I was passenger on a $100 hamburger run.
Note, pilot is fresh on getting her VFR ticket and wanted to get some ground ops experience so she asked me to come along. She also thought it would be cool to capture her comms with ATC so I brought the recorder along. Little did we know how much "communicating" was in her future!
Transponder acted silly on departure and video includes both ATC and in cockpit communications.
Note, pilot is part owner of the C172 and I was totally clueless on the operation of her transponder. She just knew how to push the button to the squawk code. Durn thing is so automated it automatically goes to mode C on take off. My transponder is nothing as techie as what was installed in her plane.
While she was flying the plane in the troubleshooting stage, I had pushed the standby button and saw no display indication that would show the transponder NOT sending the Mode C data. It still displayed the FL data. I would have expected that to disappear when I set it to standby or some indication that Mode C was shut off.
Rather then troubleshoot in an area that was congested with ATC traffic and cause more chaos with an incorrectly reporting transponder, we figured to recycle to see if it would clear it up. Since it didn't clear it up, we canceled the flight following and turned off the transponder since we had cleared KJAN airspace.
Reason for shutting it off was I was afraid we would be seen as "unverified traffic" by center at 700 foot higher then what we really were. Whether these decisions were "procedurally correct" or not I don't know, but the safe outcome of the flight shows the success of the flight.
I had asked the pilot what would she have done had she been by herself, and she said she would have returned back to Madison which in my eyes is as equally a good decision as mine to cancel flight following.
I felt the pilot was incredibly composed considering the extra tasks tossed back at her.
Certain things training sure never covers, and this would be one of them....
For those interested was when I was her second passenger just three months ago. As you can see, she has come a long way on handling an airplane. Just music, no ATC coms on this second video
