Saturday June 5th was the Linden Sports day and invites went out to most of the flying clubs near Linden, to fly in. I received emails from no less than three different clubs talking about the event. My concern about an event like this is safety. I almost have a phobia about flying into busy events with little or no crowd control.

This stems from a personal experience in my early flying days at the Lacombe flyIn breakfast. I was flying to Lacombe in my Buzzard with two of my Ultralight friends when the unbelievable happened. We all crossed over head to join a left circuit for runway 16.

Our lead flyer in a Challenger was on short final, a Beaver Ultralight was just turning final and I was on the downwind. As I was watching the Challenger pilot descending on what looked to be a perfect landing, a small plane approached at what appeared to be supersonic speed on a straight in path. He was below the Challenger and closing fast. Suddenly he must have seen the Challenger as he pulled hard right 90 degrees into a knife edge flight. While he was flying a sport plane I don’t believe it was capable of sustained knife edge flight at under 100ft AGL. In the knife edge attitude the plane sunk to the ground and I watched as the plane tumbled into the field and became pieces of wood and splinters before my eyes. The Beaver pilot who also watched in disbelief called the emergency first and the responders from the flyIN were quick to the field to rescue the Pilot. He did recover after a long hospital stay.

From what I heard his radio stack was not tuned to the Lacombe frequency and the straight in approach was not regular procedure. He was an older pilot (yes I know we are all getting older) and he only flew to one or two events a year. Maybe he was just not as sharp as he should have been to fly into a busy event.

And there in lies the problem with some of these events. Not everyone is competent enough to go to some of the events with the increased traffic and strange landing patterns of a different airport, but they think as long as everything goes according to plan I can do it. Or maybe they don’t think. If you are planning on going to a busy flyIn I urge you to plan your flight including arrival and departures, checking circuit procedures, altitudes, runways, radio frequencies and anything else required for a safe flight. Be cautious and fly safe. That’s my soapbox for this month now back to the Linden Sports day.

As it turned out Royal and I fly to Linden almost bi-weekly for pie or breakfast and promised we would flyIn for the sports day. We arrived early, (before 7am) but not ahead of President Ed. Bob McCully from Red Deer landed shortly after us and we were all in radio contact throughout the approach and landing.

The four of us walked to the breakfast and enjoyed eggs, pancakes, and sausages. Yum. After breakfast we departed to the west for home and were followed by Bob in his 701 and Ryan Crisp in his Sonex.