Or you could just go right to your kneeboard (or wherever you have the light gun signal chart written down somewhere accessible in the airplane) and comply with what the tower is telling you, fly the plane, and deal with the rest on the ground (I like option 2 of just fly the plane and land the plane better!). Well you could try and troubleshoot your radio, headset, maybe use your cellphone to try and call the tower directly, etc. Other possibilities are your headset has come unplugged, that passenger that kept touching things they shouldn’t be somehow turned down the volume on the radio, maybe your headset has broken (probably just the earphones have broken and the mic still works, its rare for the entire thing to fail at once), it could be that the radio has failed in some way (battery on your airplane is failing, antenna has come disconected, etc.).

One is that you simply missed the radio calls and did not hear the tower trying to contact you (this is easy and embarrassing to fix, simply answer them on the radio).

So at this point there are a couple different possibilities. There’s only one reason why they would be aiming a light gun signal at your airplane….they tried to call you multiple times on the radio and got no response…. So you happen to be flying around the traffic pattern and notice a glint of light coming from the control tower that catches your eye.

Atc light signal