While in graduate school and away from my “day job” as a Bombardier/Navigator in the A-6E intruder for an extended period of time, I joined the local flying club and started working on my civilian pilot license. I was pretty desperate for a flight time fix.
One of the requirements was a cross-country flight with an instructor, landing at a field other than home base, refueling, and returning.
At the time, I did not realize that one could be an FAA certified Flight Instructor WITHOUT an Instrument rating. Because it was a Navy flying club, all of the aircraft were fully instrumented.
It had not dawned on me, but up until that point none of my flight instructors had paid much attention to my pre-flight planning, kneeboard cards, fuel ladders, navbag full of up-to-date VFR and IFR charts, or my penchant for dialing in all the navaids to back up my VFR navigation.
After a very pleasant lunch 200 miles or so from homebase, we took off for the return leg. Over mountainous terrain, the weather began to develop NOT as forecasted.
Having “lived the dream” for the previous five years of “all weather, night attack,” I was not greatly concerned; the fact that it was still daylight made it somewhat pleasant. At least the lightning flashes were less distracting. My flight instructor was not quite so sanguine.
As the weather rapidly closed in, she confided that she did NOT have an Instrument rating and was wondering if there were any nearby divert fields we could get to in VFR conditions. Unfortunately, the weather had already ruled out those options.
I filed an IFR flight plan in flight with a nearby Flight Service Station (FSS), dialed in my assigned squawk, got cleared to climb to a nice, safe altitude, and used the VORTAC to navigate our way home.
Approaching the initial for homebase, the weather cleared as quickly as it developed and I cancelled to finish the flight VFR.
Fortunately, no one from the FAA or the FSS ever bothered to follow-up regarding the qualifications of the pilot who filed in flight. Afterwards I was very careful to make sure I knew exactly what current qualifications and certifications my flight instructors possessed.
Anyway, he and another man were having a detailed discussion about what were the origins of problems on a certain aircraft. As this dialog went on, they did end up in the aircraft. At some point they came to a mutual agreement to take it up for a test hop and go around the pattern a few times etc.
I think it was sometime during the ground taxi after landing where they both came to the realization that neither one of them were licensed to fly, so they nonchalantly tied down the airplane, and sauntered off the airfield.
Joe was a precious man, a great mentor and leader. Joe had been all over the world as a tech rep for Lycoming (among other things) and therefore he had lots of exotic stories to romanticize and entice us with. He did restrict those stories to exotic eating, and I heard about balloout, and I found out that ‘dog is good till you find out what it is’ LOL.
And that was a fantastic team of Professors/Instructors they had back then. People like retired GE jet engine engineer Dick Canon, and Jose. Dick already knew of/about the Scram-Jet back in 1980, which he should have, given his background with GE, since the scram-jet was already being developed and tested on the X-15 Project.
It was my badge of honor (at least to me) that I was one of only two people to ace his semester exam (that year) on all the dynamics of airflow from subsonic into supersonic and back down into the subsonic again. And while I could do the math, it was not because I could do the math that I aced his exam. It was because I could visualize the concepts he presented all at one time.
While I like to fly (and I have not flown I guess for at least 12 years), I guess that is one reason general aviation never appealed to me enough to make it a dedicated hobby. The weather can change much quicker than predicted.
I heard too many stories from my buddies at work getting about trapped in the canyons/mountains of the west when I was out in the Bay area for 13 years. Those mountains and canyons have taken many a soul, including Steve Fosset.
I did have some fantastic teachers, A retired F-84 driver and a retired F-100 driver, who both taught me how to 'fly by the numbers'. And in my very first flights with them, we went into stall/spin recovery. I guess that is that not that unusual tho.
Great story, reaffirms what I have always felt, that Navigator /bombadiers ought to have pilot training and a huge vice-versa. I hope in the days of GPS, that navigation, as the navigators of yore new it, does not disappear as a skill. One thing I never appreciated, was the name “dead reconing”. Something just didn’t sound right.