As a student pilot, one of the things you practice a lot is how to react to unusual situations. This ranges from emergencies (your engine stops working and you’re miles from the airport) to inconvenient (your radio shuts down). One of those situations I’ve practiced a few times usually occurs when I’m set up to land and reach for the flap lever, lowering the flaps to slow the airplane. My instructor would typically say, “What if you pushed the lever down, and nothing happened?” The answer, after some brief troubleshooting, is always to configure for a no flap landing, which is faster, floatier, and uses more runway than a normal landing. It’s always been a hypothetical. That is, until last week.

After seven laps around the pattern, the first hint that something was awry occurred when the plane took off on its own. It only took a second for us to determine the flaps were full down. At the time, I thought it was an error on my part, that I’d bumped the switch during the brief rollout on the runway between touch down and takeoff. We put the flaps back up and everything seemed fine. As we circled around the pattern and got ready for an another landing, I flicked down the flaps switch. Nothing. After a few seconds of toggling the switch and jiggling its connections, my instructor and I quickly realized we had no flaps, and immediately switched into no flap landing mode. We had a direct crosswind and had been practicing crosswind landings, so the combination of no-flap/crosswind landing made it more challenging. See how it went here: