I was flying over Florida, some days after my first solo. I was flying Six India Oscar, another Cessna 152. The weather as usual was clear and sunny. You’d think it was hard to get lost. Florida is a fairly easy place to navigate in a an aeroplane. Apart from TV masts, the highest feature in that part of Florida is West Palm Beach city dump. Fort Pierce is on the east coast and there was a conspicuous nuclear power plant around ten miles due south of it. Lake Okeechobee is a huge lake, more of a small sea, around twenty-five miles in diameter, inland and south west of Fort Pierce.
A few days earlier I’d been able to move from a rather run-down city apartment to an apartment in a shoreside condo owned by the flying school. I was sharing it with another Englishman of around my age. I can’t remember his name. He’d gone solo around the same time as me. He was flying Seven Zulu Yankee. I heard his voice on the radio. He was requesting joining instructions. The radio conversation went something like this:
“Confirm your position Zulu Yankee we don’t have you in sight.”
“Uh, I’ve got a real problem, I’m lost, I don’t know where I am.”
“Can you see the power plant?”
“I’ve got a real problem, I don’t know where I am.”
“Can you see Lake Okeechobee, Zulu Yankee?”
“I don’t know where I am, I’ve got a real problem.”
At this point one of the instructors cut in, saying he thought he might know where Zulu Yankee was. The instructor found him and guided him back to Fort Pierce. As he touched down the controller said “welcome to Fort Pierce Zulu Yankee!”
I landed around half an hour later. By the time I got back to the apartment he’d packed his things and gone. A few days later I got a sense of what he’d felt, when I got lost myself. But that’s the next story.