Narrative:

This is a flight I will never forget. I had 2 passengers on board with me for what I thought would be a short and uneventful flight. I had planned on a 45 min flight. During flight both my GPS units failed. After that my dg failed and I noticed I was not getting a very accurate reading from my altimeter. I immediately suspected a vacuum failure but that was not the case. It was isolated problems apparently. I do not have my hours in this particular airplane and therefore I tried my best to diagnose these problems to no avail. Approximately 10 miles out I contacted the tower and told them I was about 10 miles to the west inbound to land. The ATC gentleman asked me to indent I did and he came back pretty upset with me saying that I am nowhere near west; that I was southwest. I thought that was strange that he would get upset about that but oh well; he also told me to report left base for runway 33. We proceeded eastbound looking for the airport. I did not see any lights until one of my passengers; who is a student pilot; said 'they just turned on the runway lights for us'. I said thank you and proceeded to do a visual approach. At about 2;000 ft we had an engine problem to make things worse. There was a loud bang along with some flames coming from the exhaust. My passengers started to get very nervous to say the least. The first thing I did was monitor the engine gauges and reduce power. To this day I do not know what caused this to happen; but we were fine afterwards. About 30 seconds after that; tower controller asked what my heading was and said I was lining up to land on the wrong runway. What else can go wrong during a 45 minute flight? I then proceeded westbound to runway 33. After we landed we informed tower that we were headed to the FBO. He gave us a progressive taxi to the FBO where I went too far on one taxiway and was told I was on a vehicle lane at another time during the taxi. I continued to apologize to the tower control gentleman but he was obviously very upset but did not realize what we just went through. Looking back I made some mistakes even though this is no excuse I was nervous to say the least when everything started to fail (instruments) and then I had an explosion from the exhaust; my passengers literally praying and scared; ATC getting really upset with me for various reasons. I do not know how any pilot with the hours I have cannot get a bit shaken up when all of this is going on around them. I think I learned allot from this flight in trying to block certain aspects out of my head to just aviate the plane the best I can and try to not let outside pressures affect me mentally. I reported the mechanical defects to the place where I rented the plane as well as before taking the plane back to get the advice of a senior pilot with a lot of hours.

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Original NASA ASRS Text

Title: C172 pilot reports GPS and DG failures during a night flight. This leads to difficulties complying with ATC instructions before and after landing.

Narrative: This is a flight I will never forget. I had 2 passengers on board with me for what I thought would be a short and uneventful flight. I had planned on a 45 min flight. During flight both my GPS units failed. After that my DG failed and I noticed I was not getting a very accurate reading from my altimeter. I immediately suspected a vacuum failure but that was not the case. It was isolated problems apparently. I do not have my hours in this particular airplane and therefore I tried my best to diagnose these problems to no avail. Approximately 10 miles out I contacted the Tower and told them I was about 10 miles to the west inbound to land. The ATC Gentleman asked me to indent I did and he came back pretty upset with me saying that I am nowhere near west; that I was southwest. I thought that was strange that he would get upset about that but oh well; he also told me to report left base for Runway 33. We proceeded eastbound looking for the airport. I did not see any lights until one of my passengers; who is a student pilot; said 'they just turned on the runway lights for us'. I said thank you and proceeded to do a visual approach. At about 2;000 FT we had an engine problem to make things worse. There was a loud bang along with some flames coming from the exhaust. My passengers started to get very nervous to say the least. The first thing I did was monitor the engine gauges and reduce power. To this day I do not know what caused this to happen; but we were fine afterwards. About 30 seconds after that; Tower Controller asked what my heading was and said I was lining up to land on the wrong runway. What else can go wrong during a 45 minute flight? I then proceeded westbound to Runway 33. After we landed we informed Tower that we were headed to the FBO. He gave us a progressive taxi to the FBO where I went too far on one taxiway and was told I was on a vehicle lane at another time during the taxi. I continued to apologize to the Tower Control Gentleman but he was obviously very upset but did not realize what we just went through. Looking back I made some mistakes even though this is no excuse I was nervous to say the least when everything started to fail (Instruments) and then I had an explosion from the exhaust; my passengers literally praying and scared; ATC getting really upset with me for various reasons. I do not know how any pilot with the hours I have cannot get a bit shaken up when all of this is going on around them. I think I learned allot from this flight in trying to block certain aspects out of my head to just aviate the plane the best I can and try to not let outside pressures affect me mentally. I reported the mechanical defects to the place where I rented the plane as well as before taking the plane back to get the advice of a senior pilot with a lot of hours.

Data retrieved from NASA's ASRS site as of April 2012 and automatically converted to unabbreviated mixed upper/lowercase text. This report is for informational purposes with no guarantee of accuracy. See NASA's ASRS site for official report.