Routine call

I always cringe when I hear ATC say over the radio “We need you to give us a landline when you land. Are you ready to copy this number?”. And I bet I’d cringe even more if this call was directed at me, which hopefully never happens.

I did have the tower of a fairly big airport tell me to call him one time. We were doing a bunch of full-down autorotations and run-on landings for our helicopter training at this airport, which was Class C airspace, while they were directing us around airline traffic. When we left, the tower said “please call us when you land”. It scared the crap out of me. The entire flight I was trying to figure out what I could have messed up on.
After shutting down, I finally made the much-dreaded phone call. And this controller was all excited telling me “That was awesome to watch! Tell all your friends to come over as well, we had a great time!” He also mentioned something about their funding depending on aircraft movements and us touching down every few minutes really helps them out. I was super relieved, but kinda mad at the same time. I told him he could have maybe led with mentioning I’m not in trouble instead of just saying “call us!”. I nearly had a heart attack. He was very apologetic, and said he wasn’t thinking about that part. We both had a good laugh about it in the end. I also ended up using this airport all the time for our company. However, I never told “all” my friends about this airport because I didn’t want too many helicopters over there and mess things up for us. 😉

Mike