When your battery goes flat at 2000 feet
What happens when your battery dies mid-flight, and what it taught me about the difference between checklists and working knowledge.
I found out my plane needed a new battery a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately I discovered this while I was flying 🙃
Some context: in a Cessna 172, the engine and electrical systems work mostly independently. Once the engine is running it doesn’t draw on the battery, so you can keep flying as long as you have fuel. But you need that battery for some pretty important stuff — like your radios.
I was close to my destination when I pressed the push-to-talk button to make a call and it sounded like I was underwater. I tried again, then called for a mic check, but nothing was getting through. Then my electrical fuel gauge dropped to zero and my screens started flashing.
I was only at 2,000 feet so I climbed immediately. One thing you have beaten into you in aviation is that altitude gives you options.
In a plane it’s not like you can pull over to figure out what’s wrong. When one system fails you need to figure out what else might not be working, and whether you can still fly safely. I confirmed it was an electrical issue and that my engine was fine, reduced the load on the battery, and managed to get my radios working again. I made my calls, landed without incident, and being back on the ground felt good.
When you fly small planes they say an emergency is a when, not an if. A big part of training is emergency procedures — engine outs, fires, forced landings. What startled me was how much of it came back in seconds. To climb immediately. That the engine doesn’t need the battery. How much fuel I’d had at takeoff and how much I’d burned. How far you can glide at best glide speed. While I was diagnosing the problem, all of this was just there when I needed it.
That said, I debriefed with a neighbor who flew in the military and we found gaps. I hadn’t considered an electrical fire, and when we talked about what I would have done if my radios hadn’t come back on — which is totally legal, but not the safest — I hadn’t thought about being able to call local towers on my cell phone. Good things to know for next time.
While I would have preferred for this not to have happened, for a first emergency it’s the one you want. Now I’m changing the battery and brushing up on procedures, because you can never know them too well.
Flying is big on checklists, and for good reason. But an electrical outage wasn’t on my checklist. The checklists in the cockpit are for the really catastrophic emergencies, and there are lots of other things that can go wrong where having enough working knowledge to make a fast decision is what matters.
I think about this a lot in the context of work, too. And it’s why I get a little nervous when I see people outsourcing their thinking to AI. These tools are incredibly powerful, but if you’re not building your own working knowledge and context, you may not have the judgment you need when you have to make a fast call.