Boring is good! For comparison, a boring flight is better than an exciting flight.

Actually, I got a kick out of the one exciting flight I've been on; I didn't know how scared a should have been until I looked at the pilot.

You never want an excited pilot during an "incident". Excited pilots make mistakes. Only when you are safely back on the ground it is okay for the pilot to get excited!

I have had the misfortune(?) of being on several "exciting" flights (the first when I was about 10 years old and the plane caught fire) and I am happy to say in all of them the pilot was icy calm throughout. There is an old saying that "nothing focuses the mind like the thought your hanging in the morning." But from personal experience, an engine fire in a single engine aircraft when you are the pilot in command (the only pilot on the aircraft in fact) over the Mojave desert during a windstorm has GOT to be a close second.

Or, as Will Rogers is said to have wished: “When I die, I want to die like my grandfather who died peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming like all the passengers in his car.”

I was sitting in the co-pilot's seat of a 6 seat Cessna when, as we flew through JFK airspace, I noticed a big, commercial jet cross our path from left to right (I'll guess) about a mile in front of us, and I guess we got caught in the backwash (correct word?) from its engines, and all of a sudden the plane slammed to the left.

It was over in an instant, and the pilot's only reaction was to turn, literally, green. As I said, I didn't know how scared I should have been until I looked at him.

When he told me that he had had a previous similar experience and managed to pull out of the unplanned dive about 300 feet above the ground is when reality sunk in.

Death can be fascinating when you don't recognize it.

The correct term for what you encountered is "wake turbulence" caused by wingtip vortices that are formed when a heavy aircraft flying at slower airspeed passes through the air....those little tornadoes contain contain high energy airflow that, once they leave the wingtip where they formed, tend to fall away and out from their source at around 500 feet per minute as they dissipate. So, in your experience, the crossing heavy aircraft was most likely configured for landing as it was descending about 1,000 feet above your altitude at a point about 2 minutes ahead of you on your flight path.....time enough for a pilot to maneuver to avoid that experience if only he had gotten the training to learn from his prior exposure and anticipate the invisible threat.......ask me how I know .....

A good friend of mine, ex-military and ex-airline with many thousands of hours of flight time, was pilot in command of a twin engined Aero Commander landing on a hot, windless day in Dallas behind a departing "heavy". The wake turbulence from the departing heavy flipped the Aero Commander completely onto its back as he touched down. Everyone was buckled in so there were no injuries but the Aero Commander was totaled. Since that time there have been many changes to pilot training, airport procedures, and even design changes to the "heavies" to mitigate wake turbulence and wake turbulence issues, but it is still there and it will bite the unwary.

Thanks for the correct term and for explaining what I experienced (which has been made even more frightening [in hindsight] by joemike's story).

I don't think my pilot was much past 30, so even if he had flown military prior to his then current job of flying very small planes very short distances, should he have been prepared for what happened and reacted before it happened, i.e. how, if at all, avoidable was the incident?

Afterthought: joemike's engine fire having occurred over the Mojave notwithstanding, should the string of posts beginning with Jon's post #50195 be moved to its own thread?

I think you're right about clipping and moving the portion of this thread that has wandered off into aviation excitement....

FWIW, I experienced an identical exposure to wake turbulence as you've described one night while transiting the LAX airspace in a Kingair C90. The owner was in the seat beside me and the approach controller called out passing traffic, a large airliner easily visible a couple miles ahead and above, descending from right to left across our projected flight path on its' approach to land at LAX....strictly an advisory call as there was no immediate conflict. About a minute or two later we passed through the airspace beneath and behind where we had watched that aircraft pass in front of us and got WHACKED with one very abrupt and impressive thump from their wake turbulence. Unlike the event that JoeMike's pilot friend experienced, we crossed perpendicular to the vortex so both of our wings were exposed to the same direction of its' flow rather than flying into the funnel parallel which would give an up thrust to one wing while giving the other wing a down thrust to flip the aircraft.

My lesson learned from that: tell the controller you need to turn in order to avoid wake turbulence....either a vector to pass farther behind, or a 360° delay turn to wait out the descending vortex until it's below you and no longer a conflict....let him advise you which action is correct to avoid any other traffic conflicts, but do NOT just continue blindly ahead and hope for the best!

As my pilot did.

You'd think he'd have learned after his first incident.

The wingtip vortices can actually be seen when they lay down on the waters' surface at some airports where the approach end of the runway is right at the shoreline.....I was on downwind for landing in the pattern when a large 4 engine turboprop made a straight-in approach to land ahead of me - I watched as the wingtip vortices drifted down onto the waters' surface and dissipated before making my own turn to final for landing in order to ensure that I wouldn't get caught up in the same sort of "excitement" on landing that joe's friend experienced. The other pilot in the airplane with me expressed some significant concern as we rolled out on final because he didn't know that I could and/or HAD seen the turbulence dissipate and he wanted to abort our approach based solely on having followed a heavier aircraft to landing closer than he thought was safely do-able based on time and distance alone....he had never been taught to look for the visible tell-tales on the ground.

...and he was a very experienced and senior pilot with thousands of hours and landings.

On the one hand, judging from his age, I'd bet that my pilot had significantly less experience than that, but on the other hand, he was flying for an airline that probably sent close to 100% of its flights through JFK takeoff/landing/airspace, so you'd think its pilots would have been on the alert for, even if not fully trained to deal with, the inherent wingtip vortices danger.

And under any circumstances, having been bitten once, he should have been twice shy! It wasn't just my life, it was his own.

At least your guy was aware of the danger and reacted based on his knowledge.

(I believe that Pelham Seaplane Service was shut down for failure to properly maintain their planes; perhaps it should have been for failure to maintain their pilots. )