NZFF

Today I was booked in for a flight after school. I Preflighted the club Tecnam as usual, and we taxied out. A little way along the taxiway, we noticed that the plane was drifting right, and we were slowing down. We actually stopped and couldn't get going again without near full power.

So we got ourselves sort of off the taxiway, and shut down. The instructor jumped out, and sure enough we had a flat tyre, the starboard main.

Our wing was still hangin out onto the taxiway, forcing tower to close part of the taxiway, from Taxilink Delta to Charlie. Since landing was happening on 02, all the airline traffic (1900s, Saabs and Dash 8's) had to backtrack along runway 02 and exit via taxilink charlie. And it was all our fault!

We couldn't Lift the aeroplane because of the soft wing material (we'd probably snap them off ), so they'd have to be towed.

So the airport fire service was called, and we drove around a bit till we found the great people at Skytech. We got a trolly from the fire service, and liften the burst wheel onto the trolly and tied it down. From there we used a ute to tow RJE to a maintenance hangar to get it fixed.

So no flying today but I'm booked in for Saturday Afty. Hopefully we'll be doing some wing drop stalls.

Also here's a diagram detailing where we taxied (red dashes), where we stopped (explosion) and the area of taxiway blocked off (red quadrilateral):

oh, a bit sad that you couldn't take to the air- how long did you block the runway for?

We blocked the taxiway, not the runway - proabably for an hour and a half.

Its quite amazing how something so small (your tire blowout) can affect something so big (the national airline!)

Heh yeah, when you looked over at the taxiing turboprops, you could see all the passengers giving us dirty looks out the windows!

HAHAHA Typical BMW Driving yuppies giving a learner flyer dirty looks I would of flashed a one finger solute or a 2 cheek salute as a parting shot just to say enjoy the rest of your flight.

But Seriously thats got to suck being stuck on a taxiway I remember working at the fieldays earlier in the year when we took the bell out we went to take off in the afternoon and it was stuck in the mud let me just say a lot of people cracking up laughing as we rocked the bell out of its holes and then the next day me falling out of the chopper while trying to get in nothing more says drop-kick than falling out of a helicopter as its ready to take-off.