[Tonchi]

How about being lost in the middle of the commercial airliner approach path to Mexico City International Airport at midnight in a Cessna 152?

I didn't get into that spot by myself, it was a group effort. There were three guys from Albuquerque who wanted to do a scuba diving tour of Mexico and I went along as interpreter (due to the pilot being my boyfriend). Due to leaving the previous destination late in the day (a frequent problem when guys stay up drinking every night of their vacation) it was already quite dark when we were approaching Mexico City. Although the pilot had an instrument rating, we could not find the outer marker to save our lives. Everybody was looking out at the ground and searching for the signal and we just could not find anything where "it is supposed to be." We kept circling and circling, and nothing.

At that point we should have figured out an alternative, like going to Puebla, but instead we got the bright idea to go in further and talk to the tower. It is International Law that all controllers are supposed to speak English, but guess what? Nobody in the Mexico City tower could understand a thing the pilot said, so I got put on the radio to talk at them in Spanish. We then discovered that THEY didn't know where WE were either! It was pitch black and we were swinging back and forth trying to pick up the marker and suddenly we noticed we were not alone out there. In fact, we were getting less alone all the time. I said "Jesus! Let's get out of here!" but my boyfriend-the-pilot said "They're just going to have to talk us in now." I said "HOW??! We can't understand a word they say!" So with his Chuck Yeager attitude he just picked up the radio again and kept repeating the same request over and over again: to get a controller online who could speak English because we were coming in for a landing and could not get lined up properly without the outer marker. Then I would repeat it in Spanish, then he would say it in English again. (plthijinx can probably correct me on the procedures because I am remembering it from 30 years ago and I didn't understand then what I was doing)

Somebody in the tower told us something to look for on the ground where another beacon was supposed to be and we were all staring out the windows trying to find it, with all these huge commercial airplanes in holding pattern around us and getting thicker traffic every minute. We could pick up their landing instructions coming in from the tower on our radio but nobody telling us what to do still. It was the most bizarre thing I had ever seen, I was looking out the window and there were people in a Braniff liner looking back at me! The tower told us to keep holding, we kept getting blithering instructions in something that was neither English or Spanish and completely incomprehensible. My boyfriend finally radioed very calmly that he intended to follow the next plane going down for a landing if he didn't get specific directions how to come in otherwise because it was only a matter of time before somebody hit us and we would come down on top of them. I don't even remember seeing any runways in sight, just all those huge planes all around us.

The other planes now began getting into the act because the word was spreading that there was a single-engine Cessna lost out there and they were more nervous than we were (this was in the days were there were considerably more primitive warning devices onboard commercial airliners, if any). One pilot even shouted into the radio "Will you fucking tell him how to land and do it now!!" For whatever reason, maybe it was that the other captains refused to attempt landing until they knew we were out of there, everybody in the sky was put on hold until we got down, with a controller who spoke well enough to get it done. I honestly expected to be arrested when we checked in after landing, but nobody paid the slightest attention to us. We did the usual sign-in-and-bribe-the-customs-officer routine and left the terminal. It occurs to me now that there was probably not even a report filed by the tower of this incident, and that "air traffic control" was a truly relative term there. What is the "near miss" category in the US, 2 miles? Heck, how about 200 FEET?!

The really stupidest part I played came later, when I kept flying with this guy. By the time we arrived at the hotel, he had started shaking and could not sleep all night. He said he'd decided to give up flying because of not being able to handle the situation we had just been through. I should have agreed with him.