Fly the aircraft!

[135Boomer]

Looks like some good info in this section that others could benefit from so I'll post a little mishap that happened to my Dad and I. We took off in his 94 SkyRyder from the Yakima Fly-in in 99. Dad was the PIC I was in the backseat. We set out and did some wonderful flying. About an hour into the flight we stirred up a Coyote. We followed him around as he actually went uphill. We followed him right into a draw (yes both of us were looking at the ground and not where we were flying). By the time we looked up it was too late to turn out of it and we couldn't outclimb the slope of the hill. Dad said hang on and we basically made a controlled crash landing into some sage brush. Machine came out unscathed. After getting the chute untangled and packed up we started pushing the machine down off the side of the mountain. Keep in mind that at this point were about 6 miles from a road and over 10 miles from the take off field on the side of a mountain. We pushed the machine about 100 yards or so and came to a slight clearing. Dad said I'm going for it. I helped hold the chute up out of the brush. Dad went to power bouncing down the side of the mountain and somehow got airborne. If you would have seen the strip he took off on you would have never believed it!! This little outing made me a true believer to the versatility of a powered parachute. If we would have been in a fixed wing 1) We probably would have been hurt and or broke the machine and 2) there's no way we could have gotten airborne again in that stuff. We would have had to take it apart piece by piece and carry it out..haha. As it turned out Dad flew back to the take off field to a nervous wife and then had to spend 20 minutes explaining what happened to his passenger... I spent the next 3 hours hiking back through the brush. We ended up with the Crapper award for our little stunt....

Lessons learned: FLY the AIRCRAFT!! If your screwing off looking at the ground make sure at least one of you.. preferably the pilot flying has awareness of what's going on around you.:D

[ZipItyDoDa]

The area I fly around has 2 sets of high power lines, both on the south side of town....about 5 miles away from each other. Onccce I was flying back and flew over the first set and just went about crusing and not really paying any attention, then the thought came to me that I should have crossed the second set by now.....well I looked back and sure enough there was the second set behind me. Scared the living crapolia outta me. Not that I had gotten close to them, I was plenty high in the air, but just the fact that I had crossed them and not known.
I pay closer attention now.:D