My 1pm flight was a cross-country flight from New Smyrna to St Pete to Melbourne and back to New Smyrna. It's the required long instrument cross-country that all instrument students must make. I thought it was going to be a relatively uneventful trip but should have known better as soon as I checked the forecast.
After looking up the Melbourne weather, it appeared as if there was going to be thunderstorms moving into that part of the state right about the time we were supposed to arrive from St Pete. While that normally wouldn't be an issue (we would have plenty of fuel to divert somewhere else) we were required to make a landing at that airport for this student to get credit for this particular cross-country. If we had to divert for weather, the cross-country wasn't going to count ( a very expensive mistake). After talking to the chief pilot, I decided that we were going to fly the route backwards and completely eliminate any chance of running into weather in Melbourne.
So, we hopped in the plane and took off on our long cross-country. For the most part, it was relatively uneventful. We flew to Melbourne, did an approach, landed, and headed over to St Pete. where we repeated the process. All seemed to be going pretty smooth. We tuned into the automated weather in New Smyrna as we were passing north of Orlando. I casually listened to be sure my student go the altimeter setting and to be sure the winds were within tolerance. We checked in with Daytona Approach and got this little tidbit of information: "Skyhawk 1318Q, New Smyrna is currently IFR. Expect vectors for the GPS 02 approach."
Her statement caught me off guard. I had listened to the weather but must have not listened close enough to the ceilings. Not a big deal, I just tuned in the frequency for the weather and listened again. "...ceiling 500 overcast, light mist." Hmm, I didn't see that coming...and neither did the forecast from earlier in the day. I pulled out my approach plates to be sure we could fly the GPS approach low enough to get under the clouds and verified that we were going to have about 200 feet to spare. "Ok," I thought to myself, "200 feet is plenty of room to pop out of the clouds, see the runway and land." I was actually pretty excited. This was going to be my first legitimate IFR approach. I had one like it Dothan, Alabama with my instructor but the ceilings were about 600 feet above minimums. We saw the runway with plenty of time to spare. Two-hundred feet was going to be a different story. At the same time, I knew how this student was with approaches and that made me a little nervous. Without a doubt, I knew I could fly the approach. I told myself that I was going to have to be a little less forgiving with him on this approach.
We were established on the final approach and everything was looking good. My student seemed to be on his A-game today. We checked in with the tower shortly before passing the final approach fix and he gave us the bad news. "18Q, circle to the SW. Report your circle, cleared to land runway 7." The winds were almost right down our runway. I preferred to just fly straight in. So, I called up the tower and asked them to land on runway 02 as previously assigned.
"Standby, let us check...negative 18Q. Official sunset was 3 minutes ago and that runway closes as sunset. Circle as directed." You've got to be KIDDING me. I could barely see my wingtips flying through the clouds but I could still tell that there was PLENTY of light out there to land on the unlit runway. I looked down at my approach plate for the circling minimums and swore to myself. Circling minimum altitude was 700 feet...at least 200 feet above the reported ceiling. Perhaps the reported ceilings were off. That wouldn't be the first time a weather observation was wrong. My student seemed to be concentrating hard on flying the approach and I just watched as our altitude ticked lower. 900...800....700. Still nothing. "Ok, go missed."
My Egyptian student looked at me. "Go missed?!" Yes! Of course! We have reached our minimum and now we have to performed the missed approach. "But we can't we just go lower to see the airfield?" I couldn't believe he was asking me that question. That's lesson number 1 of instrument approaches. When you reach your minimum, go missed. I almost wondered how he passed the first 3 stages of his instrument program before being dumped off on me. We started to climb out and were being vectored over and away from the airfield. I pulled out my approach plates on my handy and easy to use iPad2 (thanks family! You have no idea how easy it has made my life!). As we were climbing through 1000 feet, my student says to me, "I see runway, we land now?"
As I looked out the right side, I could barely see pieces of the runway through broken clouds. "Of course not. We aren't on an approach. We are climbing through 1000 feet. Just diving for the runway would be highly illegal." I signed and pulled out my approach plate for the GPS to runway 7, the NOW active runway. The approach was non-precision and the minimum altitude was higher...440 feet. That gave us a cushion of only 60 feet. At a standard rate descent, that would give us only 6 seconds between popping out of the clouds to see the runway before having to go missed. By this point, we were being vectored to our alternate at Daytona Beach, 5 minutes away. The ceilings there were 100 feet higher, broken instead of overcast and the instrument landing system (ILS) there allowed us to descend to a little over 200 feet (giving us a much more comfortable approach, even for a student). I thought about trying the other GPS approach but just as I was about to ask, I heard another airplane check-in on our frequency. They had just flown that very same approach and had to go missed. Plus, I thought I remembered seeing something in the employee handbook about landing with that low of ceilings and decided to play it safe. Also in the back of my mind was our fuel situation. After over 4 hours of flying, we were running low on gas. So, we lined up for the ILS in Daytona.
Right about 600 feet as expected, I could barely see the approach lights through the mist.
Worry not, I didn't actually take that picture. We were approaching at about 95 knots and now that we were out of the clouds, he was supposed to slow down to around 75 to start configuring for the landing. We were getting closer to the runway but he wasn't pulling the power out or trying to slow down.
"Slow down. You need to slow down." Still nothing. "Ok, start pulling the power. Back to 1500 rpm. You're at 1900." He added power. "Pull OUT the power. LESS power." He pushed in the throttle again and we were now accelerating over 100 kts. "Slow down! PULL OUT THE POWER!" He was frozen. I looked at his face and he just stared over the nose at the runway. It was time. "Ok, I have the controls." Again, nothing. "My controls." I put my right hand on the yoke and wiggled it a little to see if he would get this hint. The yoke was hard to move because he seemed to have a death grip (no pun intended) on the controls. His hand was still on the throttle so I thought if I put my hand on his, he'd let go. Still nothing. "LET GO OF THE CONTROLS!! MY CONTROLS!" I reached down and slapped the top of his hand...not hard but enough to let him know that I was serious. We were too close to the ground for him to be non-responsive. He seemed to hesitate a second so I grabbed his hand and finally got him to release the throttle which I quickly found out was drenched in sweat. Just as he did that, I felt the controls finally move and saw him take his hand off the yoke. I pulled back the throttle to idle about 300 feet above the runway and started slowing us down. I must say, even after all that, I greased the landing. We pulled off the runway. I felt the sweat on my forehead and back. Whew. It was over. We were on the ground.
About 45 minutes later, I got in touch with one of the senior pilots there and made sure that there wasn't any restrictions on us landing with the low ceilings and higher minimums back in New Smyrna. The last thing I wanted was to land and for someone to say, "um, how did you get in? That's against company policy. You're fired." I let my student fly the approach but kept a VERY close eye on him this time. I knew we only had 60 feet to work with and at almost exactly 500 feet, we popped out of the clouds. My student almost yelled joyously, "I HAVE THE RUNWAY!!" Good, now land the plane. He did, with some very kind reminders from me.
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