Aircraft

Seems like a real dangerous way to fly — crossing midfield below pattern altitude in the wrong direction while someone is in the downwind within 500 feet of your position, only to do a 180 turn and cross back across midfield. I didn’t get the impression he felt he did anything wrong or unsafe. Seems like an accident waiting to happen with this individual.

A near-miss in the pattern, an angry controller, and a mishap with an iPad breaking the pilot’s headset leads the tower to call the authorities once the pilot lands. “He wanted me in jail,” the pilot says in his ASRS report.

There was violent vibrations inside the cabin with occasional clouds of smoke rising over the windshield.

The NOTAM for glider activity doesn’t let pilots transiting the area understand the nature of the hazard presented by dozens of paragliders operating at once from the cloud base to the ground in a narrow gap in the hills. Anyone that’s not familiar with the hazard is likely to have an accident or near miss. It’s like a drone show at Oshkosh.

Our concern here in the Tehachapi Valley in California are the two airports close together with traffic patterns that have been known to conflict with each other.

The other pilot said that they had us on their ADS-B in, but in my opinion they did not because we barely were able to avoid them.

What really caused the problem was that I allowed my impulse to not allow the helicopter pilot’s politeness to be wasted, to override my initial decision to go around, and attempted to salvage a touch and go landing from an unusual position, in an intentionally tight pattern that offers minimal margin for correcting off-nominal altitude and speed.

I could smell a distinct smell of oil/rubber burning. I decided to get the fire extinguish ready and available if a fire broke out.