It was one of the hottest days of the year. Again. KK stayed tied down on her pad, because she's a flying greenhouse at the best of times and she would have been an oven. We all see these CAA driven webinars pop up on the forums from time to time, and being a sucker for punishment, I signed up for one. Was it going to be as boring as it first sounded, or a gold mine? Honest answer, yes to both.
What is it?
First, what was it? “Runways and Realities: Understanding GA Airfield Differences,” billed as an hour, run by Astral Aviation Consulting. Hosted by Matt Lane and Charlotte Dadswell, with Nigel Willson and guest Bruce Buglass. The pitch was practical. How airfields differ, and how that feeds into your planning and decision making.
Powerpoints NO!
I'll confess, it opened like a glorified, PowerPoint-driven Pooley's Guide to Airfields. It might have been me or it might have been the heat. But the early parts dragged, mostly because chunks weren't massively relevant to my day to day flying, I'm not yet into ILS VNAVs at my local Class D, although I did nearly come a cropper flying though an instrument approach feather on my skills test , s I have a bit of history with them. Then Bruce Buglass, airfield manager at Sleap got going, and the thing came alive. Interesting, funny, and a gold mine of titbits.
Too many rotors
I thought Elstree was bad. Five or six helicopters floating round the runway, crossing it constantly, training low and ignoring the circuit the rest of us fly. But at least they're on our frequency, so you hear them coming. Sleap copes with up to thirty, training out of Shawbury on a different band, so you won't hear a peep. Thirty aircraft, radio silence on your frequency. If that doesn't make you look out of the window, nothing will.
And that was Bruce's real theme. Lookout, and where it bites hardest. The radio picture in brief: full air traffic control clears you, a flight information officer only informs you, and at an uncontrolled air-ground field the friendly voice just helps. Nobody's clearing you and nobody's watching your back. Which is exactly where lookout becomes everything. You treat the runway as if there's always someone on short final, even when it's quiet, even when nobody's said a word. When you enter one, Bruce reckons you want to be looking like a comedian. Head swivelling, check base, check downwind, then check the other way too, because somebody might be landing the opposite direction.
You have permission to say no
A few other pennies dropped, mostly about permission. Not that nobody tells you this stuff. They probably did, somewhere back in training. You just can't hold all of it, and some of it only really lands years later. Nigel's was a case in point. If a clearance comes in faster than your brain's keeping up, you can say “standby” straight back. Being able to talk back to the sky gods of ATC and tell them to wait is, frankly, a revelation. It isn't just their word to use on you. You can ask for “say again” without shame, too. And one of his I liked: a controller won't talk faster than they can write it down, and CAP 413 puts the official cap at a hundred words a minute, slower still when they know you're copying it. So if it ever feels like a torrent, it's slower than it sounds. Nigel summed it up nicely, that time's your enemy if you're on fire and your best friend if you just need a second to think. I've spent years treating the radio like a test I'm failing in real time. Turns out it's a conversation.
By now this was no dry Pooley's readout. It was three quarters of an hour of ideas and anecdotes that made me think. Will it change my flying? I think so. Have I learned something? Definitely. And for all the detail, it came down to the three things my instructor tried to drum in on day one. plan prepare and keep your eyes out of the cockpit.
I'm not going to write a full review, that's not what I'm here for. But if one of these pops up, grab a cuppa, find somewhere comfy, and sign up. It's free and not as bad as it seems. Certainly better than sitting in the pub watching yet another overpaid football team lose a match.
