Hard day

I don't believe in future telling. When my girlfriend called me in the morning, telling me that she had a dream about an airplane accident I did not look at this as a future event. I just let it pass. Never though of it either. I just went to the coffee shop, checked my email on the laptop (Gorna is beautifully WiFi-ed city) and prepared for the first flight day. It had to start at around noon and approximately fifteen minutes before twelve I was at the airport.

My colleague, who is like my training Buddie (we share the same room) was writing the flightplan and I was making the calculations. Both of us were going to execute a visual flight route around some major cities in the region and back to Gorna.

Wind at our planned altitude (aprox. 4000 ft.) was northwest at 5 ktnots. My laptop calculated the drift angle and groundspeed and after entering some distances it told me that the route was going to take exactly 59 minutes – nice.

My colleague was number one. After him my turn. Estimated time of departure for my turn was 13:55 local time (10:55 UTC) and it was important that we were able to land before 15:30 LT, because around 16:00 a big C17 Globmaster (USAF) was expected to land at Gorna to load some (I guess) candies from the local sweets factory (or maybe not?!). Anyway time was crucial!

That of course was not my colleague's business. So, due traffic, he got to be 15 minutes late. Add to that some service time and my actual departure was 14:20 LT. That meant that we were expected to be at the airport at 15:20 or only 10 minutes before end of fueling time (yes, they were going to stop fueling because of the US whale!).

Good news was that it came to be a very easy route, and my estimated times were even a minute later than actual. Visual navigation turned to be too easy and at some points it turned out that I did not use my map at all. Which was bad, but still I was able to identify every object on ground only by means of memory.

At 15:21 we touched down. Not the perfect landing, but I guess I had some worse than it. Generally well enough for a week and a half rest.

At the stand I understood that I had just half an hour to get something to eat, than another half an hour to file a flight plan for one hour of 2 NDB approaches to the airport. That was just enough for me.

After having an aviation non-related lunch I headed to the AIS with my colleague but we did not get there. Trough the window we saw one of our company's airplanes on the runway with some people walking around it. It was a twin engine airplane, that is used for the final part of the training (ME). What was worse, it turned to be sitting on the runway only on his belly and engine nacelles – yes, it landed with landing gear retracted.

At that point the day was no longer nice anymore... It was hell. I am not going to explain why, but I guess everyone at least estimates the reasons. The good thing is that everyone was ok and no one was hurt. Only the airplane. The accident made me think about some stuff and I guess it is going to teach me some lessons (although I have nothing to do with it). Just think about my options if this happened when I was in the air (the airplane stood there about five hours) – divert to alternate, but what about the fuel, weather, etc.

Now the training is frozen, and tomorrow we head back to Sofia, making some space for the official investigation to take place. After the big guys from the ministry of transportation say their heavy words, we are going to consider restarting training. Until than – we wait!

Stay tuned...