Emergencies are rare but that does not mean it's a good idea to be unprepared for them. Emergency possibilities offer an endless number of scenarios. Here are a few to get you thinking...

Transitioning to a new airplane can be a lot of fun, if you do it correctly. I can remember way back to when I was making the transition to my Debonair, and all of the fun and challenges that were included. This was mostly due to the fact that I was going from flying Cessna 172s, to flying a complex, high performance, retractable gear aircraft like the Debonair. Let's just say the experience was loaded with opportunities to expand my skills as a pilot.

On April 27, 2000, a Canadian commercial helicopter pilot (who was also a helicopter flight instructor) took off with a maintenance engineer in a Bell 206 from an airport in Quebec to perform a test flight. Five minutes later, they disappeared from radar. The Transportation Safety Board of Canada determined (rather quickly) that the main rotor hub and rotor blades had departed the aircraft in flight.

Sometimes, the choice to abort is complicated by other possibilities -- the unpleasant things that will likely happen if you stay on the ground but not on the runway.

Aborting a takeoff can be as uneventful as simply reducing power and rolling to a stop. It may even take the form of noting a problem during your engine run-up, and never taxiing onto the runway at all. A takeoff abort may require a quick "chop" of the throttles at rotation speed, or even a few feet in the air over the runway. In the worst case a takeoff abort may have to begin at a point where you can't come to a stop on the remaining runway.

IT WAS ALL OVER IN A FLASH, literally in the blink of an eye. The airplane was trashed and a deer laid dead on the taxiway, half-butchered by the propeller of the now-blood-covered plane. How this happened is the sad story of a distracted pilot, the proclivities of nature, and just a bad combination of circumstances...

Rosanne Roseannidanna warned us years ago: "It's always something." As pilot-in-command you may have meticulously planned your takeoff, and used the five-point method of predicting and evaluating takeoff performance. No takeoff will ever go exactly as predicted in the Pilot's Operating Handbook. Like the animal on the runway, there are often some outside influences, some extenuating circumstances that result in the true takeoff performance achieved -- and whether you will have to abort a takeoff.

The number of our landings must always equal our number of takeoffs -- or so goes the adage -- but sometimes the safest way to ensure equality is to do neither. Unlike birds possessing the gift of flight and whose skills are instinctive, we have the gift of thought, but our skills are hard won.

The pilot stated that he set 10 degrees of flaps for takeoff from the relatively short runway. The 'aircraft was slow to climb' and once (it) was airborne, he raised the flaps. The airplane settled and collided with the ground. Additionally, the pilot said that the aural stall warning was operating throughout the attempted climbout.

We had even more questions on fueling as a result of the article on explosive potentials in fueling your airplane from a fuel truck. One reader pointed out that he has a professional contractor's tank in the bed of his pickup, and that he uses that tank to fuel his airplane. He wondered if using this rig could expose his plane to a potential static electrical charge, and in doing so, introduce the potential for an explosion while he was fueling his airplane.