The plan was for a mid-October trip from Virginia up the coast to northern Maine with a first stopover in Newport, Rhode Island and then Nantucket, Massachusetts. We would complete the remainder of the planning the day by day. Getting to the adventure involved passing by Washington D.C., Baltimore, Maryland and the busy airspace around Newark, Kennedy, and La Guardia Airports.
This is where overall pilot knowledge and experience comes in and I believe that a lot of that is distilled into words of wisdom that we sometimes take for granted. Not surprisingly, I have some personal stories that make the case that our short words of wisdom are valuable assets if we use them.
Some time ago I was overseeing a project to buy high performance computers for the Department of Defense. I had to do site visits where the new computers were to go. This was mainly to make sure that the infrastructure would be in place in time. This is where the flying opportunity came in.
Leesburg Airport was still under instrument conditions, so the final landing was also going to be a real VOR approach and a fine ending to the day. Everything went fine until about halfway through the approach when the VOR receiver lost track and the little red flag appeared. Carl had nothing to do with it. I called our approach controller with a missed approach and started the missed procedure.