaining runway suddenly appeared to reduce to nothing. To make things worse the end of the runway was an elevated road leading to an overpass with cars on it.

I literately wrapped both arms around the yoke and pulled back with all my strength to get the nose wheel to slightly lift off the runway and the plane slowly inches off the ground. The embankment to the road got closer and closer and I had visions of emergency crews having to scrape us off the surface, leftovers and all.

As we approached it became clear that we were going to just clear the road but I saw a pickup approaching the road and I wasn’t sure we weren’t going to collide. He saw us coming and slowed to a stop and I swear I was able to look straight in his eyes as we cleared the road.

When we were safely clear of trees and obstructions I was able to let go with one arm and reach down to turn the wheel that trims the controls.

As I was thanking my lucky stars to have survived the day my dad was muttering at me something like, “very funny. I didn’t eat that much.”

Both he and my mom assumed I was making a joke because my dad ate a huge lunch and thought I was acting like the plane couldn’t take off.

I never told them the truth about how close a call that it actually was, nor did I ever forget to reset the trim before takeoff.

We’d like to hear your thoughts, Pandas. What is the most terrifying flight that you’ve ever been on?

If you’ve worked as a pilot, cabin crew member, or another airline employee, we’d also like to hear about your experiences at work. What have been the biggest emergencies that challenged you in your line of work?

Let us know in the comments down below.

#13

CFI (Certified Flight instructor) here. While teaching my student how to do a cross country, we got blindsided by two pop-up thunderstorms. There was a 20 mile wide corridor to fly down back to base, according to flight service, so we cut our trip short and headed home. Played it off cool, said “This is a great time to practice diversion and good decision making” but I was terrified.

#14

I’m not a pilot, but I was flying with a friend in a small BT-12. During the flight the engine sputtered and gave out. I didn’t think anything of it because I figured he was just testing something. Later, he told me that he genuinely could not figure out what happened and was freaking out for about 20 seconds until the engine fired back up.

#15

I am a commercial airline captain on a newish embraer 175. Probably one of the scarier things I have had happen was when one of our cabin pressure control channels failed and we started to rapidly lose pressurization.

Pressurization is important because the air is so thin in the flight levels, specifically above 30,000′. The higher up you get the less “time of useful consciousness” you have, down to about 30 seconds. So it is a pretty scary thought and it is a problem requiring immediate action, usually a steep emergency descent, during which you will not hear from the pilots because we are suuuuuuper busy.

Our pressure controller has two channels and automatically switches to the second if one fails. We were flying along about to start our descent and briefing our arrival and our ears started popping, like mad. I looked over and the pressurization was climbing very fast. We started a steep, but not quite emergency descent, while I flipped the pressurization switch to manual and then back to auto. This manually switched the channel to the working one and we could continue without problem.

Pretty sure all the passengers noticed were their ears popping. It gave us about 80 seconds of a scare though.

The funniest part was that when we landed our maintenance control wanted us to “defer” the pressurization channel over the phone, meaning we will fix it later (generally a very safe way to get flights out on time with something minor or redundant broken). I told him I was going to have to insist that someone come over and actually look at the plane to say it was safe to fly.

Edit: I would like to add that the mechanics were NOT being reckless. These channels rarely fail, and having 2 is already a redundancy. They are absolutely able to defer them with very little concern for safety. I was being overly cautious in my request for an inspection and they accommodated me without question. A few mechanics out there must have very charged relationships with pilots, this is rarely the case in my workplace.

#16

My father was a captain for Eastern Airlines and told a story about almost being at takeoff speed when another commercial jet taxied across his runway. He was going too fast to abort so he had to pull up early and cleared the other plane by feet (don’t remember the exact amount). His passengers had no idea but the other plane’s passengers saw everything. I don’t know what ended up happening to the other pilot, but my dad got an apology call from him that evening.

#17

I used to fly vintage biplanes and take people up on “joyrides” effectively. We would do aerobatics, let them fly it for a bit, and come back for tea and medals. We also did air displays and we did wingwalking (although my DA didn’t allow me to do those)

While its not your typical airline passenger transport, it is still commercial flying!

As these aircraft were built in the 30’s/40’s, there was several times where [things were going wrong], and as the cockpits are separate, they were blissfully unaware. Always was a chuckle at the end having to explain that what just happened wasn’t normal!

Some good examples:-

* Engine exploded during flight (big end failure, blew a hole in crankcase), landed in a field. Passenger was french and just thought landing in a field was what we did at the end… He couldn’t understand the mayday on the radio.

#18

I fly an older Dash 8, we have lots of little problems, sometimes the nav system blanks out, minor electrical issues. I fly in an area with non-precision ILS, sometimes we only fly VFR approaches, I was landing on a small dirt striip on Baffin Island when a cross wind pushed the aircraft off the approach and we had just enough power to go around, if the plane was a little heavier I may not be here to tell the story.

#19

Dad retired with 36,000 hours, closest disaster was a cockpit fire. If this doesn’t get buried which I think it will, I’ll get the details from him.

Edit: So I got the short story from him(not a fullblown fire as I had thought). He was supposed to fly from Orlando to Boston but as he was taking off he noticed that there was a lot of super hot air pouring into the cockpit. What had happened is instead of wiring the engine valve shut like the mechanics were supposed to, they wired the valve wide open. As I understand it, the engine valve usually automatically regulates the amount of hot air that the engine bleeds into the cockpit. However, the wiring they did made it so the maximum amount of hot air was coming in contuniously from the engine. He made an emergency landing in Jacksonville and by the time they landed they couldn’t touch the controls, they were using clothing as oven mits. He said he and his co-pilot were also completely drenched in sweat.

#20

If your captain is telling you to remain calm, because there is going to be some turbulence, then there is going to be some turbulence. But if he ends that sentence with “cabin crew, be seated”, then [it’s] is about to go DOWN.

#21

I was giving a ride to a friend in a rental Cessna 172F. It was late in the day and the sun was going down. The airport I was heading to was only about 15 nautical miles away but it was on the other side of a large body of water.

We taxi up to the run up pad and I test the engine like I do before every flight. Everything seems to look fine and normal. I taxi onto the runway, make my final checks, and proceed to take off. At that point I detect a small unusual vibration. I brushed it off like it was nothing. Small old airplanes vibrate all the time so it’s no surprise.

As I’m climbing out, I’m looking at the tachometer and I glance down at the oil pressure and it’s measuring lower than normal. I decide to turn base into an upwind (pilot talk for turn around while still in airport airspace) for the departure airport rather than riding it out over the lake.

We’re at about 1700 MSL (800 ft AGL) when the oil pressure falls below allowable limits. At this point I’m freaking out in my head because [things] are getting real fast. My passenger doesn’t know anything is up because I’m not saying anything. The last thing I need is some guy freaking the hell out while I’m trying to land the plane without a usable engine.

I calmly tell him, “We need to turn around.”

My assumption is that I’m [leaking] oil and I’m at a risk of fire so I get on the Unicom (Airport radio frequency) and declare an emergency landing. The others in the pattern exit and I end up doing right traffic to final. I pull the throttle to prevent any fire as I turn base to final while keeping enough airspeed to keep from stalling and crashing.

I end up doing the approach too fast and landed the airplane on the last 500 ft of the runway nearly running off the end. I pull to the taxiway and shut the engine down. Turns out the engine was grinding and ‘making metal’ on the inside.

Probably first time I was thankful for how excellent my instructors were when I was training.

Tl;dr: lost my engine during takeoff, saved the airframe, and my passenger had no clue what was going on.

#22

Approaching Vr and someone starts to cross the runway you are on.

Turned short final on runway 36R and hear tower mistakenly give clearance for someone to roll on 26 we went around and right over the top of who had been clearance to roll.

Edit: These were two separate incidents. First was a non controlled airport the second was a controlled incident.

#23

Not a pilot, but I do work for an airline.

I was doing a project at our base in LGA, and had to fly home to my native Indianapolis, and my only option was to Deadhead with a few crew members from my airline back home.

I was sitting by myself in first class on an empty plane (save for 1 pilot, 3 flight attendants, plus the two guys flying the plane)

Upon landing, we hit the runway really hard and bounced. I didn’t think anything of it, as I’ve flown on airplanes hundreds of times.

However, the Captain flying the plane looked white as a ghost, and told me he almost flipped us.

#24

My dad once had one engine quit on his embraer. Didn’t even tell the passengers, if I remember correctly.

He also told me a story of a Super 80 (I think) that literally lost an engine. The pilots were like “engine 2 stopped working” but after a passenger spoke to a flight attendant, the flight attendant let the pilot know that they had in fact, literally lost it, it fell off. Can’t remember the deets. But I’d love to be the passenger in the back window seat and suddenly getting to actually have a view instead of only seeing an engine.

#25

Flew tourists and odd jobs in Phoenix for a couple years in an R44. Going in for a landing at a remote site in the middle of the desert. Just as I was about to drop into a hover, drain my speed, I noticed just above my feet a trike motor paraglider just cruising under me only a couple feet above the ground and maybe 5 feet under me.

Very cool like, did a 180 and told pax I was worried about the landing spot, so I went pretty far in a different direction while watching [him] in my skid mirror. I quick flipped to a couple open channels to try to raise him and didnt get a reply so Im assuming he was without a radio.

Still to this day Im wondering how in the hell did he get in behind and under me so fast when I was probly cruising at 80mph? How in the hell did he keep that thing solid under my rotorwash? And why in the [hell] would it be a good idea to fly under a helicopter when it is about to land. A couple people Ive talked to have said he probably didnt even notice me. Im just gonna go to the grave believing some people wanna live on a razors edge…

#26

Relatively low-time private pilot (me), small plane with another pilot passenger. We filed IFR, took off and promptly flew into a small thunderstorm over North Georgia mountains. Water was streaming under the windshield, and we were bounced around quite vigorously with the thunder and lightning making it impossible for us to hear or talk to ATC. It lasted maybe 2-3 minutes and turned out fine, but that day I learned how stupid I can be.

#27

I’m late to the party here, but someone might enjoy this. I’m an airline captain and on this particular day I was flying a CRJ-900 into the Washington National Airport. We were on an arrival but due to VIP movement (the president) they took us off of our route with the intention of having us enter a holding pattern over east Maryland.

As we were turning around on the holding pattern, think of it as a big oval with 10 mile sides, we noticed an aircraft coming down the same route we were just in, at our altitude, roughly 10,000ft. They were 20 miles away and we only saw a blip on our screen. Keep in mind that at 10,000ft we’re doing close to 300mph, so a closing speed of 600mph. We got sight of them as we got closer and we had to turn to fly on the other side of the oval.

By now we’re about 5 miles away, turning towards each other closing at 600mph, so I instinctively put my hand on the yoke and autopilot disconnect button. At about 3 or 4 miles, ATC issues a traffic alert and gives me an immediate left turn and to descend. So I click it off and start handflying. At that same moment the TCAS (Traffic Collision Avoidance System) starts yelling
“Traffic! Traffic! Climb! Climb!”
So I do what I’m trained to do and fly the TCAS maneuver.

We probably came within two miles, maybe less, from colliding. Not that we would’ve since I saw the Southwest 737 and would’ve evaded had we gotten closer, and the TCAS did its thing right.

So, since the TCAS told me to climb I got to 11,000ft within a few seconds and leveled off. Then what do you know? A second airplane! TCAS starts freaking out again and telling me to descend, so I did.

We explained the situation to ATC and the controller sounded extremely embarrassed and apologetic. So if the dude controlling Potomac sector where we fly the DEALE arrival that got us into two RAs within seconds of each other is reading this, it’s ok. We all have bad days.

Ooohh and when we were getting off some of the passengers asked what the commotion was about. The FA told them that its because we get paid by the minute (true) and we wanted to milk the clock since we were early, in a playful manner of course.

#28

I was on a flight once that was trying to land in very high winds. We were just about to touch down. Like probably less than 50 feet from the ground when the plane suddenly dipped hard to the left and the pilot pulled up. We circled for a minute and he made another pass. I gave him a fist bump and told him nice landing on the way out.

#29

Navy helo pilot here:

I was doing some Deck Landing Qualifications last month, and me and my fellow pilots are going out to land on the boat for the first time with a senior IP. We have 4 pilots in our bird that need to qual, and I was the last to go. The other pilots, then me, get our day and night bounces, and on the last landing of the night, we call for the other people to come out and strap into the helo so we can fly back to base. Just before we get ready to launch from the boat, we get a #1 fuel pressure light, and our #1 engine starts acting wonky and starts flaming out. We troubleshoot on deck and eventually have to shut down the bird and wait for the ship to get in port so we can disembark. Had that #1 fuel pressure light come on literally 10 minutes before, or 2 minutes after it did, our helo would be in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and we would be scrambling out of the helo for our lives and a multi-million dollar helo would be at the bottom of the ocean.

TL;DR We had an air leak in one of our engines right before takeoff. If it happened any earlier or later than it did, I would be swimming in the Pacific ocean right now.

#30

Shortly after getting my PPL, I took three workmates for a local pleasure flight one Friday afternoon from an uncontrolled airfield (EGBN).

Within three minutes I’d made my first ever real mistake by taxiing halfway to the wrong holding point – I had every intention of entering and pootling along a live runway without a care in the world before the A/G radio operator called to give me a stern telling off and I realised what I was doing.

Within five minutes made my second ever mistake – I entered the right runway at the right place but with a clearly less-than-stellar look up to final, turned to backtrack and found myself face-to-face with another aircraft on short final. Utterly soiled myself. Steamed straight across the runway onto a taxiway opposite and parked for a few minutes just to calm down.

Passengers all utterly unaware of how close we came to watching someone execute a go-around/being hit by an aeroplane. Flight successfully executed, everyone has a really great time – and I learn to *plan* my taxi route and *triple-check* the runway and approach before steaming past a hold.

I learned at a major controlled airfield where my taxi route was always exactly the same and I never bothered to get into the habit of looking up and down the runway and onto final because, well, ATC cleared me for takeoff. Mentioned the story to my instructor whose sole comment was ‘well, that’s what you get when you fly from an uncontrolled airfield!’.

#31

My grandfather flies small airplanes as a hobby. I fly with him quite a lot and I had two moments so far:

It was winter, about -10°C. But the weather was great so we decide to go out for a spin. So we always fly about 200-300 metres high so we can look into people’s back yards. Suddenly, the engine cut out and would not start again. So we landed in a field, only to find out the fuel pump had frozen.

Another time we were flying and suddenly it got really foggy. Problem is, in the Czech Republic (which is where he lives) there is a regulation that states that planes up to a certain weight do not have to have GPS and so on. And this one time we had no GPS with us and we didn’t see a bloody thing, it was only white. We also didn’t really know at which altitude we were flying, since we couldn’t see any mountains and so on. That was really scary.

#32

Cockroach in the cockpit. Redeye from LAX. One of us was strapped in while the other one hunted for [him].

#33

I was flying a Piper Navajo that seats 8 passengers out of a small airport, we were making all of our required radio calls, but because this was a small uncontrolled airport some people in small airplanes will operate without radios or just dont care enough to broadcast their position. Anyway we were doing our due diligance but not long after take off and while leaving the traffic pattern my FO says “dang!” And takes control from me and make a relativley aggressive (for passengers at least) turn to the right. As he does this i see a cessna out my left window no more that 150 ft below us. We essentially climbed through the altitude he was crusing at and turned to avoid him. Only one passenger noticed when we got to the destination and he told us it was a “good move”.

Good times.

#34

Dad’s a pilot, so I get to hear all of these.

Good one that comes to mind (mind you, he flies 737s for a major airline):

Getting ready to take off at night, he sees a plane about to land on the taxiway he’s waiting on, he immediately just starts turning on every exterior light on the plane. Other plane pulled out of final descent at like 500 feet.

Edit: Just talked to him on the phone about it. He said it was back when he was flying the 727, so about 15 years ago now. He remembers seeing the plane coming down, and the captain was looking back over his shoulder at another plane, so my dad starts throwing on all of the lights, at which point the captain turns around and starts asking him what he’s doing, and sees the plane, and then both of them literally just duck, and wait for something to happen, and after a couple of seconds, when it’s clear the plane wasn’t going to hit, they both sit up, and my dad starts trying to call the tower. The tower is just not responding at all for a bit, and then a lady comes on (the dispatcher had been a man) and basically says, “when you get to your destination, call this number.” And the dispatcher and the pilot of the other plane both lost their licenses.

#35

I’m a bush pilot in Canada. I was working the right seat of a Turbo Otter, my first ever flight in one so I was still getting used to the setup. We were taking off from a short strip in the middle of nowhere with 6 drillers in the back and a bunch of gear. Captain started the engine as I was just finishing up the passenger briefing. He started rolling down the runway as I was just getting seated. I thought he was just positioning the plane to prepare for takeoff, but then he gave it full throttle. I didn’t even have my seat belt or headset on yet. I’m focusing on getting this stuff on when I realize something isn’t right. Getting closer to the end of the strip, captain starts to panic as we aren’t getting airborne (his hands were shaking like mad and he kept reaching for things but he couldn’t figure out what was wrong, I think he was too busy looking at the trees and creek right ahead of us).

I realized the problem, he was in such a rush to leave that he didn’t do a pre-takeoff check. Propeller was still in full coarse (feathered on shut down), it should have been full fine for takeoff. I yelled/gestured to him the problem and immediately pushed the prop forward, engine had a huge surge and we just barely cleared the trees at the end of the strip. He acted like nothing happened for the rest of the flight. We didn’t even speak a single word to each other. I suspect none of the passengers even realized what had happened and how close we were to being another statistic. When we got back to the airport I told him I was leaving, packed my bags and never looked back.

#36

I wasn’t the crew on either, but my service had 2 pretty severe bird strikes within several weeks of each other. One was a hawk of some kind and the second was a duck. The duck strike happened with a patient loaded, evidently just as the pilot was flipping his NVGs up. The duck came through the windscreen and went to smithereens along with all the plexiglass. I helped clean up the back of the helicopter later, and it looked like a duck had swallowed a duck of lit dynamite. The strike also happened at the exact moment the med crew had pushed a medication that relaxes all the muscles in the patient’s body (including breathing muscles), and in spite of the chaos they continued their procedure and successfully controlled the patient’s airway. The pilot also continued the flight in spite of being covered in duck blood/guts/feathers, as well as his own blood from his broken nose. The crew (and the other birds strike crew) received commendations for their calm composure under the circumstances.

It’s pretty mind boggling the damage a several pound bird can inflict.

#37

Not a pilot, but one of my buddies is. We were talking about one of the more remote airports that we’d both visited, located in a difficult place that has a lot of wind shear, so passengers are used to having the plane make a couple of attempts when landing.

Anyway, my friend said the sensors for the landing gear malfunctioned, so he couldn’t tell whether the wheels were down or if they’d gotten stuck. He flew low, made an announcement to the cabin that they needed to circle the runway because of the wind, and made a call to the control tower asking for someone to make a visual confirmation that the landing gear was fully deployed.

#38

I was flying two of my friends back from some tasty BBQ in Georgia a few years back. As we got closer to home, the weather really started to get bad, a lot of pop up storm cells. It was a perfect situation for my iPad (used for navigation charts) to totally [went out of power] as well as my onboard weather radar. I was internally panicking, and air traffic control was my saving grace and helped me get home safe. A few months later my friends asked this same question, they said I looked so calm so they figured it was no big deal!

#39

I was asked this question by a passenger while I was experiencing a problem with the rudder/brake pedals in the plane I was flying. He basically asked what was the most urgent situation was I had encountered while in flight. Little did he know that it was happening in real time at that moment.

I had called the tower of my destination airport to report my position and request landing. As I’m going through my checklist I positioned my feet on the rudder pedals to have authority of the toe brakes to slow the aircraft after landing. As I moved my foot on the right pedal it sort of flopped forward.

What does this mean? A couple potential problems, especially while on approach for landing. With the pedal flopped forward it meant the top of the pedal would be pushed into the firewall and severely limit right rudder control. Not having bilateral brake control greatly increases the likelihood of a ground-loop, or spinning out of control and flipping the plane over or off the runway.

I narrated the problem to my passenger as I “acted out” the physical inspection to try to solve the problem. I reached down with my hand and flipped the pedal back up so that it was at least in the right position. Apparently the linkage for the right brake had become disconnected. I knew that if I put the plane on the numbers I had almost 5000 feet to roll out and clear the runway for the next aircraft.

I made an uneventful landing and just rolled and rolled with light left brake and some counter steering to keep the plane under control while it naturally slowed. The controller asked me to expedite clearing the runway and I replied that I would but I still rolled until I could just steer naturally off the runway.

The passenger had no idea that I was encountering my first significant mechanical failure. I was just over 100 hours of flight time and working at a flight school as a dispatcher and front office person on Sundays. My passenger was someone that one of our clients had dropped off at another airport and was unable to pick him up. I told the guy I’d come get him after my shift if he’d cover half the rate of the plane of my choice. I was extremely familiar with the aircraft I chose but a cotter key failed and allowed the brake linkage to disconnect.

Everyone lived.

#40

Yay, story time. I’m an air traffic controller, for the record.

Had a pilot go NORDO (that’s when, for whatever reason, they aren’t on my frequency anymore. They didn’t get the right one, misheard, or their radios crapped out). It happens fairly often, and there are a number of things we can do to get you back in the right place.

This particular guy, however, went NORDO at precisely the worst time. He was going eastbound, which means he was at an odd altitude. He lost his radio, and his flight plan then had him turn southbound. That means he was supposed to be at an even altitude, which he obviously wasn’t.

There were about a dozen different planes going northbound that were at his altitude, so he ended up running one heck of a gauntlet through all these people as I was descending and climbing them to get them out of his way.

Then, apparently in an act of sheer ignorance on the pilot’s part, he decided to choose an even altitude all by himself, knowing he should probably be at one.

Remember all those planes I had to move out of his way? He managed to put himself right back into them. When you have closure rates of over 1,000 knots an hour, that’s not a lot of time to react to those things. At the end, my [bum] was clenched so tight that when I stood up, the seat came with me.

#41

My friend was a co-pilot on a commercial flight I was on from Toronto to Los Angeles and it was the scariest flight I have been on and getting the co-pilot’s perspective after the flight made it even scarier.

The flight went very smoothly until we were making the decent into Los Angeles airport (LAX) just after 10-PM. I was looking out the window and it seemed as if we were 20 metres from touching the runway when all the lights began to flicker and the plane went into complete darkness! Immediately, you could feel and hear the engines thunder into overdrive and we pulled back up.

Plane continued rising and we began to circle the air in complete darkness as everyone begins to share concerns. The flight kept circling for about 20 minutes before the pilot came on explaining they were having some technical problems, and they are discussing with the ATC to resolve the issue and make a safe landing. The circling in the air continued for nearly an hour but it seemed like an eternity in pitch black. Lights never came on, and we were notified we were going to make an attempt to land. People say this all the time but I can assure you, THIS was one scary decent! The bumpiest decent I have ever been part of. We were constantly being lifted from our seats, the seatbelt light really had merit this time. People were screaming each time and I was actually holding onto the arm rests and we kept defying gravity and swaying left and right. When we saw the lights on the runway inch closer, the plane slammed onto the runway and we once again heard the engines roaring as we slowed down on the runway. As we came to a stop, the plane just stayed there and waited on the runway for a tow to the docking area. You could feel the relief within the cabin. If everyone was sitting on toilets, I can assure you, each one would need a flush.

After we arrived, I met with the Co-Pilot a few hours later, as we had planned to meet for a day before he had to fly out of town. He explained they lost electrical power and had lost several forms of communication and flight information was not available to the pilots. Ultimately, the pilots had to land the plane manually with nearly no assistance or outside help. Considering it was night time, poor visibility and limited flight information available, this made for a very [bad] landing. He admitted as well it was the scariest flight he has been on.

Tops my list of Moments I thought I was [gone].

#42

I was flying the SR-71 out of RAF Mildenhall, England , with my back-seater, Walt Watson; we were returning from a mission over Europe and the Iron Curtain when we received a radio transmission from home base. As we scooted across Denmark in three minutes, we learned that a small RAF base in the English countryside had requested an SR-71 fly-past. The air cadet commander there was a former Blackbird pilot, and thought it would be a motivating moment for the young lads to see the mighty SR-71 perform a low approach. No problem, we were happy to do it. After a quick aerial refueling over the North Sea , we proceeded to find the small airfield.

Walter had a myriad of sophisticated navigation equipment in the back seat, and began to vector me toward the field. Descending to subsonic speeds, we found ourselves over a densely wooded area in a slight haze. Like most former WWII British airfields, the one we were looking for had a small tower and little surrounding infrastructure. Walter told me we were close and that I should be able to see the field, but I saw nothing.

Nothing but trees as far as I could see in the haze. We got a little lower, and I pulled the throttles back from 325 knots we were at. With the gear up, anything under 275 was just uncomfortable. Walt said we were practically over the field—yet; there was nothing in my windscreen. I banked the jet and started a gentle circling maneuver in hopes of picking up anything that looked like a field. Meanwhile, below, the cadet commander had taken the cadets up on the catwalk of the tower in order to get a prime view of the fly-past. It was a quiet, still day with no wind and partial gray overcast.

Walter continued to give me indications that the field should be below us but in the overcast and haze, I couldn’t see it.. The longer we continued to peer out the window and circle, the slower we got. With our power back, the awaiting cadets heard nothing. I must have had good instructors in my flying career, as something told me I better cross-check the gauges. As I noticed the airspeed indicator slide below 160 knots, my heart stopped and my adrenalin-filled left hand pushed two throttles full forward. At this point we weren’t really flying, but were falling in a slight bank. Just at the moment that both afterburners lit with a thunderous roar of flame (and what a joyous feeling that was) the aircraft fell into full view of the shocked observers on the tower…

Shattering the still quiet of that morning, they now had 107 feet of fire-breathing titanium in their face as the plane leveled and accelerated, in full burner, on the tower side of the infield, closer than expected, maintaining what could only be described as some sort of ultimate knife-edge pass. Quickly reaching the field boundary, we proceeded back to Mildenhall without incident. We didn’t say a word for those next 14 minutes.

After landing, our commander greeted us, and we were both certain he was reaching for our wings. Instead, he heartily shook our hands and said the commander had told him it was the greatest SR-71 fly-past he had ever seen, especially how we had surprised them with such a precise maneuver that could only be described as breathtaking. He said that some of the cadet’s hats were blown off and the sight of the plan form of the plane in full afterburner dropping right in front of them was unbelievable. Walt and I both understood the concept of “breathtaking” very well that morning, and sheepishly replied that they were just excited to see our low approach.

As we retired to the equipment room to change from space suits to flight suits, we just sat there-we hadn’t spoken a word since “the pass.” Finally, Walter looked at me and said, “One hundred fifty-six knots.
What did you see?” Trying to find my voice, I stammered, “One hundred fifty-two.” We sat in silence for a moment. Then Walt said, “Don’t ever do that to me again!” And I never did.

A year later, Walter and I were having lunch in the Mildenhall Officer’s club, and overheard an officer talking to some cadets about an SR-71 fly-past that he had seen one day. Of course, by now the story included kids falling off the tower and screaming as the heat of the jet singed their eyebrows. Noticing our HABU patches, as we stood there with lunch trays in our hands, he asked us to verify to the cadets that such a thing had occurred. Walt just shook his head and said, “It was probably just a routine low approach; they’re pretty impressive in that plane.” Impressive indeed.

#43

I went to an aeronautical university, the majority of students were either aerospace engineers or pilots.

My boyfriend is an engineer and our good friend is a pilot.

Pilot friend offered to fly the three of us to a large city an hour away. We flew in, ate some Waffle House, and started flying home. My boyfriend was in front, next to the pilot, and I was in the back.

We were just coming over some large mountains when the ATC let’s us know the winds are crazy strong down on the flight line. Our pilot hadn’t been cleared to land, so we flew in circles… Until we started to run low on fuel.

The pilot has one of his instructors on the radio, and they decide he can land, even though he doesn’t have that qualification.

We prepare for landing. The wind casually bats the plane sideways. We’re swaying back and forth by the struggle between wind and pilot. Finally, touch down and land safely.

I was taking a nap the whole time. *After* we land, my friend talked about how scared he was.

#44

I had just received my private pilot license and was flying around the area with my dad in a rented C172. We had landed at a local airport to stop and use the restroom, get something to drink, etc.

Well, in my noobish excitement, I had never retracted the flaps after landing. Didn’t notice before taking off again. First sign of an issue was that the plane wanted to lift off much earlier than it should. I should have taken this as a cue that something was wrong, but I did not. I let the plane dictate what I was doing despite knowing something was off. We started the climb out. I finally noticed the flaps were at full. I immediately reached down and lifted the lever to fully retract them. That was my next mistake. The plane was now rapidly losing lift and I began to sink back down ominously close to the trees at the end of the runway. I flipped the lever back down to about halfway to stop the flaps from retracting further. This stopped my sink and I was able to gain some speed and resume climbing. When I was in the clear I finished retracting the flaps.

My dad was completely unaware that I about flew us into some trees because I made a stupid rookie mistake. I didn’t do the proper checks before takeoff. Furthermore I let the plane dictate my actions despite knowing something wasn’t right. I used that as a lesson in the future to never skip safety checks.

#45

Military pilot here. Can’t speak for my commercial bros but most things that break are minor and for the more serious [stuff] your pilot is more than overqualified to handle it. From my experience sharing airspace with the bus drivers, most airliners will take precautions to make sure a bad sitatuion, though minor, doesn’t get worse I.e my buddies’ flight across the pond came back for a “bad smell” in the cockpit. Maybe something is burning, maybe somebody had a particularly acrid fart, who knows? Most times my crew is unaware the particulars of how close we came to smashing that bird I narrowly avoided.

#46

A few of my college roommates were commercial pilot majors. It was not uncommon to be woken up on a Saturday and told we are flying 6 states away today.

One particular time I remember being about 10000 feet over the Mississippi river when my friend paul says hey, look at that, just before stalling the engine and falling 1000 feet in a matter seconds. All the while he is fighting the choke, and I watched as the propeller stopped. It is not a good feeling to have been flying for 3 hours with the constant roar of the plane engine not 4 feet in front of you…to sudden engine silence and the deafening roar of wind going by as you are falling hundreds of feet per second.

Freaked the [hell] out of me, but apparently restarting a stalled aircraft is something you must do to get a license. He did it 3 more times that day.

#47

Havn’t flown in a few years – but I had my PPL for a couple years and only had a few “incidents” worthy of a story.

On my second ever solo, while I was still a student pilot, I hit a pocket of air right after takeoff that threw my head into the ceiling hard enough to make me a little dizzy. Never told anyone about that.

First trip home after getting me PPL I was taxing the plane to park and nearly took out a fence while my parents were watching me. I acted like I meant to get the wing within inches of it when my dad brought up how close I was.

One time I had a guy in a helicopter completely cut in front of me right after I was given clearance to take off. I had just pushed the throttle in so it wasn’t really “close”, but the best part of it was hearing the traffic controller lose his [cool] on the heli pilot.

I miss flying..

#48

Late to the game on this one, but I was a passenger on a pretty scary flight experience. I was coming back into laguardia from florida late at night. Most of the people on the plane were asleep when the loudspeaker comes on and the pilot literally yells “EVERYONE BE SEATED AND BUCKLE UP”. That was it, everyone was wide awake and the flight attendants were obviously rattled. Within 30 seconds the plane nose dived which is the worst feeling ever. This continued until we were mere feet above buildings in Atlantic City, i remember thinking we could jump out on top of the borgata and be fine. At this point everyone is crying and on their phones and the stewardesses are freaking out. Everyone thought the plane was hijacked as we were heading towards NYC. Of course as luck would have it, we also landed on the runway at laguardia that is right on the edge of the water and it looks like you’re going to crash into the water. While we were pulling into the gate the pilot finally came over the loudspeaker again apologizing for the disturbing flight as the windshield SHATTERED at 25,000 feet and they had to nosedive to avoid the cabin losing pressure. Scary.

#49

Small plane pilot so no passengers… BUT
Here is the story of why i don’t fly with my friend who owns a plane anymore:

1) friend decides that clouds traditionally only exist over this particular airport “like the clouds over the addams family house ” and we can get out no problem. I went along and we ended up in total whiteout, “inadvertant IMC” conditions. Coulda died. Ended up landing 150 miles from home staying in a days inn where 75% of rooms rented by pimps.

2) Fly down the coast to Florida? Sure. End up scud running the coast of Maryland, almost hitting a ferris wheel, had to get special clearance through military space (wallops!) to maintain marginal at best VFR.

3) flying across florida. 9 AM is great no problems, but T-Storms pop around mid day like clockwork. Dude refuses to get up/motivate to do the flight early. End up taking off around 11:30 AM. End up under Orlando’s class B airspace, heavies above and the best part? We get caught in an updraft, almost stall out and spend 40 mins weaving through thunder heads “because we have onboard weather”

4) Again, drags his feet for on-time departure. End up at airport and he wants to go go go. Lightning strikes on the field and reported downbursts in the vicinity. But it stops raining and he’s all – “lets go.” He Jawboned tower into Taxiing us out when they didn’t want. Then watched a tree at one end of the airport get zapped from the cockpit before tower chased us back to the FBO saying “don’t let me hear from you for at least two hours”

I spent a ton of money to get my pilots license and fly with a friend who is lucky enough to have a plane. Decided I prefer living. Probably won’t use my license again until i hit the lottery. But i’m alive after all his shenanigans (and my own stupidity not standing up for proper safety and ADM) and thats probably used up all my odds-beating karma.

#50

Oh I got one! When I was a teenager my dad was earning his pilots license, it was the best we always got to go on lessons. We all liked his instructor and had him around for dinner often and he and my dad would make sports bets. Well instructor Chris lost and the payment was a ride with him on this twin engine just for fun. It’s a clear night so we go and Chris and dad are flying, and my mom, baby sis, and I for in the back. My sister fell asleep before we even get to the runway.

We take off and immediately something is very wrong, suddenly loud bangs all over the plane like metal is hitting it and the plan pitches crazy. My mom had a headset so I reached over and grabbed one side so I could hear. Chris is freaked out but I heard my dad say calm as [hell], “we fly the plane first and panic later” then start radioing others we are circling back for emergency landing. At this point my mom grabs the headset back and I just sat still. They landed the plane perfectly. Turns out there was an outside compartment on the nose of the plane that was open so on take off it flew open and a bunch of [stuff] hit the plane. We got out, all of us shaken, and then my Lil sis pipes up, “daddy are we going to fly now?” we all just lost it laughing.

My dad can’t fly now, but I’m saving up. Next time he comes to visit, I’m going to make sure I’ve had a few lessons and I’ll take him flying this time. Those flying lessons were some of the best moments of my childhood.

#51

Passenger and pilot here. You’d be amazed how much your brain explodes when you’re in a nosedive where your only option is to pull up but you’re gaining incredible amounts of speed and your G tolerances can only go so high. Started to grey-out but got it under control. Had I not strained hard enough I would have just passed out and plummeted 7,000 ft. Scared the [hell] out of myself.

#52

Not commercial, but hobby flier. I was out with a couple of mates on a nice day and we decided to all go out. I don’t have my pilots license but a mate offered to let me take over.
Anyway we’re flying at a medium kinda altitude when out of the corner of my eye i noticed our altitude drop significantly – my heart leaps into my throat and I panicked. My friends didn’t notice. I started remembering things in my life; my first bike ride; my dad telling me we got a new puppy; my first love.
I told my friend, a more experienced pilot who politely told me that the Dial was broken and the altitude was fine.

#53

Back in my flight instructor days I had a gig to take up some kids for the day who were doing an aviation camp. There were 3 of them ranging from 7-14 years old. We were doing a quick flight to a nearby island. Our departure airport was a towered field that I was very familiar with.

On takeoff we’re climbing up through 1,000 or so when tower very casually tells me to use caution for another plane he cleared to take off behind me that may be over taking me. I think the actual verbage he used was even less urgent. Anyway, mid way through his sentence I see big tail numbers in my windscreen as I’m looking at the a*s end of a Cirrus airplane dead ahead, maybe less than 100ft. I push the nose over and slow it down a bit but by then it was already over.

The kid next to me just goes, “was that supposed to happen?”

Not really, no.

But I’ve never had anything really go on that we tried to hide from the passengers. At least not mechanically. One time as a charter pilot we did have to hold short of the runway for like 15 minutes to burn fuel (to get within takeoff weight limits) which is kind of embarrassing so we didn’t mention it even though we ended up having to wait for quite a while haha.

#54

I’m a helicopter pilot. I was doing a tourist flight and was flying low (~ 50 ft) in between rock formations to impress my passengers and give them a nice time. I’ve done this flight multiple times, everyone always love that low pass and I usually love it too, except this time I saw a prey bird flying *higher* than us right over our flight path and I was unable to diverge as I was lower than the walls around me. You have to know that most birds usually try to avoid big noisy thing flying near them, they do so by swerving left, right **or down**. Prey birds are also known to sometimes attack big noisy flying things by diving at them. It all went pretty fast and thankfully the bird didn’t do anything stupid like throwing itself into the main rotor. We landed safely a few minutes later and my passengers went on their way without suspecting anything. I’m more careful now when I make this flight.

#55

In flight school (for KingAirs) my instructor pilot was like “I’m gonna demonstrate a full engine shutdown.” well the engine shut down fine. When he went to restart it, it did not restart. So we declared an emergency and he landed it. Crash rescue was there waiting for us and everything. It was kinda cool in hindsight seeing how ATC treats you when you have a real world emergency.

A lot of other moments both in the c-12 and the uh-72. But mostly because I had no idea how to fly and little things that aren’t a big deal seem like a big deal.

#56

Instrument training student here,

Was doing a solo night flight, pattern work (working on take offs and landings) and I had done a few laps, everything going fine. A little over an hour into the flight I was taking off once again when I look down to turn off my landing light as I no longer needed it, mind you I’m only a few hundred feet above the ground, and in my peripheral vision everything got reeeally bright…

I look up and there another plane roughly 200 feet away from me flying right freaking in front of the departure end of the runway, not making calls, unknown to the tower as he never announced his position or intentions (you can’t do this). Obviously I [survived] but I called my family after I landed and let them know how much I loved them.

#57

Private pilot. I was 19, had just gotten my license and was doing one of my first trips with passengers – a 90 minute flight from Vancouver to Tofino (a popular surfing spot) over water and land, in a Cessna 172. With me was my girlfriend, my sister and her boyfriend. We were going to go surfing for the day and return that evening.

We show up at the airport, and I realise in my preflight preparation I had neglected to work out whether we could actually carry four people, our bags, and full tanks. A 172 can’t take off with that much weight. So we had to leave some stuff behind and switch to a different plane that had half tanks, with the plan to refuel at Tofino just before leaving.

We take off. I’ve flown a few 1-2 hour flights before to new places so I’m not worried about navigating. I’ve also been there by car many times. We fly over the water for a while, then the land.

As we get close, I see my worst fear. Fog on the ground. I start panicking and thinking I’ll have to divert to my backup, if I can find it. I have an extra 45 minutes of fuel, enough to divert but not enough to get home. I suddenly realise my backup airport doesn’t have a gas station and I’d need to call for help.

Note: Tofino was (is?) an uncontrolled airport at that time, meaning there’s no atc. You just listen and talk on a specified frequency and all pilots announce what they are doing and coordinate with each other.

I don’t admit my panic, but I do admit that I can’t see our destination and ask everyone to help look. We’re scouring the ground, I don’t really know where it’s supposed to be as in my panic the ground suddenly doesn’t look anything like my map. There’s no chatter on the frequency which means no other planes are around.

All of a sudden my sister shouts “I see it! Right under us!” I look down and sure enough I see half a runway disappearing into the fog.

I make the worst snap decision I have ever made. I announce I’m descending for landing on this runway. I don’t care which direction the wind is going. Hell, I can’t even see the windsock. I circle around, drop like a stone, and pull the plane in for a landing just as the fog closes in around us. The taxi is through thin fog and visibility is about 100m or so.

Im delighted to be on the ground. Nobody else realises what just happened. They just want to go surf.

Story’s not over, folks.

We call a cab and surf for the day. It’s fun.

We get back to the airport for the return flight and as part of my checklist I dip the tanks to check how much fuel we have. I do the math, figure out how many gallons to add, and fill up. I pocket the receipt.

Then, in what is the best snap decision I have ever made, I dip the tanks again.

It’s not even close to what we need to get home. If I had tried to take off, we’d have crashed into the ocean.

I pull out the receipt and stare at it. The pump dispenses in litres.

I redo the math, fill up again, and climb back in the cockpit. “Just thought I’d add some extra to be safe,” I say with a smile, my heart pounding out of my chest.

We have a safe flight back home.

None of them ever found out how close we came to [the end] several times that day. I decided I wasn’t really cut out to be a pilot as much as I love it.

#58

My friend is a commercial pilot. He said for the most part, it’s a pretty easy job since a lot is automated. You just got to make sure your wings don’t freeze or else you’re pretty [messed] up. I think the worse moment my friend had was when he had an engine problem and he had to emergency land at a nearby airport. He made it safely and is still flying around.

#59

737 pilot here. I’ve had a few when flying into Innsbruck, passengers none the wiser – but there is always a backup plan. I’ve had severe windshear, balked landing from below 10 feet, smoke in the flight deck due to deicing fluid, EGPWS terrain warnings, flap load relief. Performance is always right on the limit.

#60

Glider pilot here. This one time I was on tow and we flew straight into a surprise cold front (my home town is prone to freak storms that aren’t very predictable). Anyway, as soon as the tow plane flies into the storm it goes into a nose dive, with me right behind him. At this point we are around 1.5k feet AGL. I figured I could cut rope and pull out if needed at the last second so I stayed on. Down we went like eagles diving on a fish. There was a sudden thud as a large sheet of rain slammed against the frame of my plane. My grip on the stick was like a vice, yet my movements were controlled and subconciously meticulous. Time slowed as the thought of death suddenly entered my mind. I felt as though I wouldn’t ever see the tow plane pull up as our descent took us straight for the rocky forest ahead. Then, like a gift sent from the good lord himself, an updraft slammed into the tow plane and he was able to pull out of the perilous dive. In the end, the flight turned out to be one of the most adventurous flights I have had yet.

TL;DR
I was pulled into a nose dive in a storm while on tow in my glider.

#61

Helicopter Pilot –

In my Army days we would do a rapid decent through what is known as the small arms threat band. Basically it is a maneuver where you go from an altitude where most small arms can’t hit you to low level, ie 10-30 feet off the ground at high speed.

Point nose at ground, make sure you do not over speed the rotor head, Pull nose up at last moment. Simples

Now rate of decent, torque are all well known numbers for this type of maneuver. You basically fly the aircraft to the numbers with co-pilot monitoring gauges.

On one occasion co-pilot says our rate of decent was way more than it should but all power, rotor speed and torque were bang on the numbers pretty much. After doing this type of things who knows how many times I got a feeling something was not from visual clues. Normally you start to pull out of the dive between 500-1000 feet depending on terrain. I start pulling up somewhere around 1500-2000 feet. And that is when I had the “pucker” moment.

Nose is level and I am pulling live 80% power and we are still and we are still rapidly descending. 90%….100%… co-pilot on the controls… we pass through 500 feet… and ground coming up super fast. I can actually see where we are going to hit. I pull the collective to its upper stop which basically means we are putting so much torque into the aircraft that it can literally twist apart.

We level off at 30-50 feet. Alarms are going off everywhere. That’s co-pilots job to deal with. My job is get us on the ground. I pick a field to my right and do a run on landing and emergency shut down.

Aircraft is winding down and co-pilot goes, “Did you call a pan or a mayday?”, Nope, “Neither did I”. We call home over the radio and the QRF are there in less than 10 minutes.

Aftermath is the aircraft is toast pretty much. There is a slider on the torque meter that shows max torque on a particular flight. It was off scale. I am not sure if the AC ever went back into service.

When trying to figure out what the hell went wrong we could only come up with we must have been in a column of rapidly descending air called a micro burst. Can’t see them. Can’t predict them. Just wrong place wrong time.

tl;dr Bent the [hell] out of an aircraft. Still alive. Proof is this tl;dr.

#62

Whilst practicing for my private license, I was doing repeated power-on stall recoveries. Decided to do one with a crosswind. Slowed down to takeoff speed (around 60kt), and brought the power in. Brought the nose up as per normal, speed tapered off, stall horn started honking, as expected. Prepared to lower the nose.

Instead, the left wing stalled entirely and the plane pretty much rolled over onto its back while the tail swung to the right, which is the initial parts of a flat spin. I pushed the yoke entirely forward and held it there with full opposite rudder and the plane (a 172) plummeted. The plane gained a little airspeed and pulled itself together and I pulled out of a 100% nose-down dive.

Flew back to the airport shaking like a leaf. At full throttle. I just wanted to get the [hell] out of the air.

#63

Former Army Blackhawk pilot. I feel like I’ve had my share of ‘uh oh’ moments, especially while deployed. My most vivid memory was during one of my first flights in Iraq. I wasn’t fresh out of flight school, but I had only been flying for a few years (maybe 400 hours) and certainly didn’t know what to expect in the desert. It also meant I didn’t really know I should be afraid when trouble loomed.

I was on a battlefield circulation mission at night, flying with NVGs. While there are some decent sized hills in northern Iraq (and mountains in the far north), for the most part the terrain is pretty bland. Although sparse, ground lights are a must for helping to identify the horizon on low illum nights. On this mission there was not much in the way of terrestrial illumination. As the mission went on, it was apparent that something was happening, the ground lights were starting to fade. All of the sudden, we couldn’t see the silhouette aircraft in front of us. We could barely make out their infrared strobe flashing. We had hit a wall of dust and we were getting into trouble. There were not enough calibrated NAVAIDs (Navigational Aids) in Iraq to fly in IMC (Instrument Meteorological Conditions), and our aircraft were not equipped with IFR certified GPSs. We were also 30 miles away from the closest airfield. We had to keep site of the aircraft in front of us and identify the ground.

Practice and instinct dictated that our flight slow down and descend a bit to get better visual cues. We maintained good internal communications and radio contact with the other aircraft, but it felt like hours of silence between each transmission. At some point I thought to myself “Well, this is it. Probably not gonna make it back.” Our crew chiefs could hear everything was going on and were a bit antsy, but the passengers didn’t have a clue.

When slowed back to about 20 knots and descended to about 50 feet AGL, we started making our way in the direction of FOB Warrior. We could once again distinguish our sister aircraft and the ground, but obstacles were still elusive. Eventually we started seeing the oil fires that burned around Kirkuk. Fortunately, the other pilot in my aircraft had been deployed to the same area of Iraq a few years earlier and was able to navigate the flight using the oil fires as a guide. Obviously we made it, but within a few days I was on another night mission escorting a MEDEVAC aircraft transporting an injured military working dog to a vet facility near Baghdad, when we hit another dust storm and I got extreme spatial disorientation while on the controls. Think trying to find your way around while swimming 10 feet deep in murky water – no visual cues. We were in a full power climb with the nose slightly pitched up. If I hadn’t realized what was happening and transferred the controls we would have eventually lost all airspeed.

After a while I got burnt out with anxiety about unseen dust storms and had to take a break from night missions.

TL;DR Nearly got swallowed up by a night dust storm in Iraq and had to use oil fires to find our way to safety.

#64

As a kid (8-9) I flew in a small plane with my Air Force dad and his friend. We lived in Minot ND (big base there) and were flying sometime in winter. Later I learned we had such a long joy flight that day because the landing gear froze up, and we were flying around trying to get them to come down. As we were almost out of fuel they were planning to crash land on the Frozen River… When in the nick of time the landing gear unfroze and deployed. I had no idea though… It was beautiful flying above a winter wonderland.

#65

[Stuff] breaks all the time. Normally nothing so bad that the plane is gonna crash, but important enough that we take some sort of corrective action. The systems in planes (I fly a corporate jet) are so redundant and interconnected that you don’t always know for sure what’s actually broke.

Example: you might get a message saying that you’re ground spoilers failed but you can look back and see that they’re working just fine. Turns out it’s just a sensor gone bad. But do you think I flew the plane again until that sensor got fixed, hell no.

So to answer the question, they almost never know.

#66

Not a pilot but used to do work on ones house. My favorite story was the time the heater went out in the cockpit but not in the rest of the plane. So the pilot and crew are up there freezing, putting all their clothes on trying to warm up. Instruments and whatnot are freezing up. They had no idea if they were going to be able to land.

#67

As a child, my family and I spent a few days in the Bahamas and as we were at the outdoor airport/single runway we discovered that we were flying an 8-seater single prop plane back to Florida. The first time taxiing down the runway, the pilots discovered something was wrong with the engine so they pulled off to the side and made us sit next to the plane as they attempted to fix the engine. After being told that the plane was functioning again, we boarded and began to taxi down the runway again. I was watching the pilot and co pilot do their thing when I notice the airspeed indicator dropped to 0 as we were about to lift off. At this point we were running out of runway and I watched as the co-pilot jabbed the non working gauge with his palm and the gauge began to work again. The pilots then looked at each other, back at us, then back at each other before laughing.

#68

Not me but my father. Years ago when dad was flying the 767 for Air Canada they were coming out of London Heathrow back to Canada in the winter time and some snow had started to fall.

Heathrow ten years ago was notorious for letting a dusting of snow hamper operations. Dad and crew expedited boarding and preflight as much as they could and pulled the brakes and pushed back early to get ahead in the queue for takeoff.

They couldn’t get a taxi clearance right away as a number of aircraft ahead of them had opted to “wait for the heaviest of the snow to pass” prior to taking off and the controllers wouldn’t move them out of the way.

Dad basically begged them to move them ahead somehow, as he had been around the block a time or two and knew what was coming, but to avail. Ground had them park the airplane and they sat loaded at the gate for four hours before all flights out were cancelled… Over four inches of snow.

The airport’s inability to deal with the snow and backlog of traffic meant that Air Canada couldn’t get a plane out for three more days, by which time they had brought extra aircraft over from Montreal to try to relieve some of the buildup.

So in this story what the passengers didn’t know is that if they were maybe 10 minutes faster boarding the plane they wouldn’t have gotten stuck in London for an extra three days.

#69

Airline pilots generally inform passengers on a need-to-know basis. If there is a malfunction the passengers can’t see, hear or smell and if it doesn’t have an immediate effect on the flight it is best not to tell anything as it can only cause panic.

**(1)** The closest I’ve come to a disaster was almost a decade ago when during cruise the thrust reverser suddenly unlocked on engine 2. This was one of those near hypothetical failures we trained for in the simulator but you’d never expect to see in real life. We immediately pulled that engine back to idle because should it fully deploy on cruise power the resulting yaw motion could easily cause structural damage (Lauda 004 and TAM 402. Playing with the throttle we found that the *’thrust reverser unlocked’* warning only appeared at a high power setting. After a short consult with maintenance we decided to leave engine number 2 running at low power: allowing us to continue the flight to our destination, while not being at risk to overstress the airframe should it deploy. Shutting the engine down completely would have meant we had to divert to an alternate airport because the remaining engine can’t provide enough power to generate the electricity, pressurization and thrust required to continue to our destination at cruising altitude.

Passengers may have noticed a reduction in engine noise from the right-hand side of the aircraft and a slight delay, but apart from that there was nothing that could indicate something was amiss.

**(2)**Piloting a small aircraft for a sightseeing flight with 3 passengers I once experienced an engine failure. This was partly self-inflicted and a valuable learning experience. 5 minutes in flight I saw the right fuel tank was empty. Because I’ve looked in the tanks before departure and as the indicators are far from reliable I suspected instrument failure over a fuel leak. Letting go of the controls the aircraft flew straight and level as you’d expect when having 2 equally filled tanks. Still, I’d rather be safe than sorry so I decided to lean the fuel/air mixture a bit to optimize fuel economy (Generally the fuel mixture in an aircraft’s piston engine has a bit more fuel than required for combustion. The evaporated non-combusted fuel cools the engine from the inside). Keeping an eye on the engine temperature I started reducing the mixture when suddenly the engine stopped, the aircraft went completely silent and started to glide. Pushing the nose a bit to keep the propeller windmilling I applied the emergency checklist from memory and the engine roared back to life at full mixture. I told my passengers I had to shift gear, while they remained completely oblivious about what just happened. Back on the ground we found that one of the 2 magneto’s providing electricity to the spark plugs had failed.

#70

Regional airline pilot here.

ATC, pilots, mechanics, and everyone else that works around planes make mistakes multiple times a day. But there is something to be said about making so many mistakes you become a smoking hole in the ground. That is ridiculous hard to do. There is SO much redundancy and layers of safety built in the airline environment. The last US carrier crash with fatalities was with Colgan Air back in 2009. There have been millions and millions of flights since then. Try to wrap your mind around how amazing that is. And it’s not luck. It’s the system we fly under.

#71

Airline pilot (hence the throwaway account) I had a couple. My most recent one was in a holding pattern and was I listening ATC cleaning another plane to land on the same runway in the opposite direction that another plane was taking off. Immediately went on the radio and informed the other planes about the conflict. The plane taking off aborted the take off and the landing plane aborted the landing. Very quickly another ATC took over from the one the goofed.

#72

I built an Alpi Pioneer with my father. On our second flight I was flying and the regulator/rectifier caught fire and filled the cockpit with smoke and left us running on battery power only.

Me: “You have the stick.”
Dad: “No you broke it!”

Anyway we made a pan call shut everything down except the engine, wound down the gear and managed to get back to EGSL.

We spoke to Alpi about it and all they said was it’s a common fault we will send you a different Reg/Rec.

#73

Landed on the wrong runway. (it was night time, and tower didn’t inform me of my misjudgment until less than 1/4 mile away.) I was a young Private pilot and had a few passengers, so it wasn’t too big of a deal.

from Bored Panda /pilots-share-dangerous-moments-passengers-never-knew-about/
via IFTTT source site : boredpanda

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