Page 19 - March 2015 Volume 19 Number 3

of the #4 FA as she reached for a passenger seat for stabilization.” I explained the above chain of events to both of them and recommended we all file the appropriate paperwork for her IOD (injury on duty), so as to document the event for the managers, health insurance company and bean- counters. She applied an ice pack for some of the flight and apparently, all is well since that day.
There used to be a sentence in the AIM that said: “...shall taxi no faster than a man can walk.” Probably a hold-over from when we used wing-walkers regularly and it was a method of regulating taxiing airplanes to a reasonable pace for our pedestrian assistants. A few years ago, that line in the AIM was removed. Except at fly-ins, no one uses wing walkers anyway, and no one taxis that slowly, so the guideline lost most of its relevance in today’s mostly paved-surface aviation world. It’s still a good idea however, to taxi within the speed limit of your brain,
ground conditions including day/ night/weather considerations, traffic and familiarity with the airport.
Write It Down
Don’t let airfield familiarity bite you, though. Sometimes we hear what we expect to hear and not what was actually said. We become accustomed to taxiing the same old route to and from certain places and that may not be the clearance we were issued – this time. It’s standard procedure for me to write down taxi instructions because I can’t remember more than three or four pieces of information at a time and I certainly don’t want to get it wrong. I started using this technique at the big airports because the list of taxiways, hold shorts, and the “do this when you get to here and there”, can be extensive. Now, everywhere I go, even smaller GA airports, I jot down the taxi clearance, just as I do the enroute clearance. When I forget to write it, I get bitten.
Hold Short
The airport diagram, and sometimes an approach chart, will often seem like one of those picture-puzzles where you look for a hidden object that doesn’t belong, like a tennis racket growing from the flower garden. Almost every airport diagram depicts at least one or two “Hot Spots.” They show up as a red circle or an oblong circle around areas in which we pilots have repeatedly done something we shouldn’t have. Typically, they’re at the intersection of a taxiway and a runway where, for whatever reason, we get confused or distracted and make a wrong turn or don’t stop at the hold-short line. It’s not always our fault, though. On the way to the hangar, ground once cleared me to cross the approach end of a runway. My jotted-down note said “clr to X-5” (cleared to cross runway 05). At the hold short line I told ground that I was going to stop here for a second. My habit is to
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MARCH 2015 •TWIN & TURBINE • • •