Today, I almost quit.

(second in a series of posts about a wake turbulence incident, originally written Jan 6/7 2013)

This is a difficult post to write. Today I came perilously close to a number of things; the ground for one L

I also came seriously close to quitting. I didn’t think that would ever happen but stuff changes in the blink of an eye.  I seriously questioned (maybe still am) whether I had the “right stuff” to carry on. Something majorly scary happened to me up there today.

The flight started off relatively normal, Bob up to his usual mean tricks (another post, another time), we were practicing short field takeoffs and landings.  Few circuits in, everything fine until I was on short final for a landing. I’ll let the video show you what happened.

  video here

If you look very carefully at the start of the video you can see a Q400 passing underneath the CN tower. ATC were trying to sandwich me in between that one and another further out. I got hit by its wake turbulence. I had no idea what was happening. All I knew was that the plane was doing something very very wrong and I was in a whole heap of trouble. Bob had to take control. I had no idea what was going on, let alone how to fix it. I barely had enough time to figure out just what the f@#k was going on let alone react to it. And that’s the bit that scares me most.

I honestly thought I was going to crash that plane. Maybe if Bob hadn’t been on board I would have. I’m still really shaken up by this. More to follow but if friends and family are reading this. I’m fine, honestly and I'm not going to quit but the thought did cross my mind for a short period.