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Eventful flight

gmpaul

Active Member
After filling up with some cheap fuel at LBX I?m leveled off back to BYY short hop 15 min. I felt something moving on the top of my head and it?s not my earmuff strap. So I reach up and brush it off? this is where things got exciting. A Bumble BEE comes fly around form my right shoulder eye level between the wind screen and my nose. I know this thing needed position light, black and yellow, nose art said Kill, samurai sword for a stinger a thousand steely eyes look at me as he slowly circled my head. I?m telling my self fly the airplane, and stay calm that?s a lot easier said than done. That last 6 or 7 minutes of flight had to be and hour. Just as soon as my wheel touched the canopies was slid open. After putting my 9 back in the hanger getting a cold water looking at my baby what do I see a bumble bee fly out of my plane an out the hanger door. Plenty of excitement for one day.
Has anything like this happend to any one else?
 
That's a good test of the nerves! :eek:

I haven't experienced anything like that but around where I live we usually get tons of mosquitoes. Though, not this year because it's been so dry. But they usually get into the plane by the swarm and I usually spend a part of pre-flight with the door closed, swatting mosquitoes. You can never get all of them and they always seem to come out to annoy you as you're making a landing.
 
I had a green passenger the other day. He was sitting quiet all 30 minutes (we went really high) and exited as soon as I opened the canopy. Never seen him again.


Passenger.jpg
 
I once took off from an airport in northeast Arkansas and on the climbout, saw a wasp flying around in the Cherokee's cabin with me. I figured if I was gonna get stung, I'd just deal with it since I didn't feel like wasting the fuel and time to go back and land and try to get it out of my airplane. I climbed eventually up to 10500' and apparently the wasp didn't cope all that well with the altitude and went to sleep somewhere in the back of the plane. After I landed at home here in W.Falls TX, and was unloading all my camping gear out of the plane, the wasp woke up and sluggishly flew out the door and away.... a awfully long way from its home territory.
 
Spent a weekend camping in a very rural area just below the Southern Rockies, and on the way home several huge flies came out and flew around. Big things!

Fortunately I had my oxygen bottle. I went high and they went to sleep.

That was probably my fastest ever descent. As I taxied in, they woke up and flew out the open window.

Dave
 
I was deathly allergic to bee stings, to the point that prior to going through the five year sting therapy program I was stung and woke up three hours later in the ER. Although I?ve been stung a few times since completing the therapy, it is still a very unpleasant but not life threatening event.

Years ago when I was working on my PPL my instructor noticed a bee in the cockpit of our 152. We quickly landed, he pulled the mixture and rudder us off the runway between landing lights. As soon as we stopped rolling we bailed out, ran about 20 feet, turned around and stood there staring at the plane, he just off the right wing and I just off the left.

The tower watching this called the fire trucks, which arrived in full gear ready to go to work. It turned out that we were both severely allergic and without saying a word did exactly the same thing.

One of the firemen did shoo the bee out of the plane and we were able to continue our lesson.

Here is another, not so funny story.

This spring we were heading west, over the Appalachian mountains at 10.5 on our way to Chattanooga to visit Grandma. Our son sleeping comfortably in the baby seat strapped in the baggage compartment when my wife notice a large wasp crawling on the canopy, directly above The Boy. We don?t know yet if he inhareted my bee, wasp, and ?mixed? vespid allergies so him getting stun could be a life and death issue.

At this point we had two options; circle down and land at the small country airport directly below us or continue on for the last 15 or 20 minutes to our destination where we could land and have an emergency medical crew waiting for us with a short ride to a hospital, if need bee (pun intended).

I elected to continue on to our destination as it would have taken close to 10 minutes just to cycle down and land. Other than the wasp falling on our son and flying back to the top of the canopy, which almost gave my wife a heart attack, no one was stung and the wasp flew out once we opened the canopy.

Lesson learned, don?t panic, fly the plane, and make sound / rational decisions.
 
and...

putting screens on the NACA vent (scat hose end) is a must to keep these kind of pests out of the vents. :)
 
Thanks for the tip Reiley

I wrote this for humor but it defiantly wasn't funny while it was happening.
 
I had a cat come forward out of the tail section on a 172 recently at cruise altitude, just jumped over the passenger seat back and laid down for a nap in the right front. It was our hangar cat but had absolutely no business being in the airplane. Stuff happens, fly the airplane first and foremost.
 
Been There, Done That.....I've had flying vermin in the cockpit a number of times - back in my Grumman days, I could just open the canopy a little farther, and they'd find the exit pretty quickly. A couple of years ago, I had a long flight with a wasp as co-pilot in the -8...can't open that canopy in flight! I was unfortunately already up at oxygen levels at the time, and didn't want to go all the way back down to let him out, so we just declared a mutual truce - he stayed on the canopy, and I stayed in my seat the whole way.

Un-nerving!

Paul
 
Could be worse, in Australia we get snakes and spiders.

I've been flying a glider before and seen a redback spider (venomous, excruciating at best and fatal at worst) crawl out through a gap between the fuselage wall and the instrument panel, then across the panel, then disappear through the same gap on the other side.

It's strange: one irrational part of your brain initiates panic-on-sight as soon as the spider appears, but calms down as soon as it vanishes, while the rational part of your brain spends the rest of the flight whispering, "If it's behind the panel then that means it's primed and ready to drop onto your legs..."

I hate spiders.

- mark
 
snake in the plane - not me

So far I only had a fly took the flight with me. A few years back I stop by Gallia-Meigs Regional at Gallipolis, Ohio and read a story of a local pilot posted on the board. Upon taking off he found a snake in the cabin. With one hand he grabbed the snake's head and returned to land safely. They even have a picture of the snake and the plane from the local paper posted with the story. For a while each time I got into the airplane I was worried. Now by telling this story the image of a snake in the plane refreshed in my memory and it will get me concerned again :(.
 
I was flying an old 172 a few weeks ago and pulled the wing root vent open and about a dozen red wasp came pouring out into the cockpit with me, aparently there was a nest in the vent, they swirled around the cockpit for about 10 minutes till I could land,,,not a one stung me, I guess they had spatial disorientation pretty bad,,,they were flying into everything. I was lucky,,the nest was way up inside the vent and not visible during the preflight.
 
My Cessna wing root story only involves one mean-looking bee (it had hair and a soul and everything), unfortunately I popped the vent open shortly after takeoff with paying passengers onboard on a three hour international flight. Not wanting to return and mess up my customs plans (and look like a total weenie to my passengers), I spent the next three hours staring at this yellow death (well, pain...) dealer, who was also staring back and sizing me up. Before it came to a boiling point, we had landed, and I made sure both doors stayed open to free the micro beast. Sadly the bee didn't fly out and sting the customs guy, but I never saw it again. I didn't delcare the canuck bee in my paperwork.
 
Slithering Passenger

I work for a helicopter EMS program and one of our pilots looked down at his feet while on a recent flight and saw a snake slithering across his boot on the pedals. The instant he moved his foot, the snake disappeared below the floor of the aircraft. He told the medical crew what had happened. They landed in a field and one of our other aircraft was dispatched to the location to continue transporting the patient. It took the mechanic several hours of removing panels until he finally found the snake wrapped around a wiring harness inside the belly panel of the ship. Turned out to be non-venomous but I'm sure it got really interesting for a few minutes.

snake_1.jpg
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Watched

I watched a glider break tow and descend in a controlled but VERY rapid descent to land, canopy open and pilot out before it even stopped. Turned out he saw about a 4 foot snake, copper and mottled down by his feet, did not panic, but decided to get down quick. Turns out it was a rat (chicken) snake, non venemous, and was adopted by one of the soaring club members. He may still be alive today.

KB
 
In about 1993, I was sitting #1 for takeoff at Laughlin AFB in Del Rio, TX in a T-38 with my student. It was a hot day, so we still had our canopies open as we accomplished our pre-takeoff checklists.

I suddenly became aware of what I'll call a presence. I looked up to find that a swarm of perhaps 250,000 bees was passing by (and through) our cockpit. They were like a homogeneous whole, not individual insects, and they were definitely NOT interested in stopping to check us out -- they were passing through, on a mission to somewhere. (Besides, it was too late to reach up and pull the canopy closed -- we would have trapped several hundred of them in the process.) So we just cringed and waited as they passed around us. Within 15 seconds, they were gone, heading rapidly and purposefully east in a compact, 100' ball of fury. We saw no stragglers, so we closed the canopies and took off.

But I have to admit that I was checking the cockpit for stowaways the entire flight. Yikes.
 
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Background: at age 12 I was stung by about 10 bees, and spent a couple of days in bed, recovering. Not allergic.

As a young F-4 Naval Aviator, I was in the squadron that had yellow for the tail color, and we wore yellow helmets. ................Bees like yellow!

Passing 10,000 feet at 400 kias, a bee landed on my visor. Being afraid of bees, I instinctively reached for the canopy lever to open the canopy, and let the bee out. :eek: Fortunately, I stopped in the nick of time, or I would have had some 'splainin' to do.

I'm not sure I would have told the story truthfully if the canopy had come off! ;)
 
On the ground

I did not get to take off, my experience was on the ground. I jumped in the 172 to get underway, and I thought I'd been stuck by a needle, except the pain kept increasing and spreading. Jumped back out to discover a wasp still attached to my back. I guess he objected to me sitting on him, don't know why?

Never been stung by a wasp before, and don't really ever want to do it again.

Cheers

Jim
 
After filling up with some cheap fuel at LBX I?m leveled off back to BYY short hop 15 min. I felt something moving on the top of my head and it?s not my earmuff strap. So I reach up and brush it off? this is where things got exciting. A Bumble BEE comes fly around form my right shoulder eye level between the wind screen and my nose. I know this thing needed position light, black and yellow, nose art said Kill, samurai sword for a stinger a thousand steely eyes look at me as he slowly circled my head. I?m telling my self fly the airplane, and stay calm that?s a lot easier said than done. That last 6 or 7 minutes of flight had to be and hour. Just as soon as my wheel touched the canopies was slid open. After putting my 9 back in the hanger getting a cold water looking at my baby what do I see a bumble bee fly out of my plane an out the hanger door. Plenty of excitement for one day.
Has anything like this happend to any one else?

Yep, but it was a large brown spider that walked across the panel and promptly disappeared behind it.

I searched and searched for that critter after landing but did not find it until weeks later, it was dead down near the fuel valve.

I have an irrational phobia of spiders, must be a genetic code going back a hundred thousand years when we lived in caves, ate nuts and berries and an occasional chunk of meat...and had to deal with spiders without the conveniences of modern life.
 
On a T-37 navigation flight in pilot training out of "Willie" (Williams AFB, AZ) I had finished the low-level route and was entering the pattern at Davis Monthan with my instructor, a very large major. The pattern was full of Warthogs (A-10s of course) and I was told to make a 360 before coming up initial. I snapped smartly into a tight left turn in the mighty "Tweet" and started beating my chest wildly and yelling at the major "TAKE THE AIRPLANE! TAKE THE AIRPLANE!". He was a little slow on the uptake thinking I had totally lost my mind over there in the left seat but then finally took the stick as I unzipped the top of my flight suit and finally dumped the honey bee out on my lap that had been repeatedly stinging me on the chest.

Somehow I didn't think that scene was NEARLY as funny as the major did.
 
A juicy one

I was on a short hop in an L-19 when a wasp appeared, hovering a few inches from my face. Without thinking, I gripped the stick between my knees and brought my hands up in a mighty smack. The results were juicy, but no other ill effects.
 
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