Girls Gone Wild. In Humboldt County?

By Ace CFII

I was flying along our beautiful West Coast shore line with a student doing some side slips in prep for the x-wind landing that was needed back at EKA.

Just a few people on the beach, so we kept the altitude at 500 feet (per 91.119). As we were enjoying the beautiful day, we heard a call on the radio, “This is Flight Check 101, we would like vectors to the ILS 32 at Arcata.”

My student asked, hey what’s a Flight Check? I told her that’s the FAA checking to make sure that the instrument approaches are working correctly at ACV.
I was surprised to here us being called out as traffic, as our position was so far away.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing next. It was the flight check aircraft (the feds) asking for an intercept vector to our position. What the HELL! My student was in shock, and so was I.

Sure enough this King Air pulled up on our left wing, came up on 122.90 and said, "Follow me back to EKA for an enforcement action."
" What’s that", said my student. It’s some kind of joke, I have so many crazy friends, let’s play along, this should be fun,
I said. I couldn't believe what happened, this was not a joke.

I found myself defending our altitude of 500 feet. Hey, we were not in a congested area, I said. They came back, yes you were.
Being a smart pilot, I countered, I know that the legal term is not defined in the regulation, and in practice, is subject to varying interpretations and applied to varying geographical areas.

There were only a few people on the shore line. That may be so, they said, just to let you know we just busted (150 day suspension) an ATP for flying a Gulfstream II in Hawaii to low over the shore line and for a low pass at the airport.

The FAA inspector handed me his copy of AOPA’s April issue, opened to page 50 and took one hell of a long look at my student. Here, you may want to read this, he said. The title of the article was, What is a `congested area’? I was dumbfounded, and glad I bought into AOPA’s Legal Services Plan. Were going to do battle I told my student, maybe I can get John Yodice as my counsel.

I decide to check it out a little further and found the NATIONAL TRANSPORTATION SAFETY BOARD documents regarding the case. This deal turned out to be some serious foolishness performed by the pilot and in my opinion, the 150 day suspension was a walk.

After all the trauma, my student ( below) and I decided a relaxing long cross country to Disneyland was in order, That's why they call me ACE!

Excuse Me Miss, are you the attendant on this flight?

1. The April 22, 2008 meeting of the Humboldt County Aviation Advisory Committee has been rescheduled to Saturday, April 26 at 11:00 am and will be held in Fortuna at the Rohnerville Airport.

2. We have added word verification in the comment section due to the repeated receipt of spam, sorry for the extra step.

Posted by ACE (using Rob's computer)