Student pilot trained for the worst

By Morgan Steger
The Collegian

Fresno State student Sam Robinson said he watched the televised landing of JetBlue Flight 292 with a critical eye last Wednesday.

The 145-passenger flight was aborted after the pilot noticed the plane’s front landing gear was facing sideways. The plane circled Los Angeles International Airport for three hours to burn off fuel before touching down on its rear wheels and grinding to a stop on its mangled and flaming front landing gear.

The suspenseful ending of Flight 292 caught Robinson’s attention because he is a licensed private pilot with more than 300 hours of flight experience in the cockpit of Cessna 172. Though he said he was impressed with the performance of the JetBlue pilot, the landing wasn’t as dramatic as it appeared because “as a pilot you always expect something to go wrong.”

Robinson said air transport pilots, such as the captain of Flight 292, train four times a year in flight simulators, running through all kinds of scenarios to be prepared for any instrument or equipment failure.

“All pilot training is about something going wrong,” Robinson said.

Fellow Fresno State student Sam Greer, who has been a licensed pilot for five months, also said he didn’t consider the JetBlue landing to be a particularly high-risk procedure. He said as a pilot he would have been more concerned about telling the passengers something was wrong than about landing the plane.

Greer said his father, a pilot for Southwest Airlines since 1992, once had one of his engines fail during a commercial flight. He said his father wasn’t worried, though the passengers were, and his father was able to land the plane without incident because of his extensive training.

Robinson said he received his flight training through Scott Air, located at Fresno Yosemite International Airport. He said as a student pilot he was trained to deal with engine failure, fire onboard the aircraft, instrument failure and adverse weather conditions. Robinson said he never has to worry about problems with the landing gear on his Cessna because it is stationary.

Robinson said he has had a copious amount of training regarding the effects of weather on aircraft.
“I feel like I have a master’s degree in meteorology,” he said.

He said this training paid off when he was able to safely navigate a flight to Oakland between thunderstorms, developing no complications other than ice on his wings, which melted before he landed.

Jeremy Hawkis, a member of Fresno State’s Air Force ROTC and a licensed pilot for two years, said the bulk of the training he received at Mazzei’s, a flight school at FYI, focused on what to do in the event of engine failure.

Hawkis said his instructor would cut the power to his engine while he was in flight and then guide him through simulated crash landings over agricultural fields as part of his training.

In the event of an actual engine failure, Robinson said he would pitch his plane’s trajectory to the correct angle to maintain a speed of 68 knots and then continue his descent, landing in the safest strip of land available.

“If the engine quits, it turns into a glider,” he said.

Though his engine has never quit, Robinson said he was once in a tense situation that tested his skills as a pilot.

Robinson said he was flying his family into John Wayne International Airport when the headset and microphone he was using to receive landing instructions from the control tower stopped working.

Robinson said his heart was pounding because he was landing his Cessna next to a descending Boeing 747, all while trying to reestablish contact with the control tower. He said he finally resorted to using the passenger’s communication set in order to restore contact and land safely.

“I was a nervous wreck when I got out of the plane,” Robinson said. However, he said once the tension had passed his first thought was, “I’ve got to do that again.”

Robinson, who plans on getting his commercial license in 2006, said after all the training he has received he feels equipped to handle any scenario he might encounter as a pilot.

“I would rather have something go wrong in that atmosphere than anywhere else because I know I can handle it,” he said.

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