Srinath flew his first full solo at Livermore today running patterns to practice takeoffs and landings. We used two GoPro cameras today for the very first time, one mounted in the usual spot at the back of the aircraft looking forwards and the other one on the copilot’s window facing the PIC. They both had audio inputs from the radio.

It was a busy day and Srinath was asked to follow other aircraft, extend the crosswind and once even asked to come to a full stop to sequence other departing aircrafts. The solo was uneventful except for a brief period (9:07) on the downwind leg.

I had driven to the hangar to see Srinath fly the pattern. The club’s other plane 733BE had just gone through a 50-hour maintenance and our test pilot conferred with Steve on the maintenance items before he took it out for two touch and go patterns. He was in the pattern behind Srinath. On the ground, Steve and I were watching Srinath.

Tower communicated with Srinath that he was #2 behind a Pitt. No response. Tower tried twice more and still no response from Srinath. I was tuned into LiveATC listening to the ATC and mentioned to Steve that I was worried Srinath didn’t respond to the calls. Within a minute, I heard Srinath check his mic and soon he told tower that he might have a radio problem.

He called it quits after that pattern to my relief. Was there a problem with the headset? We squawk’ed that there might be a problem with the radio. Our club’s maintenance team looked into it and didn’t find any problems. The audio feed into GoPro caught the radio communications just fine. We have not encountered any issues with the headset since. Did Srinath simply get distracted for a while and missed the calls?