An edited version of this article was originally published in the November, 2012 edition of AOPA Pilot Magazine. The original version is below.

One day, I flew my school’s Cardinal to Hagerstown. Radios inoperative, I telephoned tower ahead of time, agreeing to an ETD, time enroute, an ETA, and to obey light signals.

The flight unfolded uneventfully, save for a borrowed, ailing hand-held. On short final for Runway 2, I had green light and, finally, verbal clearance. I taxied to my turn off, then to the radio shop. Parking outside, I thanked tower for their help, they for my telephone call.

Finally, avionics repaired, I flew our Cherokee to pick her up. My passenger was the Cardinal’s owner, henceforth called Dave. Dave rarely flew at all, much less his airplane. He would bring her home. I would fly the Cherokee.

At some obscure point, the Cherokee suffered the inevitable electrical failure, precluding communication. I considered my options; only one, as I saw it–land elsewhere, telephone tower.

Not long before this event, I was flying several instructors back to our home field. Although neither was my instructor, I suffered an automatic tendency then to defer to another pilot’s authority. Other pilots simply have more experience, I thought, so they must know better.

On this flight, I had set up the landing perfectly. On short final, one suddenly ordered, “Go around! We need to land the other direction, into the wind!” I obeyed, circling around for the reciprocal. On short final again, I realized we were now approaching this short strip with a tailwind, but managed to land her anyway. Consequently, I reluctantly logged a landing far less pretty. As we slowed, he said, “We had a tailwind; we should have landed the other direction.”

I looked at him, saying indignantly, “That’s what I was trying to do, but you said to go around.” He did not respond. I filed that experience away, angry I had let myself get talked into something I knew was not right.

Later, during the Hagerstown trip, after discussing the electrical problem with Dave, he said, “We’ll have to have the guys at the shop fix it.”

I said, “We can’t land at Hagerstown. It’s Class Delta, we need comm with tower. We will have to land elsewhere, then telephone the controllers.”

Suddenly, he became insistent, even aggressive. He pushed and pushed, “It’s okay, use this runway. We have to land. It’ll be okay!” Landing was his goal, not electrical problems, not procedure, not FAA regulations or safety, not even my certificate. Here I was flying a marginally crippled airplane, contemplating effective resolution of this near-crisis, relying upon my limited experience, and he kept pushing landing.

Under his pressure, I folded, simply chose a runway, entered downwind, and flew the pattern to a safe landing, taxiing to the radio shop. Greeting me inside was my personal invitation to telephone the tower. I kicked myself for letting myself get talked into something so egregious. I complied. Then, the tower manager arrived to confront me. He didn’t yell, he was just upset, informing me we’d passed within 500 feet of a scheduled airliner.

I knew I had done wrong and politely tried to explain. He recommended I meet with the local FSDO. I agreed. In my embarrassment and my defense, I reminded him that it was I who had painstakingly telephoned, perhaps talking with him personally, that day several weeks earlier, to arrange passage for the Cardinal in the first place. I explained that, in this case, not only should I have known better, but I did know better.

I admitted I’d never done anything so foolish, but, not to point my guilty finger, my passenger, who also was a pilot, kept pushing me. Even in my infancy as an aviator, I knew the regulations, but he pressured me to do it his way.

The manager said, “Is he an instructor”?

I said, “No, but he’s the owner of the airplane.”

He made a bee line to confront Dave. “Come on,” he said, “you’re both up there together. You had a problem and instead of working together to resolve it, one of you had another agenda. You’re both pilots. You need to work together to resolve the problem!”

What puzzled me then, a phenomenon I understand better now, is Dave’s lack of concern, his apparent disinterest about the matter. Despite his at least partial responsibility in creating the event, while I was being grilled, fearing for my certificate, here he was off fiddling with something inside the cockpit.

Also observing Dave’s cavalier attitude, recognizing me as the pilot earlier who had taken such great pains to do things by the book, to everyone’s satisfaction, the manager now recognized the dynamics in the cockpit that led to this unfortunate event.

Scolding Dave, the manager referred to my expertly orchestrated flight two weeks earlier, saying, “He telephoned us ahead of time and arrived within ten minutes of when he said he would; it was beautiful”! Finally, he said sternly, “Alright, I’m going to let this go, but this is the last time. This keeps happening by other pilots, but no more. This is it.”

I shook his hand firmly and thanked him. Then he left, back to his tower.

As I tried to soothe my frazzled nerves, I thought back through the events that led to that minute, on that fateful day. I knew how to do it properly. That tendency I harbored then to defer to someone who gave the illusion of authority that time almost cost me my certificate.

I was too upset then to be as angry at him as I would become for his hand in setting the stage for this event. Dave further angered the tower manager by repeated efforts at communication by way of these still dysfunctional radios, a tragedy exacerbated by his limited aviation communication skills.

Somehow, I got the radios working. After that, I coached him at every turn as to what to say to this now-furious controller, but Dave muddled through in his own indifferent way, at his own ill-practiced pace, saying pretty much whatever he wanted, how he wanted to say it, incensing the controller. This was his airplane, by golly, and he was determined to be the aviator.

Finally, we were cleared to the active, then for takeoff, Dave stumbling through communications the entire way. Airborne, we climbed southward, back toward Washington, D.C.

I was tired and irritated, my ego bruised from my tongue-lashing, but feeling relieved to have weathered the storm. We finally were headed home.

Not ten minutes passed. Suddenly there was a loud bang, the Cardinal’s nose pitched violently skyward, I was pressed hard into my seat. Dave struggled to get her back to level. He relaxed his grip, again the nose pitched up. As though we needed anymore problems that day, we’d now lost our elevator trim. Needless to say, if he had been a conscientious aviator, instead of content just wearing the shiny badge upon his lapel, he may have caught the problem before it became one.

Anxious for me to get a sense of what happened, he quickly handed control to me. After a moment, still suffering from that inhibition, I handed the yoke back to him. Seconds later, it was back in my hands, this time for good. Having had an epiphany, finally gaining enough insight into his personality and mine, never again did I suffer from that paralyzing force, that force I had let govern too many decisions already.

It was I who flew the entire trip home to Hyde Field, down through the VFR Corridor, that convenient, no-longer-accessible passage between the airports, National and Dulles, a now-distant memory from a simpler, less paranoid era. He admitted he wanted me “to fly and land because you have more experience in this airplane than I do.”

Let’s be honest, my experience, my knowledge, moreover my attitude is what gave me the calm, the focus to learn to fly this thing all over again. Flying was hands-on all the time. No trim. Straight and level meant constant, firm pressure. Climbing involved releasing pressure; descending, even with a power reduction, meant pressing harder. Landing, coming in its own time as landings always do, called for varying degrees of adding, then releasing pressure to level off, bleed speed, then touchdown.

Also markedly different was Dave’s attitude. No longer was he insufferably impatient or controlling, casual or desperate about his agenda. His tense, transparently accommodating demeanor betrayed this experience as sobering him. Unlike during our earlier problem, he now was open to dialogue.

The forty-five minutes home I practiced this unique piloting technique. I realized I’d better land on the first try since the full power of a go-around might make handling her difficult. Mainly though, I was concentrating on the minutes ahead.

I eased through the VFR Corridor, turned east, Davison AAF off my right wing, then crossed the Potomac River, south of D.C. As Hyde Field hove into view, I prepared for landing. With each application of flaps, back pressure increased. Powering back, easing pressure, I leveled off, easing off more and more as we slowed. In the perfect attitude, she chirped onto the tarmac. As I taxied, Dave finally confessed his fear.

Apart from illustrating the importance of far exceeding minimum currency, the moral I finally accepted as a direct result of this experience is to trust myself, never again to let my assumptions of someone’s authority, skill, or experience, or especially his bravado, cause me to doubt myself, my own knowledge, my own skill, and what I know to be right.

This attitude does not imply arrogance on my part, that what someone older, maybe wiser, possibly more experienced or well-intentioned says is or is not the truth. It simply means consciously, intelligently, and assertively assessing the source of that information and comparing what I’m hearing to what I already know, and what I know to be reasonable.