…doesnt feel right…

I am a student pilot with about 60 hours total time split between a Beech Mentor T-34C, Cessna 172 and my just-purchased personal plane, a Beech Musketeer. I had flown about 20 hours with a CFI in the few months preceding my story, in both a 172 and the Musketeer. I had four flights for a total of about eight hours in the Musketeer. On the fateful flight, we took off normally in marginal VMC conditions. The smoke from several brushfires had cut visibility down to about three to four miles. We had an easy and uneventful flight with a normal takeoff, several ground reference maneuvers, a little GPS familiarization, stalls and slow flight. Nothing was out of the ordinary and the aircraft performed well.

Key Takeaways:

• A student pilot experienced a nosewheel failure during a touch-and-go landing in a newly acquired Beech Musketeer, despite the flight instructor's positive assessment of the approach.
• The incident occurred after the pilot repeatedly felt the approach "didn't feel right," highlighting a critical mismatch between their intuition and the situation.
• The key takeaway is the importance of trusting one's gut feeling in flight; if an approach feels low and slow, pilots should add power immediately, even if not explicitly instructed to do so.

Key takeaways sponsored by Aviator Pro | Start Your Training ->

See a mistake? Contact us.