kamwings
Flight Levels
I went to my first fly-in this weekend, to Sarnia airport, CYZR. It's named after astronaut and former ISS commander Chris Hadfield, who was born in Sarnia, and Chris was going to be flying in to meet people and try to help save the airport, which the city is contemplating shutting down. It turned out to be far busier than I expected, with probably over 100 planes flying in, plus lots of locals driving out to meet him. As an un-towered airport, the radio was going non-stop, and it didn't help that some other nearby airports use the same frequency, which resulted in people stepping on each other from time to time. But I followed standard procedure, made my calls, found the plane in front of me, and kept him in sight as I overflew the field and entered the left downwind.
I turned final, making my call as I'm supposed to, and 20 seconds later, a Lancair flies right over me - barely 20-30 feet above me - and lands in front of me. Needless to say, it startled the **** out of me and I lost my composure for a second. I neglected the "Aviate, Navigate, Communicate" rule and instead made a call on the radio to cuss him out and ask who just flew over me on short final. He apologized briefly, I recovered and went around, but by the time I landed and parked just two planes away from him, he had disappeared into the crowd - not cool. I would have expected him to come over and talk it over so we could figure out what went wrong. But maybe I'm just a naive new pilot and this sort of crap happens all the time.
I've attached a brief 20-second video clip showing how close a call it was. I'm really disappointed that somehow I managed not to turn on my audio recorder, so the audio sucks and I can't listen to the radio calls to see whether he actually made any at all. I did look at the FlightAware track of his plane (luckily he has ADS-B), and I could see he made a highly unusual approach to the pattern (attached here), and then flew a crazy aborted pattern and did a non-stop turn while descending all the way from crossing the field to short final. I can't help but think he was trying to sneak in ahead of me on purpose, and he MUST have underflown the plane that I heard in the pattern behind me, too, given his track log data.
I don't think this is normal, but what say you guys? How upset should I be about this?
<video src="https://www.beechaeroclub.org/wp-content/sp-resources/forum-media-uploads/kamwings/2021/08/20210814-Sarnia-landing-incident_01.mp4" controls="controls" width="640" height="480"></video>
I turned final, making my call as I'm supposed to, and 20 seconds later, a Lancair flies right over me - barely 20-30 feet above me - and lands in front of me. Needless to say, it startled the **** out of me and I lost my composure for a second. I neglected the "Aviate, Navigate, Communicate" rule and instead made a call on the radio to cuss him out and ask who just flew over me on short final. He apologized briefly, I recovered and went around, but by the time I landed and parked just two planes away from him, he had disappeared into the crowd - not cool. I would have expected him to come over and talk it over so we could figure out what went wrong. But maybe I'm just a naive new pilot and this sort of crap happens all the time.
I've attached a brief 20-second video clip showing how close a call it was. I'm really disappointed that somehow I managed not to turn on my audio recorder, so the audio sucks and I can't listen to the radio calls to see whether he actually made any at all. I did look at the FlightAware track of his plane (luckily he has ADS-B), and I could see he made a highly unusual approach to the pattern (attached here), and then flew a crazy aborted pattern and did a non-stop turn while descending all the way from crossing the field to short final. I can't help but think he was trying to sneak in ahead of me on purpose, and he MUST have underflown the plane that I heard in the pattern behind me, too, given his track log data.
I don't think this is normal, but what say you guys? How upset should I be about this?
<video src="https://www.beechaeroclub.org/wp-content/sp-resources/forum-media-uploads/kamwings/2021/08/20210814-Sarnia-landing-incident_01.mp4" controls="controls" width="640" height="480"></video>