As a newly minted U.S. Army aviator and UH-60 Black Hawk pilot, being based in the Republic of Korea in 1988 was an ideal first assignment. The cost of living was low, the people were friendly, and the food was great. And then there was the flying. There were few rules in Korea, and as young lieutenants and warrant officers we took advantage and “aired out” our UH-60s often. 

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The rules were simple. Don’t fly into the prohibited area of the capital, Seoul, aptly named P-73. Don’t fly into the Korean president’s TFR. As with the U.S., these were likely to pop up unannounced, or sometimes even move. And don’t ever, ever, stray north of the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone), into the People’s Republic of Korea, also known as North Korea. The North Korean military was known to try and lure aircraft across the DMZ through MIJI, or meaconing, intrusion, jamming, and interference. They’d set up false NDBs to mimic stations in South Korea. In the winter, when fresh snow covered panels indicating the DMZ, they would set up false panels in North Korea, or use other means to lure crews across the border, then shoot them down. Part of our Korea check out was testing on our ability to navigate the DMZ.

One day I found myself on the mission board with another lieutenant and longtime friend, John. We had gone through the lieutenant basic course together and he was one class ahead of me in flight school. We were told to put some hours on an airframe, so we decided to make a day of it.

We would fly up to the northeast corner of South Korea by Sokcho and follow the DMZ to the west. We would hop into Camp Page in Cheongju for some gas and lunch, continue westbound to just north of Incheon, then follow the west coast of Korea down to our base, Camp Humphreys, near Pyeongtaek. A storm had recently come through and dumped some snow, so it promised to be a nice day for flying. Joining us was our crew chief, Sergeant Morey. 

The western side of Korea is dominated by the Taebaek Mountain range, so the first half of our flight would follow valleys and ridgelines. It would be much like navigating in the Rockies. Our UH-60 was well equipped with two HSIs. There were rumors about some newfangled navigation system that was slowly coming online and would use satellites, but that was in the future. We did have a Doppler inertial navigation system, but it was so unreliable we would joke that if we taped 25 cents to it and threw it out the window, we could at least say we lost a quarter. So, we relied on our map, clock, and HSI. I would navigate the first half while John flew, then we would change out after lunch.

The flight progressed well. We hit the east coast of Korea, followed it up to the DMZ, then made a left turn to the west. I was right on the map, and our times were working out. At some point things started to seem a little off to me. A bridge was not where I thought it should be… a valley was not there… At some point I told John to keep flying up a valley to the west. He looked over at me and said, “You mean to the north?” I said no, to the west, and pointed to my HSI that was showing 270 degrees, or a west heading. He responded, “No, my HSI and the magnetic compass show us flying north, and we’ve been flying north for some time.”

I looked at the standby compass; it showed north. I looked at my HSI and it showed west. At some point my HSI had failed and drifted off by 90 degrees, but I did not get a “fail” flag. John then asked the question that was on all our minds. “Sam, are we in North Korea??” I looked at him and responded, “That’s one possibility.”

John immediately turned south, dove down as low as he could, and pulled the collective to get every knot of speed he could milk from our trusty stallion. He would throw in occasional jinks to the left and right in case a young North Korean conscript got a lucky shot off at us. I continued to try and locate us on the map, but everything was running together. Eventually we spotted a South Korean flag at a remote mountain airstrip. This was nothing more than a small dispersal strip with a control tower to be used if war broke out. At this point we knew we were in South Korea. The airstrip had no identifier, and I did not see it on a map. We were getting low on fuel but decided to continue a bit to see if we could nail down our location and proceed to Camp Page. But we agreed that if we got to a certain fuel state we would return to this airstrip for gas.

We continued for about 15 minutes, but our luck didn’t change. John, as pilot in command, made the decision to return to the South Korean airstrip and get gas. I made some calls on guard but got no response. As we made our final approach the control tower flashed red lights at us warning us off. Unfortunately by this point, other lights were flashing at us. Our low fuel lights. 

We landed and were immediately surrounded by Jeeps mounted with .50 caliber machine guns and mean looking Republic of Korea (ROK) soldiers. Their tedium of being assigned to guard a remote airstrip was broken. They had purpose and life. We were escorted to the parking ramp, then given the signal to shut down.

I told Sergeant Morey to tell the guards we were Americans; we just needed some gas. He got out with his hands raised and was only able to get out “We’re Americans…” before being thrown to the ground and having a rifle put to his helmet. We eventually convinced the ROK soldiers we were not North Korean infiltrators, got some gas, and continued our merry way back home, deciding it was best to cut things short. Well, merry except for Sergeant Morey who, for some reason, was silent and sulking the entire way home. We wrote up the errant HSI and it was checked out by maintenance. The response was the one every pilot dreads. “Checked. Could not duplicate.” We then encountered the nonstop comments about lieutenants and maps. Until… a few days later our XO (executive officer) and the maintenance officer were flying the same aircraft, and it happened again. They, however, became hopelessly lost and had to land in a frozen rice patty, hike to a phone, and call for a fuel truck. I guess it goes to show you. Sometimes God smiles on fools and lieutenants.

This article was originally published in the March 2023, Issue 935 of  FLYING.

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In the early ’90s, a friend and I bought a Kitfox. It had a Rotax engine specifically made for airplanes. The worst mechanical event during our ownership was when the exhaust came loose in flight, filling the cockpit with noise and smoke.

Our kids grew up with this little airplane, and we flew all the time with the doors off, with them sticking their heads out into the slipstream for a better view. When a friend put his Cub on floats up for sale, we decided to purchase it. We sold the Kitfox to a friend who owned a powersports business, and that was the end of the Kitfox for me until late Summer 2002. The new owner of the Kitfox then wanted to sell the airplane. The buyer, a student pilot, needed tailwheel instruction, and I agreed to spend some time training him. I did not find out until our first lesson that the student had 55 hours of instruction and had yet to solo. This can be a red flag and may indicate someone is better off trying something besides flying. Because he was the new proud owner of the Kitfox, I agreed to give it a go.

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After two lessons in non-ideal weather conditions, the student had yet to make a landing where I did not have to intervene. On wheels, this lightweight airplane could be a handful for someone of my experience, let alone a newbie. I told our friend it was a lost cause. He asked me to take the student up on a calm evening; if he could not manage landings, then I could call it quits. OK, deal! October 2 featured perfect low-wind conditions, so we met around 5 p.m. to practice landings. There was a light wind out of the northeast so we used Coldwater Airport’s smaller 3,500-foot Runway 3 (now 4). The landings were not going well, but the takeoffs started to get smoother. Around his fourth try, he landed without bouncing horribly and with zero input from me, and then made two more landings without help. As we climbed after the sixth landing, out of the blue he asked, “If the engine quit right now, what would you do?”

I explained that at low altitude, all you can do is pick the best spot straight ahead and push the nose down to keep the speed up for a glide and hope for the best. He nodded, indicating he got the concept. He lined up with the runway and executed his best landing yet. I said, “Wow, nice job,” as we rolled to a stop and took off again. 

I was finally feeling as though I no longer had to watch his every move. I was enjoying a view of the lake off to our right when, at around 200 feet, the engine went silent. It did not sputter like an engine starved for fuel or kick like it had a spark problem. One second it was running at full power and the next, it was completely dead. 

Training kicked in, and I immediately took the controls with no resistance on my student’s part. I shoved the nose down hard because in a climb at a low airspeed, most of the airplane’s momentum is coming from the engine. Without it, I had to use our altitude for airspeed. Once in the glide, the windshield filled with power lines, a busy two-lane highway, and a bowling alley. 

What I saw did not look survivable, so I did what we are trained not to do: I turned the airplane, but not by lowering a wing and banking. I somehow got the idea to push the left rudder and skid the airplane 90 degrees to the west of the runway.

The windshield filled with an unobstructed grassfield, but as comforting as that was, the maneuver had used up most of our precious momentum. The airplane was now in a nose-low, wings-level, minimum-speed descent. As the ground rushed up, I pulled back to raise the nose, but not much happened. The airplane hit with an awful crunching sound, and within a few feet, flipped inverted. As the g-forces of the sudden deceleration hit us, we were thrown against our shoulder harnesses, but they kept our faces off the instrument panel.

I asked my student if he was injured. “I don’t think so.” I told him to evacuate the airplane because of fire risk. We had been flying with the doors locked up and open, so there was no mangled metal in the way of our exit. We released our belts and fell to the ceiling, then rolled out onto the wing. From there, we stood up and ran. We could hear sirens in the distance because traffic on the road saw what happened, and many motorists were stopped and running in our direction. Someone had already called 911. After a few minutes with no fire, my student noticed the strobe lights were still flashing. He asked if he should turn the master power switch off. Smelling no gas, I told him to go ahead. 

The next morning at the airport, two FAA inspectors reviewed my credentials and one asked if I knew the survivability statistics of engine failure accidents on takeoff. I said, “Not very good.” He said so many were fatal, with pilot error being a big factor. He added since I was there talking to him, he wasn’t going to question whether my actions were correct. Since I was still alive, that was proof enough what I did worked. He said, “Let’s go find out what caused the engine to quit.”

There was fuel in the carburetor and ignition on all the cylinders, and the compressions were good, so we tried the starter. Within one blade rotation, the engine came to life. The conclusion? Engine failure from an undetermined reason.

Did you catch two unusual things that happened? The first was the student asking about engine failure procedures right before an actual engine failure. The second was that the engine went from full power to nothing at the worst possible altitude. The Kitfox’s engine has two ignition systems for safety and two spark plugs per cylinder. If one dies, you still have a redundant system to keep the engine running. Two toggle switches by the student’s left knee controlled the two ignition systems.

Several months after the accident, we discovered the student’s life was a bit of a mess. He had lots of debt, troubled relationships, and a huge life insurance policy which specified he was covered under pilot training. Had I not been onboard, his chances of survival would have been close to zero. The question remains in my mind whether he’d planned it that way.

This column was originally published in the February 2023 Issue 934 of FLYING.

The post Buyer Beware appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

In 1976, I was an inexperienced 24-year-old pilot when I got my first “real” flying job. I was hired by a small commuter airline to fly mail at night and passengers during the day in Piper Navajo and Navajo Chieftain twins.

A normal sequence started on day one at 10:30 p.m. in Charleston, West Virginia, flying east to Baltimore, Maryland, then back west to Martinsburg, West Virginia, then further west, ending in Cumberland, Maryland, at 3:30 a.m. the next morning. At 11:30 a.m. on day two, I would fly passenger runs until 9 p.m., then at 9:30 p.m., pick up the airmail run back to Charleston, finishing up around 1:30 a.m. on the third day. At every stop, I had to unload and reload 1,600 pounds of mail and somewhere find time to check the weather and get something to eat.

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This was all-weather, single-pilot flying. You didn’t cancel an airmail run—you flew.

One night, on the Baltimore to Charleston leg, I had an exceptionally heavy load of mail, so I elected to carry less fuel than normal. The weather was forecast to be good VFR at Charleston, so I had no problem with this fuel load. However, when I arrived in the Charleston area, it was (in the old sequenced teletype-style report format) W0X0F, which means “Indefinite, Ceiling Zero, Sky Obscured, Visibility Zero in Fog.” I got the weather in Huntington, West Virginia, and Cincinnati, Ohio—Huntington was down too, but above minimums, and Cincinnati was good VFR. I figured if I flew that direction, I would arrive in Cincinnati with about 15 minutes of fuel, so I chose to fly on to Huntington.

As I continued westbound, passing over the Charleston VOR, Charleston Approach informed me the visibility had just come up to a mile. They then gave me a 180-degree turn back towards the airport, where I could see that the departure end of Runway 23 was clear but the approach end was still covered in fog. They also informed me that this was closing back down pretty fast, and by the time I could get vectored for the approach, it could very easily be zero visibility again. What could I do to get safely and legally in with only 1-mile visibility? The contact approach.

I was only 4 miles from the airport when they cleared me for the contact approach to Runway 5. Fortunately, I had already reduced power and extended the gear and flaps, lining up on the runway and slowing down to get the rest of the flaps out. One steep descent and landing later, I was safely on the ground in Charleston. As I was taxiing in, the visibility dropped rapidly, and the tower informed me that the reported visibility had just sunk to zero again. As I was taxiing the aircraft from the APO (Airport Post Office) to parking, ground control informed me that Huntington had a severe thunderstorm earlier that night, which had knocked out their lighting. I would have arrived at Huntington and not been able to land. Thanks to a momentary break in the fog and the contact approach, I was able to deliver the mail into Charleston instead.

After this incident, I vowed to never put myself in a situation where I did not have enough fuel for other alternatives, and it changed the way I looked at alternate airports—for example, Beckley, West Virginia, sits at a higher altitude and is less susceptible to fogging in. A knowledge of what the FARs said about what I could do was also important.

On another night, flying from Baltimore to Charleston, I was over Elkins, West Virginia, at 10,000 feet msl, and had been experiencing light to moderate icing. I changed altitudes three times to try to get out of it. After having to cycle the wing deicing boots multiple times, I noticed that the aircraft was not regaining speed like it normally would. Hearing the loud banging of ice sliding off the propellers and hitting the fuselage told me that the propeller deicers were working normally. There is only one deicing light, on the left wing, and it was pitch dark outside, so I thought to get my flashlight and shine it on the rightwing. There was almost an inch of ice on that wing: The deicing boot had failed.

I knew I was in trouble and thought about descending, but I realized that would be an irreversible decision—and I could use my altitude to keep my airspeed up if I had to. My airspeed was stabilized at 150 mph (about 130 knots). I thought, ‘OK, she is flying good, so this is a good airspeed and I can get the gear down at this speed.’ I did not know how much ice was on the tail, so lowering flaps would probably have not been a good idea.

I informed ATC of my problem and was vectored onto the ILS Runway 23 at Charleston. I traded my altitude to keep airspeed up and got the runway in sight about 5 miles out. I put the gear down on short final and kept my airspeed at 150, flaring out over the numbers and getting it stopped before I ran off the cliff on the departure end. I found out from the mechanics that with the rain in Baltimore, when I tested the boots before takeoff, some of that water got sucked inside the boot through a pinhole, and this later froze the valve closed, not allowing any air into the boot to inflate it. With this incident, I learned that instead of just reacting, fly the airplane first then think things through carefully so you can make the right decisions.

One other night I was flying from Martinsburg to Cumberland at 3 a.m. I had 1,000 pounds of mail in the back, and it was my last leg of the night. About 30 miles out, the manifold pressure on my right engine went from 30 inches to 23 inches—I had lost the turbocharger. To me, there were three possibilities: 1. The turbocharger had suffered an internal failure; 2. The wastegate had failed; 3. The exhaust manifold had failed.

Well, one and two were not too bad, but number three was, and it would be pumping 1,800-degree-Fahrenheit air into the engine compartment. It took me all of about five seconds to think about this before I shut the engine down. The only approach at that time was a circle-to-land VOR approach to an airport surrounded by mountains and it was night. On the approach, I broke out of the clouds at about 300 feet above minimums (about 1,500 feet agl) and was able to see the runway lights about 5 miles out. I was then able to set up a normal base-to-final turn and land safely at Cumberland. This taught me the importance of knowing my aircraft systems and how they worked so that I could act accordingly. Also, I learned the importance of situational awareness, knowing where I was and what was underneath me.

In more than 30 years and 25,000 hours of flying NAMC YS11s, Douglas DC-9s and DC-8s, and Boeing 767s as a freight dog, I know the unexpected and unplanned will happen: unforecast weather, mechanical failures, even traffic. I learned how to deal with these things by just stopping and thinking first and applying all of the above lessons learned.

This article was originally published in the December 2022/January 2023 Issue 933 of FLYING.

The post Lessons Learned From Flying the Mail appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

In late June 2021, I had a business meeting scheduled in Salt Lake City, Utah, so I was happy to have a good excuse for a cross-country flight from Ithaca, NewYork, in my 1979 Cessna 210N. I had an uneventful flight to the Northern Colorado Regional Airport (KFNL) near Loveland and Fort Collins, where I had planned to overnight and head to Salt Lake City InternationalAirport (KSLC) the next day. I filed IFR for KSLC via the northern route, which has somewhat lower minimum en route altitudes (MEAs). Shortly after passing the Medicine Bow (MBW) VOR, I noticed red flags on both Aspens (PFD and MFD), as well as major electrical discharge indications of the ammeter on the JPI930 engine monitor. I shut off all electronics except the Garmin GTN 750 and headed back to KFNL with ATC guidance. Denver Center suggested a landing at the Laramie airport (KLAR), but I feared there would be minimal maintenance facilities. Besides, the engine was running smoothly and I was in VFR conditions, so I elected to return to KFNL.

About 30 nm north of the airport, I lost radio contact with Denver Center as the GTN 750 screen and the rest of the instrument panel went dark. I connected the Icom handheld radio to my Lightspeed headset and continued trying to reach Denver and the KFNL tower. I was reminded that without an exterior antenna for the Icom handheld radio, its range is only a few miles. Radio communication with the remote KFNL tower was finally accomplished about 4 nm north of the airport as I entered a long left downwind for Runway 33. Denver had offered to give me block space for landing at KFNL, and they diverted traffic until after I landed. They also provided their phone number and requested that I telephone them immediately after landing. After parking the airplane, I called Denver Center and reported my safe landing. They thanked me, wishing me luck.

I then visited Professional Aircraft Services (PAS) and the manager, Larry Hallock. I described the loss of my electrical charging system. He informed me the voltage regulator was not defective, recommending we overnight a 100-amp alternator/clutch assembly from Dallas. This engine was a zero-timed Continental IO-550 with a direct drive alternator, which had not been removed or worked on since its installation at the factory.

The next day, the new alternator/clutch assembly arrived, but in the interim, the PAS maintenance shop had removed the direct drive alternator assembly from my engine and found disturbing evidence of a major hardware failure. I visited the shop and witnessed that the clutch shaft and lock nut in my alternator clutch assembly were loose and wobbly. There was no cotter pin in that shaft/nut assembly as there should have been, and there was visible evidence of metal pieces distributed throughout the engine. In addition, the four 5/16-inch bolts on the crankshaft face gear—which meshes with the smaller alternator clutch gear—were loose, allowing the face gear to “chatter” with the alternator clutch gear.

The cotter pin was conspicuous by its absence—and later found in the crankcase. It appeared to have not been “spread” after being inserted into the castle nut. The shop drained the engine oil, filtering it through a metal screen mesh as recommended by a recent FAA bulletin. Visible pieces of orange elastomer/rubber sealant were present—and when these pieces in the screen were touched with a magnet, multiple bits of ferromagnetic metal were observed. Some orange polymer as well as some small metal pieces were also inside the alternator housing casing, below the large gear on the crank case shaft. The oil filter also showed visible metal particles.

The telltale signs of a major engine problem drove the conclusion that a major engine teardown and repair was needed. Fortunately, KFNL hosts The “New” Firewall Forward engine overhaul shop. Jerry Doyle, general manager, and I agreed to move forward by removing the engine from the airplane and beginning the teardown, inspection, and repair.

An important question was whether the cost would be covered by either Continental, the engine manufacturer, or Avemco, my insurance provider. As noted above, this “new engine” was now 4 years old and had 430 hours on it. Continental informed me that my engine was past the 18-month rebuilt gasoline engine warranty.

I felt that my personal witness of the engine damage during the initial electrical system diagnosis provided substantial evidence for an assembly error when the alternator was installed at the Continental factory. In addition, my photos, which show the missing cotter pin in the direct drive alternator castle nut and related engine damage provided substantial evidence that someone at Continental had failed to follow standard operating procedures in the assembly of the alternator and had made the simple yet damaging error of not spreading the cotter pin after inserting it into the alternator clutch drive castle nut. In providing evidence, I referenced Special Airworthiness Information Bulletin NE-18-16 from June 2018, which described a fatal accident involving a Bonanza equipped with the same IO-550 engine. In the end, Continental compensated me for engine removal, parts, labor, and reinstallation of the engine. As a “Plan B,” I had also approached Avemco with a similar request, and my agent said they would help if needed.

The supply chain shortage problem made the engine rebuild period frustratingly long, and the shops were very busy. Plus, the 210 went out of annual inspection. There were no significant findings when PAS performed the inspection, fortunately. A year later, after my test flight, all looked good—and I flew home the next day.

The post Over The Rockies With No Alternator appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

It was our first night cross-country flight in the B-24, beginning at our base in Topeka, Kansas, on a triangular flight plan across the American Midwest. The aircraft was one in a pool of training B-24s and we’d not flown this particular one before.

We took off in the dark after only a gentle warning of a cold front we would fly over. Heading north, as we approached South Dakota, the weather got rough and wet snow appeared. We began to ice up. Then came the sporadic thump of rime ice thrown by the props against the fuselage. And then, I made one of the classic mistakes one should never make: I took my eyes off the instrument panel and began looking out the side window at the snow and patchy ice on the wing leading edge.

It was turbulent, and one large lurch of the airplane brought my eyes back to the instrument panel. It was awry. The gyroscope of the artificial horizon had tumbled, and the tiny aircraft silhouette was drifting across the instrument face. I reached forward to “cage” the gyroscope and as I did that, I must have pushed the wheel forward with my left hand. Suddenly, we were falling, twisting downwards…airspeed climbing…rate of descent moving toward its limit (2,000 fpm)…airspeed now over 300 mph…artificial horizon telling nothing…airspeed now past the red line on the indicator that said this aircraft should not exceed 355 mph.

I was 23 years old with nine other souls on board, alone at night, in a storm over Rapid City, South Dakota, losing all my altitude. And I was completely lost as to what to do. I was feeling very alone.

I was alone, for my engineer, who had been standing beside me, was forced to his knees by the diving spiral, and my copilot was sound asleep in his fully-reclined seat. There was only me to somehow figure out what was happening and what to do. I screamed, and that helped, and then I heard a voice, that often-damned training instructor’s voice from so many hours of instrument flying under the hood: “Needle, ball, and airspeed. Needle, ball, and airspeed. Damn it, why don’t you do as I say? Needle, ball, and airspeed!” Over and over and over again. 

And that did it. I focused on the instruments. Yes, I focused on the needle and ball. I straightened out the needle with the ailerons and then the ball with the rudder pedals. Now, I could focus on the airspeed (I don’t really remember what it was reading, but the engineer said later that it had reached 420 mph). I began pulling slowly back on the wheel to get the nose up and that airspeed down. Then, suddenly, the wheel came loose and my first thought was that the tail had come off! But it was my copilot, who had been awakened by my scream, brought his reclined seat back up, grabbed the wheel to pull himself forward, and unintentionally put us into a violent change of attitude that by all rights should have broken us up but didn’t. We had zoomed—from a steep dive to a steep climb. And the airspeed had fallen to somewhere around 92, but together we pushed the nose forward to get us level…at long last! Miraculously intact, ourcraft showed an altitude of 5,400 feet msl. The elevations around Rapid City are high enough (3,202 feet msl) to suggest we had been close to hitting the terrain, and afterwards, the navigator said he had seen lights of a city on the ground through the plexiglass dome on the top of his nose compartment! 

We did not do much talking through the rest of the night. We took up the western leg of our assigned triangle and flew straight and level, most of us sharing the unspoken concern—whether our aircraft’s structure was going to hold together. At the first signs of dawn, we noted that our path was converging with what seemed like a line of clouds and agreed it would be imprudent to fly through them with a weakened ship. Then we saw a well-lighted airport below. The code of the airport’s rotating beacon revealed it as Denver. It then dawned on us that those “clouds” were the Rockies and the “high cloud” was probably Pikes Peak. 

We turned and landed back at Topeka a little afterdawn, noted the frightening dive on the airplane’s log, reported it all to operations, and counted our blessings. Three days later, that same B-24 crashed with no survivors. It was last seen in a very steep dive. I assumed the elevator cables had given way. 

But, yes, if you lived in Rapid City in the winter of 1943 and thought one night you heard a large airplane in a screaming dive, you would have never known how close we came to dropping in on you.

The next night’s flight also ran into winter weather during a three-legged trip. This time, me and my crew flew out of heavy ice, seeking warmer weather to the southwest of the front. After landing in Tulsa, Oklahoma—Topeka’s weather having closed in—I met a young woman named Vivien Poe in a bowling alley and, before long, we were married in the chapel at the Topeka air base.

Editor’s note: John T. Foster flew west in 2003 at the age of 83.

The post Look Out, Rapid City! appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

It was the first thing that ran through my mind: “Talk to me, Goose.” But this wasn’t the Hollywood thriller I grew up with—Top Gun—this was a real-life tragedy. I’d just lost my father, and now I had an inflight emergency involving oil fumes in the cockpit and a vibrating engine. 

As we taxied out that morning, the tears started down my cheek. With a shaky voice, I asked for—and read back—my clearance. By the time the Piper Arrow reached rotation speed and lifted off the runway, my sobbing convulsions broke squelch and the tears in my eyes made it difficult for me to see. This was my departure from Leesburg International Airport (KLEE) in Florida after spending the last week of my father’s life by his side in the hospital and then in hospice.

We were flying home from central Florida to Virginia that Wednesday with the promise of a slight quartering tailwind. I felt an altitude of 11,500 feet might permit us to make it nonstop, but we’d have to eke out every efficiency possible, including “cutting the corner” off the coast of Georgia. I engaged the autopilot and contacted Orlando Approach. 

The next hour was a quiet and somber time. The metaphor of “slipping the surly bonds” and flying amongst the angels was not lost upon me. My mind was entranced thinking about the final days and the final words my father and I were able to exchange, replaying them over and over again as if to record them into my brain, never to be forgotten.

We were navigating direct to STARY, the intersection shortcut of choice for mid-Atlantic pilots making the trek to and from Florida. STARY is situated 13 miles off the coast of Georgia and permits an almost arrow-straight flight back to Virginia. I thought of STARY as a good, incidental omen.

We were just south of Jacksonville, about to go “feetwet,” when the faint odor of oil caught my attention. It’s not an unexpected aroma in a 42-year-old airplane, so I dismissed it and returned to reminisce vivid thoughts of my father. A few minutes later, my wife asked, “Do you smell that?” Snapping out of my stupor, I recognized the smell was getting a bit overwhelming, even for our trusty old bird. I confirmed to her that it was the smell of oil but having already convinced myself that it was normal,I said, “It’s OK, no big deal.”

As we approached STARY, I felt the first shudder. I looked over at my wife, and she was reading her book.About one minute later, it happened again. I looked at the engine monitor and then at her, and found her looking up at me. After the third time, the vibrations didn’t stop. “We might have to land in the water,” I told her. “Your job will be to prop the door open before touchdown.” 

I couldn’t believe I had spoken “those words” and—not ever one to be at a loss for them—her silence surprised me. She broke out the rosary beads from her purse and began praying.

I turned 30 degrees left and started making our way towards the angling Georgia coastline. As I looked ahead, I saw nothing but deserted beaches. It turns out, all of what lay ahead was wildlife refuge. Hilton Head was 65 miles beyond, and I thought for a brief moment that it might be nice to become stranded on Hilton Head—but the incessant vibration cut short my daydream.

I suddenly heard my first flight instructor, Jarl, preaching: “The closest airport might be behind you.” With the vast Atlantic Ocean off our right wing, I had only to look over my left shoulder and, as if on cue, there was St. Simons Island (KSSI), about 18 miles distant. It was then that I called JAX Center to report our engine problem. “Roger, 72T, say intentions and number of souls on board?” Wow! I couldn’t believe that I was being asked “that” question.

As I completed the turn towards KSSI, I began to think that this might have a happy ending after all. Descending into thicker air, the normally aspirated engine was able to make more power and consequently vibrated more intensely. I pulled the throttle and prop back in an effort to slow the engine and vibration, thinking that having less power for longer would be better than the engine’s sudden catastrophic loss. Between radio calls to JAX, I joined my wife in reciting the Lord’s Prayer and Hail Marys in alternating fashion. I also began to think of my father, wondering if I’d see him sooner than I had thought I would.

It felt like the next 20 minutes took an hour to pass. Approaching the non towered field, I began making my calls to St. Simon’s traffic 10 miles out. I wanted everyone/any-one to know that I was coming. Once comfortably within gliding distance, I began my circling descent. I continued my slow pull of power, knowing that I could not count on the assurance of adding any power back in. 

The landing on Runway 22 was uneventful. After pulling up to the ramp and shutting down, we didn’t know what to expect. Stepping off the wing, we found a puddle of oil already forming under the engine and a long streak of oil from the side of the cowl extending rearward all the way under the pilot’s storm window.

What was it? The No. 1 compression ring from the No.4 cylinder had decided to disintegrate. Miraculously, the ring remained within its channel on the piston. There would have been no telling our fate, had it come loose and been blown down into the crankcase. The ignored oil fumes was my first indication that the crank case was pressurizing and oil was being blown overboard. But I had missed it, too distracted with grief to take the early hint.

The lesson I learned from this incident is that grief can affect your flying skills just like some medicine can—perhaps more so—since it can cloud your judgment more insidiously than the obvious runny nose or sore throat. Flying while in such intense mourning led me to miss the cues that had been talking to me all along.

The post ‘Talk to Me Goose’ appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

The question, “Are we there yet?” is asked so often by young children traveling with little concept of distance and time that it has become a joke for adults to ask it of each other when traveling as well. It’s not always a joke for adults. For pilots, it can be indicative of your passengers’ disconnect from the flying process, like children strapped into a plurality of seats with their sipper cups and board books for company.

Why do we fly people without explaining to them what we’re doing? Why do we shush inquisitiveness from adults and kids? Some of us make the effort to take passengers along through the walk around and explain what we’re looking for. Some passengers are delighted to learn this, and they should be kept involved in the entire flight, for they might end up in flight school. Others are bored by it and just want to get in and get somewhere: they should fly commercial. How many of us have significant others that fit the latter description? You have my condolences.

The Great Inquisition

A friend has a Van’s Aircraft RV-6 that he often travels in with his wife. When he bought an Aeronca 7AC Champ and he took her on a cross-country flight to a familiar destination, halfway through the flight she inquired, “Shouldn’t we be there by now?” It was no joke.

In the RV-6, she had been quite chatty sitting beside him with the panel before her, and she seemed to be involved in the flight. Stuck in the rear seat of the Aeronca with nothing to interact with but the back of his head, it became clear that she wasn’t the least bit involved in the flight, and it turns out she really hadn’t been that involved during the RV flight.

On the return flight, he had her sit in front and do most of the flying. He no longer shared flight plans with her—he discussed them with her, and let her decide what the best route would be. She caught the bug, took an online ground school, and hired a local CFI for the air work. Within a year, she’d passed the knowledge test, found a designated pilot examiner who could fit in the RV-6, and earned her private pilot certificate. Flying isn’t for everyone, but we won’t know if flying is for our “one” until we involve them.

When I carry passengers in rough conditions, I have to keep them fully engaged with navigating or flying the airplane, just to avoid motion sickness. In Flight of Passage, Rinker Buck memorialized his nausea in the back seat of the family Piper PA-11, begging his brother—while being slammed by Taconic turbulence—to let him fly so he could keep his breakfast down. We can learn from his experience.

Teaching Leads to Mastery

The best way to master a subject is to teach it. We’ll never possess all the answers, but we can learn humbly from the questions others ask. (If you’re a narcissist, fully aware of your incompetence, and can’t admit that you’re ignorant of or wrong about anything, go to a golf course instead of an airport.)

By sharing our experiences and imparting knowledge to our passengers, we exhibit our respect and caring for them. The airlines are required to conduct a passenger safety brief prior to every flight. How many of us do this in GA? The preflight brief is the minimum we should be teaching our passengers. If they appear disinterested, keep them involved anyway, at least until the aircraft is tied down or chocked at the destination.

There may be social obstacles to sharing our passion for flight with our passengers. I’ve been accused of mansplaining how to perform slips on final and how to time magnetos (it may have been my gesticulating with manly hands and my use of the expression, sparky-sparky that gave this impression).

Trying to connect with someone toting a cell phone is also a source of frustration. The “not my job” attitude can be exasperating, usually expressed with, “Why are you telling me this?” I typically respond with: “Because I’ll need your help.” Once their eyes stop rolling, I keep them busy with a finger on the chart and their eyes looking out, a vintage luxury that glass panels sorely lack.

A Wake-Up Call To Promote GA

Recent advances in avionics have minimized pilot workloads to the point where boredom can be more of a safety issue than the complacency that accompanies our overconfidence in the sparky-sparky system. Years ago, most GA autopilots performed altitude and heading duties only. There is no more helpless a feeling than hearing the faint voice of someone on the frequency who, while flying on top to the coast, succumbed along with his passengers to the soporific drone of well-synchronized props, awaking almost two hours out over the ocean with only 40 minutes of fuel remaining. For some, the greatest compliment a passenger can give a pilot is to fall asleep during the flight, but the best compliment is actually to stay involved with the flight.

The next time we hear—“Are we there yet?”—let it be a wake-up call that we could be doing more to promote GA by engaging our passengers more in our flying.

This article was first published in the 2022 Southeast Adventure Guide of FLYING Magazine.

The post Are We There Yet? appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

“Would you go to Hanover County, Virginia, and fly the Cub I just bought to my grass strip in southeastern Wisconsin?” A friend in need asked me—and I was happy to make the trip.

“Sure.” So I flew commercial into Richmond where the seller picked me up, then introduced me to the prewar Piper J3L-65 Cub. She was original and in remarkably good shape, so I prepped her for the trip and slept on the FBO’s couch that night.

We departed at dawn intending to complete the 600-mile jaunt back to Wisconsin in one day, provided we could pass the bottom of Lake Michigan before a storm system blowing up from St. Louis, Missouri, arrived.

The Lycoming 65-hp engine smoothly pucketa-pucketa’d along, and the skylight made the cockpit a bright and cheery space. We were warmly greeted at both fuel stops. During the second stop, I checked on the weather: The front was west of Indianapolis, moving northeast. My goal transitioned to something similar to Rinker and Kern Buck’s Flight of Passage: A True Story: If we could just get into Indiana…

Passing Grand Lake in western Ohio, dark anvils dominated the western horizon. Since there were several small airports south of Fort Wayne, Indiana, I decided to race the front to one of them, or divert east to Van Wert County. The O-145-B2’s stack was roaring at 2,500 rpm and the head gaskets held, but that pudgy USA 35B airfoil was no match for the winds aloft.

With an anvil looming above, I noticed an orange blob below: a windsock, limp on its pole beside a small hangar. The adjacent narrow strip of green beckoned us. We peeled off into a descending turn, slipped down to the eastern threshold, and settled into—not onto—grass that was well over two feet tall, through which the old wooden Sensenich prop was now flailing.

We were committed to waiting out the storm here—I had to throttle up to keep us moving. Using the hangar as a reference, we snaked through the grass to where there would likely be tiedowns. Facing the hangar, I shut down, leapt out, and managed to find three old tires—with nylon ropes still inside through the fescue forest. I lifted the tail and repositioned the old girl between the tiedowns. With the front roiling above, I tied down the wings and was just pulling the lock knot tight on the tail rope when the frontal gust hit hard. The old ropes, green from disuse, managed to hold fast as heavy raindrops began drumming the fabric.

I slid into the back seat and closed up the cockpit. It was like being in a car wash. The winds rocked us against the ropes. I fastened the seat belt, lest a tiedown fail and we get flipped. Then I discovered the skylight leaked, just above me. The wind eventually died down and the downpour subsided to a gentle rain with lots of virga drifting by. The visibility wasn’t improving: we were down for the night.

Mosquitoes—protected from the rain by the wings and having discovered every opening in the cockpit—harassed me for blood with their unwelcome whine. As dusk closed in, I rinsed down some snacks I’d brought along with water from a canteen. I stepped outside under the wing and was promptly ambushed by mosquitoes. I retreated to the cockpit, closing the door and window with their poorly kept promises of protection.

I hung my legs over the front seatback, trying to get comfortable—I tried straddling the seatback, I tried positions that a yogi wouldn’t attempt, and I crawled over the seatback to try various contortions up front, all to no avail. The front seat seemed more exposed to the whining marauders, so I returned to the back seat and hunkered down.

The temperature dropped, and my A-2 flight jacket was no match for the damp cold. I needed to layer up, so I stuffed the few articles of clothing I had inside the jacket and zipped it all the way up, tucked my hands into my armpits, and shivered myself to sleep. The cycle of drifting off to sleep, hearing a whine close by, swatting the air until quiet was restored, and drifting back to sleep continued until dawn. Fortunately, I could see clear skies to the west.

I ventured out on feet too frozen to feel, stretched my legs, and performed a walk around, removing torn grass from the lower tail wires, wing struts, and main gear, and untied and coiled the ropes back into their tires. I stomped the grass down under the prop and examined both it and the air filter. The filter was clean, but the prop had a definite green hue to the brass leading edges. I completed the preflight and prepared the cockpit.

The eager Lycoming started on the first blade and pucketa’d away as her oil warmed. I performed a quick run-up and began a high rpm taxi through the rough to the far end of the runway. To turn around at the end, I had to get out and pick up the tail as if she had a tail skid.

At the other end of the runway was a typical paved country road with a set of power lines and a barbed wire fence running alongside, with a soybean field beyond. I could see up and down the road. There was no traffic for this humble runway, so I fed in the power, and flailed grass about three quarters of the way down the runway. That Lilliputian Lycoming gave us all she had—not much—but it was enough to get above the grass and into ground effect. Keeping the nose down to build speed, the Cub and I departed between power lines and fence, climbing out over the soybeans, headed for home.

It’s easy to romanticize flying cross country in an antique: It’s just you and an aging airframe with an anemic engine spinning a wooden prop on some grand adventure, but we still need to exercise good judgment. Racing a cumulonimbus to achieve an impulsive goal is foolhardy, and not diverting to your planned alternate is stupid.

Being in a hurry to land, then landing at a strange airport without first verifying its condition, is poor practice. Compounding that error, I put myself in a hurry to leave. I ignored my fatigue and the runway conditions, and performed a risky stunt. I could have napped while a local farmer mowed the grass. Then I would have cleared the power lines by 50 feet.

All the poor decisions that should have led to our demise were in perfect alignment. I got away with it, yes, but not because of skill, nor luck: it just wasn’t our time…then.

The post Racing a Storm Is Not the Best Choice appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

We’re not going to talk about “winter flying.”

This is about flying in winter—when you are on a scheduled commute. It’s about adding extra time towarm up the airplane and clear the ice and snow from in front of the hangar. And, it’s about all the things that can go wrong when you are trying to warm up the air-plane and clear ice and snow from in front of the hangar.

During my first years of flying from Maine to Massachusetts, I didn’t have a hangar, so I didn’t have to clear the ice and snow from in front of it. Instead, my airplane, a 160 hp Piper Tri-Pacer, The Rocket, was parked on the ramp at Central Maine Regional Airport (KOWK) at Norridgewock. I had hired a local seam-stress, an expert furniture upholsterer, to make wing and fuselage covers for the airplane.

These covers were a complex thing of beauty. The hard part was getting the main fuselage cover up and over the twin antennas on top of the cockpit. Once those antennas found their way through the proper holes—cut especially for them—everything else would fall into place.

After mastering the shortcuts of covering your air-plane, you then have to learn to do it in a strong wind at night, and/or sliding around on ice. More than once on icy, windy nights, I spent more time covering the airplane than I did flying home from Massachusetts.

Just because The Rocket was on the ramp did not mean I did not have to clear ice and snow. My winter air-port is owned by the town of Norridgewock. The town brain trust evidently takes a legal view, rather than a common-sense one, of snow removal: If plow trucks get too close to the airplanes, they might damage them, resulting in costs to the town. Therefore, plow trucks stay far away from the airplanes for which they are ostensibly plowing snow. This results in anywhere from 3 feet to 5 yards of snow in front of each airplane.

After a mere 6-inch snowstorm, this “front yard” of snow becomes a pleasant form of moderate exercise—away to get one’s muscles limbered up before flying. After a 30-inch snowstorm, usually followed by blowing wind and drifts reaching almost twice that high, this “exercise” becomes an hours-long beatdown.

During this particular snowstorm, I tried hard to cajole the plow truck driver to get as close to my airplaneas possible. A man of Norridgewock integrity, he wasn’t cajolable.

“Shame on you—are you from New York?” said the look on his face.

“No, I’m from ‘Exhausted’ and fed up with this symbolic snow plowing,” said the look on my face. He wouldn’t budge.

On the way into the airport, I had noticed his car. It had a large R/C airplane sitting in the back seat. “This guy loves airplanes,” I thought. I asked him if he’d like to go for a short flight.

“I’d love to go for a short flight,” he said. “I’ve got some time. I’ll take you up for a few minutesbefore I fly to Massachusetts,” I replied. “Maybe some other day,” he said. “By the time you get all that snow dug out in the front of the plane, you probably won’t have all that much time. Besides, I’ve got a lot of plowing to do.” And he did, just not in front of my airplane.

The Gift That Keeps on Giving

Maine winters can push you pretty hard, but this push comes with a gift: It makes you pay attention to nature. And when you do, you become more aware of the dramatic natural beauty that’s all around. This struck me particularly on one cloudless night. I was standing on the ice in front of my rented hangar. The sky was a blanket of stars with the arc of the Milky Way easily visible, running in a gray line north to south.

I pulled The Rocket out of the hangar by scattering some sand on the ice in front of the nose wheel to give my feet a bit of purchase. I had tried using slip-on cleats before, but when you’re tugging on a 2,000 pound airplane, the cleats tend to roll off your shoes.

I got the airplane moving a bit and was looking up to take in the inspiring display in the heavens. The mo mentum of the airplane was pushing me, gliding me slowly across the ice. Just then, my heels hit a ridge in the ice and I fell backwards in front of the nose wheel— one leg on either side of it—with the Tri-Pacer gathering speed as it cleared the hangar on a gentle downslope toward the taxiway.

This was not a good position to be in. It seems obvious that the immediate remedy would be to squirm backwards faster than the nose wheel is closing in on your personal property. It became clear, however, thatyou can’t squirm backwards as quickly as you would like, when your fanny is on glare ice. Out of prudence, I raised one leg and kicked hard at the turning nosewheel, regretting that I had removed the wheel fairings for winter flying.

The danger of kicking a turning nose wheel with an airplane bearing down on you—while lying flat on your back—is having your foot thrust under the wheel. Fortunately, the hard kick propelled me across the dark ice and gave me enough room and time to swim and slide out of the way of both the nose wheel and the main gear. Lesson learned. Now when I move The Rocket around on ice, I bring along more sand—a lot more sand—and apply what the British call “utter caution.”

By February or so, the snow outside the hangar—having been cleared more times than I can remember—had combined with the snow that had fallen off the hangar roof to become a foot-high ridge of solid ice. The path in front of the hangar was now reduced to three wheel ruts painfully sculpted with a pick and ice scraper. In fact, the phrase “clearing ice” is a bit comical. No one actually clears ice. You chop away at it until you are ready to collapse, and then you live with what’s left.

By early March, even the wheel ruts seem too deep to navigate. The ice mound in front of the hangar has been shaved down just a tad, allowing me to start the airplane in the hangar and drive it at near full-throttle up and over the ice and out into the clear, sacred space where the airport plow truck has done its symbolic work.

Getting the airplane back into the hangar, usually at night, means somehow getting it up and over that ice dam. This can’t be done with the muscles of one human being. I pondered taxiing the airplane face-first into the hangar, but that would just set up the problem of get-ting it out the following week. The solution: I bought a manually operated winch and installed it in the back of the hangar. The Tri-Pacer has a great sturdy hook under its tail, making it easy to winch it in backwards. But the process takes the better part of an evening in summer and most of a night in winter.

Survival Kit Basics

I have always carried a survival kit in the Tri-Pacer; it seems like an optimistic thing to do. It consists of a narrow-cut mountain backpack and a separate nylon bag with a pop-up, two-person tent, a tarp, and one of those squashable sleeping bags that folds to the size of a football. In the pack are a change of clothes; some thin, wool underwear; a couple pairs of Smartsocks, which combine wool and synthetic fibers; a wool “watch cap”; a good hank of nylon rope; three small, sealed tins of tea; and three or four of those old-fashioned, liquid-filled cigarette lighters.

Living in Maine, I used to keep one of those liquid lighters squirreled away in every jacket I owned. TSA agents gradually confiscated most of them as I tried to board commercial flights.

Probably the most important item in the survival backpack is my huge Gurkha knife, or kukri. It looks like a big Bowie knife with a down-curving, 30-degreeangle in the middle of the blade. Also, I’ve always kept a first-aid kit and a quilted, three-quarter-length coat—good for sub-zero weather—tucked away on the shelf be-hind the back seat.

Of all the hazards of flying in winter, the hardest one to detect is baggage creep. It occurs over a period of several winters; and then, one sunny February morning, you realize you’ve been lugging 75 pounds of stuff with you in the back of the airplane. In addition to the tent, sleeping bag, and survival backpack, you now have onboard a big plastic bin full of tools, hydraulic fluid, duct tape, extra inspection port covers, a nylon bag full of heavy tie-down stakes and rope, plus wing, windscreen, tail and cowling covers, and a 10-pound jumper cable with a special fitting on it for starting a Piper.

At some point, you have to inventory all this stuff and decide what you really need because it’s getting out of hand. Come some blistering hot summer day, all of this survival gear and these extra tools are going to prevent you from clearing the trees at the end of the runway. Of course, if that does happen, you’ll have everything you need to survive.

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the Q1 2022 edition of FLYING Magazine.

The post In Winter, It’s Not the ‘Flying’ Part That Gets to You appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

Oh, those early flying years—making no money to speak of but being a commercial pilot flying for a living. Troubles seemed so far away. I had my first job after graduating college as a flight instructor in Indianapolis. Life was grand, what could go wrong? I was married to a registered nurse who could support us, and I could go flying every day.

It was a beautiful Indiana winter morning in 1973. What a great opportunity. One of my instrument students owned his own aircraft, a Cessna 210, and was letting me borrow it for fuel to take a quick two-day vacation to Disney World in Florida. My wife and I were so excited. We’d been married for not quite two years, with no children yet—three to come later—and we were inviting our chief of maintenance, Jerry, his wife and their two small children to go with us.

All six of us packed up and had a wonderful flight down, first to Memphis (KMEM), Tennessee, for fuel, then Daytona Beach (KDAB), Florida, for more before arriving at Orlando Executive Airport (KORL). Mickey Mouse, here we come! Well, after one great day at Disney, it was time to head back to the cold, desolate state of Indiana.

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The preflight and engine run-up seemed fine—I mean after all, I had the chief of maintenance with me. We both noticed what looked like a flutter on the oil-pressure gauge, but good pressure registered on the gauge.

Takeoff was smooth—the night air crisp and clear—and we were off for Chattanooga (KCHA), Tennessee, for our first fuel stop. I’d filed an instrument flight plan and all was going well, yet it still seemed like there was a flutter on the oil-pressure gauge. The engine was running smoothly, but Jerry and I both decided to stop before the Smoky Mountains and check into this in more detail.

I was about to change our destination with Atlanta Center when it happened. The engine just sputtered and stopped. I called ATC to report our problem, and when restart was futile, I announced to the controller that I had lost my engine and wanted to spiral down to whatever this airport was that I saw below me.

I’ll never forget the next two broadcasts from the controller: First, “I understand you lost your No. 1 engine?”

I reply, “No, I lost the engine.”

“Oh, you’re cleared to do whatever you want. Let me know how it turns out!”

Fun aside now. I’d trained hundreds of students in engine-out procedures in single-engine airplanes. Set up best glide speed, select the best landing spot. Things were a little more difficult than with my students though. It was night, I was in a retractable-gear aircraft that uses the engine-driven hydraulic pump to operate the four gear doors and the gear itself—and I had my family and another person on board.

You don’t want to get too “dirty” with a lot of drag while gliding, but I wanted to use the windmilling prop to assist in putting down the gear. (No gear-up, dead-stick emergency landing for this pilot that night.)

Well, lo and behold, the gear came down before the slowing airspeed stopped the prop. We spiraled correctly and touched down as if nothing was wrong. We coasted onto the FBO ramp and came to a halt near the fuel pump. “Need some fuel?” asked the lineman scurrying up to help. “No,” I said. “It’s a little more problem than fuel for us tonight.” I later found out that my wife was asleep as we glided down and was awoken by the other woman telling her that she didn’t want my wife to die in her sleep. My wife later admitted she would have rather not been awake during a night crash.

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To make this long story short, nothing could be done to determine the fix for the airplane that night. We found out later that the No. 6 cylinder ring had cracked and then broken, causing the loss of all oil pressure. Trying to get home that night is another dreadful story, but we made it after sleeping all night in chairs at the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. And the airport where we landed? Oh yeah, it was in Eastman, Georgia—you know, of Eastman Kodak Co. fame. Anyway, a new engine was shipped there, and Jerry and I returned a week later to install it and flew home. That too is another story, but I learned about flying from that.

Editor’s note: This article originially appeared in the December 2021 issue of FLYING.

The post A Flutter in the Gauge appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

Most pilots don’t need an excuse to go fly on a calm, sunny Saturday morning, but on this particular day, I had a good one. The plan was for my Cessna 172 to be part of a four-airplane formation, launching from St. Louis Downtown Airport (KCPS) at about 10 a.m. to fly over a parade in St. Louis, Illinois. The event was a peace march organized by the widow of David Dorn, a retired Black St. Louis police captain killed by looters on June 2, 2020,  while he was protecting a friend’s pawn shop during the unrest following the death of George Floyd.

My VFR flight started an hour earlier from Smartt Field (KSET) near St. Charles, Missouri, which is just a short 20-minute hop from the west. After landing at KCPS and meeting the other three pilots, we took off in quick succession, with permission and coordination from the tower.  Shortly after takeoff, the local controller handed us over to St. Louis Tracon, which then coordinated the flyover above the parade route.

Despite the haze, everything went perfectly well, and after the flyover, each of us split off to fly back to our home airports. I decided to fly back to the north over the scenic Mississippi River, and I coordinated with the KCPS controller again until my airplane was out of his airspace near Granite City, Illinois. From there, I skirted east of the St. Louis Class B airspace by staying over the Mississippi and tuned my radio to the unicom frequency, 122.7, for KSET traffic.

As I was flying in the haze over the confluence of the mighty Mississippi and the Missouri rivers at 2,000 feet msl, I saw a small cloud moving quickly toward me. Yikes—a large flock of snow geese over the Mississippi flyway! Who would have ever expected to see them in late August? For the uneducated, snow geese do not fly in a “V” formation typical of Canada geese but instead fly in what appears to be a small white cloud. After a quick bank to the right, I was out of their way and continued on.

Next, I transmitted on 122.7 to alert other pilots in the area of my position at 2,000 feet over Alton, Illinois, which is about 10 miles east of my home field. Seconds later, another pilot reported taking off from Runway 36 at my home airport, with the intentions of flying east. I assumed she heard me and would fly well below my westbound track. Remember the old saying about why you should never “assume” anything? This bears repeating.

Then it happened again—another large flock of snow geese suddenly appeared and another evasive maneuver was made. This distracted me so much, I forgot about the other airplane.

Within moments of banking out of the way of this second flock of snow geese, the ADS-B began yelling, “Traffic 12 o’clock, traffic 12 o’clock.” Drats, I could see nothing but the haze. Even though I had turned on the anti-collision lights, strobes and landing lights for an extra layer of protection in the reduced visibility, a Cessna 152 suddenly appeared head-on in my windshield. As I climbed to my right, the other airplane dived to the left. We were close enough that I could confirm it had the same tail number as the airplane taking off a few minutes earlier. Thankfully, the rest of the flight was uneventful.

There are plenty of lessons to be learned from this flight. First, always be vigilant when flying near a migratory-bird flyway, regardless of the season.

Second, exercise extreme caution while flying in haze. 

Third, never assume other pilots hear or understand what your position is—or what your intentions are. 

And finally, communicate. Initially, I was mad at the other pilot for nearly causing a catastrophe, but then remembered it was my responsibility to communicate effectively with others to make sure each of us knows where we are and where we are going.

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the November 2021 edition of FLYING Magazine.

The post A Flock of Geese Triggers Another Hazard appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

It was 2001, and an IFR-approved panel-mounted GPS had just been installed in my airplane, a Cessna 180. I was anxious to see it in action with its moving map, multitude of functions, and the information it provided. A short 20-minute flight to a nearby airport for breakfast with a friend and some hands-on use of the new equipment was in order.

The weather at the breakfast airport that morning was not VFR because there was a low marine stratus layer. The AWOS reported instrument conditions, with a 300-foot overcast but reasonable visibility of 4 miles below the cloud deck. Because I pride myself by staying instrument current, this would help me stay current.

The airport is served by an ILS (with 200-foot and half-mile minimums), and the local approach controller can give vectors for the approach, though they lose radar coverage around the final approach fix.

I asked the controller for the approach using a pop-up clearance, and I quickly received one with assigned altitudes and headings. As I entered the clouds, the GPS provided course information to the airport. I completed the before-landing checklist, verified the settings on the radios, knobs and switches for the approach, and listened to the Morse-code identifier for the ILS to verify that the approach frequency was properly identified. I reviewed the approach plate one more time.

I loaded the approach into the GPS—albeit this would be a backup to the primary navigation instrument, an HSI that would be presenting localizer and glideslope information from the ILS transmitter. The only new piece of equipment installed was the GPS; the rest of the radios had been in place for years and worked well. I enjoyed the tracking of the flight on the GPS’s moving-map display, and I wondered how I had managed to fly 40 years without one.

Somewhere on an extended base leg—at about 8 miles from the airport and a thousand feet above the final approach fix crossing altitude—the localizer came alive with correct steering information. At the same time, the glideslope needle appeared from the top of the HSI instrument case and centered itself.

The controller gave me a heading to intercept the localizer and a descent to the final approach fix altitude. The approach appeared normal, just like a hundreds of others that I had flown. Shortly afterward, the localizer centered, and as I was descending, the glideslope remained centered. Monitoring the progress on the GPS, I could see the passage of the final approach fix and observed the marker beacon flashing along with its audio signal and the reversal of the ADF needle. I reduced power for the final approach, started the approach timer, reviewed the decision height and missed-approach instructions, and listened one more time to the latest weather on the AWOS—still 300 feet and good visibility underneath.

I continued the approach. I thought to myself what a marvelous job I was doing tracking the localizer—it is easy with an HSI and the map on the GPS. Descending through 1,000 feet and still in solid cloud, every indication suggested this was just another typical ILS, and soon, the airport or lights would be visible. I continued the descent.

When flying IFR approaches, I try and stay on the gauges until I’m obviously clear of the clouds and can see the runway. At about 200 feet above the decision height, I started to see the ground out of the side window with my peripheral vision. I glanced up, and to my amazement, all I could see were trees—big trees. They were everywhere, surrounding me.

I immediately arrested the descent and applied go-around power and started to climb. I missed hitting the trees but only by a few feet. I reentered the clouds and called a missed approach to ATC. As I transitioned back to the instruments, the localizer was centered as it should be, but I was astonished to see the glideslope also centered during the climb. It should have been pegged at the bottom of the HSI as I climbed.

I was now well-above the glideslope in the missed approach, still the needle remained centered. It remained centered until I selected a different navigation frequency. I had just flown an ILS approach with inoperative glideslope, and I didn’t realize it. The glideslope needle was moving up and down during the approach, was it not? I was correcting for its movements up and down with power and elevator inputs, right? The answers were all “yes”; I believed I was following a live glideslope. In reality, it was dead. If it moved at all, it was very small and probably caused by electronic noise. I had just cheated death.

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I have since reviewed that flight over and over, as well as my HSI’s operation to understand its normal and abnormal indications. The “HDG” flag will appear when the aircraft’s heading is not in agreement with the remote gyro’s input from a flux detector. This is the slaving system, and it was working fine. A second flag also exists, known as the “NAV” flag. It appears if there is no signal to drive the course needle coming from a VOR or localizer transmitter. I have GPS steering also available on this instrument. When there is a valid VOR, localizer or GPS signal, the flag disappears, and the course needle comes alive.

A third flag of sorts is the glideslope indication. For the needle to appear, a valid glideslope signal must be received. This is paired with the localizer frequency and simply set into the VHF radio. If there is no glideslope signal, the glideslope needle disappears into the top of the instrument case—as in a localizer approach. If there is a signal, the needle comes alive and follows the signal. The mere appearance of the glideslope needle is the indication that the HSI is receiving the signal, and the position of the needle on the instrument case indicates the position of the aircraft with respect to the course being followed. On my HSI, there was no flag to tell you that the glideslope is working.

Upon returning to the maintenance shop, it was discovered that in the process of installing the GPS, a wire had separated from a plug on the back of a radio. This wire was the circuit that drives the up/down indication for the glideslope in the HSI, and when this occurred, the glideslope needle appeared but centered itself to the on-course indication.

Many airplanes have a second glideslope indicator for redundancy; mine does not. Lastly, controllers tell me that they have the responsibility to vector an airplane for an ILS approach so the airplane intercepts the glideslope from beneath it—not at the glideslope or above the glideslope but from below it. In my case, the first indication of a live glideslope was a centered indication; I should have been suspicious of it from the beginning rather than simply following it—almost into the ground—short of the runway.

The post I.L.A.F.F.T.: The Glide Slope appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

In fall 1967, I was a Marine second lieutenant and completed my first solo in a Navy T-34. After a couple of times around the pattern, the instructor got out, slapped me on the helmet, and told me to make three touch-and-goes and come back to pick him up.

In fall 2017, I completed my last solo, this time in a flight school’s Cessna 172. Between the two, a lot of gas went out the exhaust as I chased flying jobs.

After that first flight, I went through VT-2 at Whiting Field in Florida, flying the magnificent T-28C/B. Having requested jets, F-4s or A-6s, I found myself in North Carolina at New River Marine Corps Air Station, flying the CH-46 Sea Knight—a helicopter later called the “Phrog,” but in a loving, respectful way.

For me, flying Marine helicopters in Vietnam was the ultimate adventure. The job itself was simple enough: take care of the “grunts” on the ground, regardless of weather or the fact you were regularly being shot at. I loved it. I flew for a year, came home with a bunch of medals and, after a tour in the training command, was unleashed on an unsuspecting civilian world.

I ultimately wanted to fly for the airlines, but airline hiring has more ups and downs than a pork-bellies futures chart. I interviewed with the “spooks” but wanted an accompanied mission of some kind. I talked with Air America but found the same problem: no families included.

A few years later, I was on the Hawaiian island of Maui, still not flying, but I was bartending and having a lot of fun. I realized that I couldn’t do that forever—that I should go flying, which I could do forever. After sending out a batch of résumés to various companies in Hawaii, I was picked up by Aloha Island Air, flying de Havilland Twin Otters around the islands.

After three years with Aloha Island, and a lot of library time searching for operators in Africa, I was hired by Air Serv to fly Twin Otters out of Lokichogio (“Loki”), Kenya. Loki was on the border with Sudan, which was embroiled in its continuous civil war.

In many ways, the job was similar to the one in Vietnam: rough country, taking care of relief workers in a hostile area, but not shot at as much.

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After Sudan, I was working for a drilling company in Algeria, working a five-weeks-on, five-weeks-off schedule in the virtual center of the Sahara. Finally, through connections I had made in Loki, I was hired by Champion Airlines to fly the “big iron,” Boeing 727s. Later, I was in 737s and Twin Otters for Saudi Aramco in Dammam, Saudi Arabia. I was there on 9/11—an interesting time.

Returning to the US, I taught ground schools and got my CFI-I. I worked for flight schools in the Los Angeles area and enjoyed the interaction with the students until one porpoised on her first solo landing and tore up the airplane. So much for that job. Fortunately, she wasn’t hurt.

I was hired by a Cessna Caravan company in Hawaii, but things started to change. During training, I couldn’t remember simple procedures or checklist items, things that I had easily mastered in previous years. Consequently, ground school did not go well.

I returned to the mainland and worked for a flight school out of Santa Monica Municipal Airport (KSMO) in California, but the problems continued. I didn’t tie down an aircraft—twice. I wasn’t being lazy; I just forgot. That company moved their operation, and I moved to another flight school. The instruction seemed to be going better, but I often had to go through a long process to remember what I wanted to say to the student.

I was taking out a renter for an area-and-aircraft checkout, but I had left my iPad, filled with all the ForeFlight goodies, in the car. I didn’t even think about it, though I had been a dedicated “don’t leave home without it” user. Weather was marginal—low scud with some haze—but I still could see the ground. We went out and did the usual maneuvers and returned to the airport. Taxiing in, ground control called and gave me a number to call. Yeah, the FAA.

A week or so later, a student and I entered the downwind, and she landed normally, no big deal, but I once again received the call-the-feds message. A couple of weeks later, I was invited to visit the local FSDO for the dreaded 709 meeting—a check ride to reevaluate my skills.

In the FSDO office, I met with three examiners. The lead said they had two things to discuss. One, that I had neither acknowledged nor obeyed a tower instruction to “go around,” break off the landing and reenter the pattern. And two, that I had violated the nearby Class Bravo airspace. I had no memory of either incident and said so.

The second man at the meeting took out some papers and showed them to me. One was a radar track of our flight, showing it crossing the departure path from the Bravo airport. The first guy asked, “Didn’t it occur to you that you weren’t where you should be when you saw the airliners taking off under you?”

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I told him that we were above an undercast and had only occasional glimpses of the surface, but that everything was clear above and around us. The second guy brought out a cassette recorder, and I heard my voice calling for landing and the tower telling me to go around. I have no memory of either call.

The dates were set for an oral and a flight test. All would be to ATP standards. Great. It had been nearly 20 years since I had obtained my ATP, and I had been busy flying in distant places, far from the FAA, and not reviewing the books as I should have. Besides, remembering procedures, checklists and manuals had never been a problem—until the Caravan ground school.

I went home and studied but could not maintain my concentration or, upon review, remember what I read. I had years of teaching that exact material and couldn’t remember it 20 minutes later. A meeting with the FAA confirmed that maybe I had, as the representative said, “lost a step.”

A week later, we all met at the FSDO again, and I surrendered my certificates: an ATP and airplane-multiengine-land certifications, with B-737 and G-IV type ratings; as well as airplane-single-engine-land, rotorcraft-helicopter and instrument-helicopter certificates, with BV-107 and SK-58 type ratings. I asked for and received a 24-hour temporary certificate and drove back to the airport where I checked out a Cessna 172.

I flew out over the ocean and went through the various maneuvers, enjoying the ride and not really thinking that it would be my last as a PIC. I asked for the ILS under VFR conditions back in. At pattern altitude, I called for an overhead break and landed gently on the numbers, taxied in, and tied down the airplane. As I was walking back to the office, a couple was walking toward me, headed for their airplane. The woman said something to the man, who turned to me and said, “She said that you really look like a pilot.”

“I am a pilot,” I said.

It was a couple of hours later I realized that, after 10,000-plus hours across 50 years in all kinds of flying machines over all parts of the planet, I had lied to her.

This story appeared in the August 2021 issue of Flying Magazine

The post No More Happy Landings appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

Many years ago, a friend landed and left his Cessna 172 in Louisville, Kentucky, because of weather, an hour and half away from our home-base airport in Madisonville. He was far too busy in his business to go back and fly it home anytime soon. As a newly minted 17-year-old private pilot, I jumped at the chance to be his volunteer ferry pilot.

My mentor and neighbor—an Eastern Airlines captain and the only airline pilot living within 30 miles of Madisonville—happened to be driving to Louisville to catch his deadhead to New York. He said I could ride with him to Louisville, and he would help me prepare for the flight. His offer lent my “rescue” mission an air of authority. My friend Catherine thought the plan was grand and volunteered to go on the adventure as well. What could possibly go wrong?

The muggy August air in Western Kentucky hung like kudzu on the oaks as we made our way east on the Western Kentucky Parkway. The high glare cut visibility to maybe 8 miles, my most generous estimate. We were slightly behind schedule, but I calculated we could still make it home before dusk.

When we arrived at the FBO desk in Louisville at 6 p.m., the lineman could barely remember the faded green-on-white 172. He located the airplane on the line board and recalled: “Since I really wasn’t sure on your friend’s plans, I put her back on ‘the Slope.’ I topped her off myself last Saturday evening after the storms cleared.”

My airline-pilot friend drove us out to the old Cessna. The preflight was uneventful. I clicked on the master switch and checked the fuel gauges—both read “full.” On the struts, I dipped a finger in each tank. Full as promised. Satisfied with the airplane and our flight planning, we gratefully sent my airline-pilot friend to catch his flight to New York.

The lineman wasn’t kidding when he called it “the Slope.” I had to set the parking brake once the chocks were removed. Catherine and I boarded, strapped in and fired up the old Lycoming. It ran beautifully. I taxied forward a few feet to sit upright as we copied Bowman Field ATIS and got our taxi clearance.

The weather for the 90-minute rescue mission was technically VFR, with “winds light and variable…visibility 10 miles with haze,” but haze was an understatement. On takeoff, my vision was surprisingly obscured. To be sure, I could see directly below, but I had only a faint horizon—if at all. Most of the time, I was following the compass and looking often at the attitude indicator for reassurance. Catherine, normally reserved, had a lot to say about the sensation but was all smiles. This new and lonely experience as PIC in reduced visibility was sobering. I hoped the visibility would improve.

Straight and level at 6,500 feet, I searched into the fish-gray, nearly featureless cone of visibility below us for the landmarks along our course. At last, Rough River Lake emerged—albeit slightly out of place. Hmm. A quick correction of about 20-plus degrees northward, and we continued on course.

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Soon, we neared the halfway mark on my sectional. Per training, it was time for a progress confirmation check. The aircraft was flying perfectly. Oil pressure was fine and—what? My fuel survey revealed an alarming fact. More than half of the fuel we had on takeoff was gone. A quick calculation: I was halfway to the destination and had used more than half of our fuel. That equaled a pretty big problem. Three things could have been happening: my gauges were wrong, the burn was far too great, or I was leaking fuel.

With each gentle bump of the air, the gauges seemed to dip just a little lower. Maintaining at least the appearance of competence for my passenger, I tried to think through the situation. On preflight, the tanks were topped by the lineman. I had personally inspected the tanks as well—full, to the brim. When I first switched on the master, the fuel gauges both read “F.” I had to have started with full tanks. My fuel burn must be too great. But how? At this rate, the burn must be way more than 14 gallons per hour. Impossible—but irrefutably true.

We droned on, now in the presence of considerable doubt. With declining visibility, dusk approaching and an apparently monstrous fuel burn, I had decisions to make. Press on or land safely where could we refuel, recalculate our course, or even reconsider the very wisdom of this trip. The current trajectory took me to about 8 miles short of my destination. Not good. My heart rate increased, and I could see the National Transportation Safety Board report already.

Could I make Bowling Green? Do they have fuel? I assumed so, but the hour was getting late. If we ended up stranded, where could I go with Catherine and no credit card? I struggled with my conscience and decided to land.

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We turned definitively southward and began a gentle descent. Twenty minutes later, we were in the pattern at KBWG. Never had the numbers been so inviting. The gauges taunted me with the idea that I could have made it to Madisonville, but I squelched that thought. The tarmac was a place where I could unravel this mystery and think.

The landing was a squeaker. On the ramp, we exited the airplane, and I explained our plight to the evening attendant. He topped the tanks with nearly 24 gallons. The gauges had been right.

Just as in life, reviewing a situation with another often illuminates the real problem. The lineman, Catherine and I discussed our predicament and looked back at the elderly but beautiful bird sitting up proudly on the ramp. Standing safely on terra firma, my thinking was now clear.

On level ground, with the airplane and tanks upright, we could see that there was no leak except in my attention to detail. Topping off the tanks and doing the preflight on the sloped ramp had been the issue. Replacing the 12 gallons burned—and adding the 12 gallons not filled or recognized in Louisville—reconciled all details. “The Slope” had gotten me.

I had been trained by three very different flight instructors: a teenager not much older than I was, a swashbuckler, and a brash retired US Navy captain. Though they approached flying very differently, they all taught me that when presented with a conundrum in the air, “land and sort it out” on the ground. If you eat crow, so be it. I followed their advice and was glad I did.

This story appeared in the June/July 2021 issue of Flying Magazine

The post Summer Haze and Low on Fuel appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

The flight began normally. Little did I know how crazy and funny things would end up becoming. It was my student’s last flight before his first check ride in the private pilot portion of our Part 141 curriculum, which comes just before a student’s first solo. We were flying a Cessna 152.

We had a long taxi because the main runway nearest the flight school was closed, as it would be for the rest of the summer as it went through updates and repairs. Taking off just behind us was a SkyWest CRJ. Our takeoff was normal, and everything was going fine—until about 50 feet agl, when I saw something small fly off the dashboard and straight into my student’s lap. I ignored it at the time and continued talking to ATC, who then told us to begin our outbound turn to get us away from the departure end of the runway, to make way for the CRJ. I heard the tower telling the CRJ our position and asking for them to report us in sight.

“SkyWest (call sign) has the little bugger in sight,” the SkyWest pilot said, referring to us.

I responded on frequency: “Who you callin’ little bugger?”

Radio silence.

I then said, “But, seriously, jokes aside—thanks for bein’ here, guys.”

He responded: “Hey, we’re right here with you, man. No problem.”

I smiled. I had thanked them because the events of this story took place in June 2020, when aviation had come to a screeching halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic. And, at the time, it felt as though it was just us two up in the sky that day. Well, us, and a stowaway.

As we were climbing through about 2,000 feet, the unexpected happened. I glanced over at the thing that had flown into my student’s lap. Turns out, it was a wasp.

“Oh, my…” I said quietly into my mic. My student, focused on flying, didn’t say anything. I continued: “OK, I don’t want you to worry, but there’s a wasp on your crotch. I’m going to reach over and try to kill it, OK?” He said: “Oh… Sure… OK.”

I then proceeded to awkwardly try to smush the thing with my checklist—trying not to get fresh in the process—when it moved and started hiding right under the seam of his pants.

Realizing things were getting a little too personal, I took the airplane from him and let him try to find it and kill it. At this point though, the wasp had disappeared. We assumed it was dead. We were wrong.

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I should mention that these communications with the tower and the SkyWest jet were happening at the same time as my student and I were trying to vanquish the wasp, but what I’ve related so far gives a good rough timing of how it all went down.

Then tower gets in on the joke from before: “Little bug—I mean, Cessna (N-number), contact departure. Safe flight, talk to you in a bit.”

Little did he and the SkyWest pilot know, we were dealing with a literal little bug in the cockpit, making the irony palpable.

So, the flight continued normally for a while. I had my student practice some steep turns and stalls, then it was time to head back in for some touch-and-goes. We were entering the pattern and doing a forward slip to a go-around when I saw something fly at me this time. My student turned to me in shock and, with a look of horror on his face, said, “Oh…”

“What? What is it?” I asked. “Is it on my face, my shoulder—what?” (I had trouble seeing or feeling anything; we both had masks on because of COVID-19 policies, and I was wearing sunglasses.) Then, before he could answer, the wasp jumped off me and onto my student. I quickly took the controls again, and he struggled to get it off of himself.

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Finally, I grabbed the checklist and whacked it off his shoulder and onto the floor. “He’s on the floor,” I yelled. “Stomp him out! Get him!” My student stepped on the wasp, finally extinguishing it. Once ready, my student took back the flight controls, and we finished our landings, successfully completing the flight.

I should note that at no point during the flight did either of us completely ignore the airplane or fight over controls, and we both used clear communication when transferring use of them between us. Once we were on the ground, we both had a good laugh about the whole thing, and I apologized profusely for grazing his thigh and having lost my cool a little over a wasp. He wasn’t the slightest bit bothered and laughed it off.

I wish I had a better moral to this story, but I’ll leave it with this: Don’t be one of those pilots who takes everything too seriously. There’ll be times in either your training or your career when you’re stuck in a small space with another person and the most unexpected stuff happens—it’s a place where many good and bad memories are made. In those moments, emergency or not, you have the choice to make it a good memory or a bad one. A lot of us always say, “Well, I would’ve done X, Y and Z,” but until you’re actually in that situation, you really don’t know what you’d do. Remember that there’s no one simple fix to any situation, so just make the best of it, and don’t forget to enjoy the ride and laugh about it in the end.

This story appeared in the April/May 2021 issue of Flying Magazine

The post A Bug Interrupts a Flight Lesson appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

In 1948, living in New Jersey, I wanted very much to get into flying. My inquiries led me to Secaucus (now a metropolis in its own right, 10 minutes from New York City), where I found the Dawn Patrol seaplane base located on the Hackensack River. The owner-operator was a veteran Navy pilot, who just a few years earlier had engaged in combat flying a torpedo bomber. His name was Cliff Umschied, and the fleet consisted of two Luscombes on floats. I was a kid and didn’t have much money at the time, but it was the beginning of a long and wonderful love affair with aviation. The lessons that my own flight training taught me stayed with me over the years until I eventually became an instructor and a designated pilot examiner.

Fast-forward to the Korean conflict that erupted in 1950. The following year, I found myself at Naval Air Station Barber’s Point on Oahu, Hawaii—about 15 air miles from Pearl Harbor—having completed several rounds of technical training, though I still wanted to fly. One day, I took a bus that made a stop at Honolulu International Airport (KHNL), now David K. Inouye International Airport, and there discovered the Hawaiian School of Aeronautics, owned and operated by a very pleasant woman whose husband at the time was a colonel fighting in Korea. Her name was Marguerite Gambo Wood, chief flight instructor and DPE. The fleet, as I recall, consisted of four Aeronca 7AC Champs, two Ercoupes and a Seabee. My instructor was June W. Johnson, a young lady probably not more than six or seven years older than I was.

June told me that her husband was a pilot for Hawaiian Airlines, then a freight carrier for the islands. We did air work over the pineapple fields—the same ones flown over by the attacking Japanese planes 10 years earlier—and pattern work mostly at Bellows Field, an abandoned World War II base on the east side of the island, not far from Kaneohe. We got by in a Champ with no electrical system at an international airport with 10,000-foot runways and four-engine traffic going on all day by using the light-gun system. We taxied out to a pad that was monitored by the tower, and when he flashed his light, we acknowledged by wagging the ailerons and elevator. Returning to the field, it was a right downwind with the ocean on our left. We watched the tower for their signal and rocked our wings to acknowledge. After just a few hours, I was signed off for solo and encouraged to go up and do stalls and spins at will.

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But by far the most challenging and memorable period for me was fulfilling the cross-country requirements. That’s what the Ercoupes were for—flying to the other islands. They had electric starters, greater fuel capacity, 75-horsepower engines and not-so-great condenser-tuned radios.

I flew the cross-country once with June and a second time alone. The flight took us from KHNL to Diamond Head at the southeastern tip of Oahu, then across the channel to Lauu Point at the western tip of Molokai, landing for a pit stop and verification signature at Molokai Airport.

Sounds simple enough, but it entails flying over what is serious open water for about 30 nautical miles in an Ercoupe with a questionable radio. Then it was off to the north coast of Molokai, a route that took us to the second required landing at Kahului Airport on Maui. The route ended with flying south to the coast of Maui, then back west to Lauu Point and home.

In the ’60s, we moved to Westchester County, New York. On weekends, I freelanced as a CFI at a small field in Duchess County (I taught my youngest son to fly on those weekends) and used nearby Westchester County Airport (KHPN) every chance I could. At 57, I left the business world and began 10 years at KHPN as a flight instructor, chief flight instructor and, for several years, designated pilot examiner for the local FSDO. I never forgot the skills I acquired over the pineapple fields on Oahu in the little Champs.

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On one of the last flight tests sent my way, a fellow instructor referred a young gentleman who had completed the private pilot training requirements. After the preliminary logbook check and oral exam, we went through the preflight and then did a couple of landings—they met the standards. We then left the pattern, and I directed my applicant to a work area nearby, telling him that we were going to do some stalls and steep turns. Now, many applicants for a flight test exhibit some nervousness, and I’ve always believed that a reasonable examiner makes allowances for that, but his reaction was quite visible.

We cleared the area, and I told him to do a gentle no-flaps stall and recover at the first sign of a break. By that time, judging by his demeanor, I’m sure he was in a sweat. I had him do a couple more clearing turns to help settle him down and then told him to do a full-flaps stall with a full break and recovery with minimum altitude loss. The result: left wing well down, controls crossed, and we were in an incipient spin. Had he been alone, he would have died. I recovered (shades of my early training in Oahu), suggested that he relax, and headed back to base.

In our discussion afterward, he told me that he hated stalls. I asked him how many stalls he had done in his training. His response: “Three.” (Mental note: Mention to the instructor the importance of completing requirements before recommending a flight test.) To the applicant’s credit, he retrained with his instructor, overcame his fear and came back to me for a retest, leaving happily with his private ticket.

When unpacking our things after the move to Westchester County, I came across a box of some old records, and sure enough, among the items was the 1951 Hawaii sectional, the very chart I used for the cross-country flights—course lines and all. Given the layout of the islands, it’s a very big sectional—a good 5 feet long and about 18 inches high. It has been framed and hangs on the wall of my “cave” over my desk. Every day, it brings back the joy I had flying in beautiful, pristine Hawaii. I was a fledging at the time, but the challenges it presented and the education it provided lasted a pilot’s lifetime.

This story appeared in the March 2021 issue of Flying Magazine

The post Hawaii Lessons in an Ercoupe appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

It was my first flying job—the one you dreamed about having all your life. The one for which you strove, saved and worked so hard, and it was finally real. I had to leave my native New Zealand and move to the Australian Outback to get it, but that just made it all the more exciting, away from the familiar and out into the vastness of that huge sunburned country.

I was based on Elcho Island, off the north coast of Arnhem Land, about 200 miles to the east of Darwin. To say it is remote is an understatement. No roads, no shops, one radio station and one TV channel. At least we had a paved runway. Most of the airstrips I would be flying to were red dirt, which meant, in the wet season, red mud.

We had a ragtag fleet of Cessnas, mostly 206s, 207s and 402s—all old and high-time but well-maintained. These were working bush airplanes, carpets long gone and replaced by painted plywood floors and high-density vinyl seats. It was worth getting out of bed early because the last person in had to fly the 207 for the day—and on short-strip work in the tropics, this was to be avoided. It was not so affectionately known as the “Lead Sled” or “Ground Gripper.” Ours had started life ferrying coffins around with an undertaker in Arkansas.

The first year passed without incident. I was, as the chief pilot put it, “greener than pea-and-frog pie,” and I knew it. I was cautious and careful.

The closest strip to home was Marparu, 16 miles away on the mainland. We went there almost daily, supplying the aboriginal community with pretty much everything. Food, doctors’ visits, teachers in and out, and medevac. If it could fit in the Cessna, we flew it.

A fellow Kiwi, Ian, was building a new schoolhouse there. It was a large job for one man, but he worked tirelessly, and slowly over the months, the school took shape. I flew food and supplies into him every few days, and every two weeks, I flew him out so he could catch up with his wife who lived in the local mining town an hour or so to the east.

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At last, the school was completed, and Ian asked me to do a couple of flights to get his tools and leftover building supplies. One of the things he needed to get was a set of plank stands about 10 feet long, so it was going to be a job for the 207.

The runway at Marparu is about 2,800 feet long, literally cut out of 50-foot-tall trees. There’s a clearing at each end, another 1,000 feet or so of felled-but-not-cleared trees. The surrounding terrain is dead flat. To prepare for the trip, I removed all the seats except for the one behind the pilot’s seat, so we could have as much cargo space as possible.

The day was typical for the wet season: high humidity, low QNH (airport pressure setting), high temperature at around 95 degrees Fahrenheit, and not a breath of wind. I was sweating just thinking about loading the airplane. Upon landing, I was confronted with a mountain of gear next to the strip. There were tins of paint, lengths of wood, jerrycans of diesel, a concrete mixer complete with single-cylinder diesel engine, nails, three large truck batteries, and all manner of other things dear to a builder’s heart.

I did some calculations and figured we could lift about 1,000 pounds. I only had some bathroom scales to weigh all his stuff, so a fair bit of guesstimating went on. A lot of the stuff was “dangerous goods” and shouldn’t have been put on at all, but with some serious complete-the-mission focus and wanting to please my friend, a lot of warning signs were ignored.

The 207 looked a little saggy on its undercarriage, but the strip was long, and I’d flown out of there many times at max weight, so I wasn’t overly concerned. I made sure to use every inch of the runway and swung the tail around over the clearing to get maximum length. About halfway down, there was a painted-white fuel drum. I figured that if I didn’t have two-thirds the speed I needed by the time I passed the drum, I’d abort and offload some gear.

The 207 jumped forward with a reassuring eagerness. Sixty knots came up as we passed the drum, and I was lulled into thinking this was all going to go to plan. At about 65 knots, though, it just stopped accelerating. It took me a couple of seconds to notice this, but what I did notice was that the end of the runway was approaching. Quickly.

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For a fleeting second, I thought about aborting anyway, but we were too far in for that now. As the end of the runway arrived, I rotated, and with the stall-warning horn wailing, we staggered into the air. We were far from out of trouble. Though airborne, we were over the clearing and still had 50-foot-tall trees to clear. Those trees seemed a very long way above where I was sitting. Half my brain was screaming at me to push forward because we were on the verge of the stall, while the other half was yelling to pull back to avoid the trees. All of my brain was telling me that this wasn’t really happening.

All that flammable cargo would shortly turn us both into a flaming crash site, miles away from any help. I braced for the impact, but it didn’t happen. How we got over those trees I’ll never know. A breath of wind, the hand of God—I have no idea. We skimmed along in the tree tops for what seemed like minutes and then ever so slowly climbed into the sky. I milked the flaps up in 1-degree increments. I kept in full power for a full five minutes. It took more than five minutes to climb to 1,500 feet.

During the whole one-hour flight, we never got above 3,500 feet or 105 knots. The magnitude of my foolishness had begun to sink in. How had all that training and all that carefulness been thrown aside so easily? I’d let wanting to get the job done and look capable and fearless in front of my friend cloud my judgment very badly.

When we landed, I had trouble getting out of the airplane because my legs felt like jelly. Ian looked at me with a strange expression on his face. “Was that as close as it looked?” he asked. “I thought the wheels were going to start turning in the treetops.” I gently put my arm around his shoulder and made a tiny gap between my thumb and forefinger. “This close to dying,” I said. He laughed. I don’t think he believed me. We unloaded the supplies onto several trollies. Luckily, it had started to rain, so no one came out to help us. The boss would have probably fired me on the spot if he’d seen it all.

That was 25 years ago, and I’ve never forgotten the lesson I learned that day. Work within the limits, be careful, and if it feels like a bad idea, then it probably is.

This story appeared in the January-February 2021 issue of Flying Magazine

The post Overloaded Takeoff in the Outback appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

A lot has been written over the past few years about pilots relying on the automation to fly the airplane to the detriment of actual hands-on-the-stick piloting skills. I have long been baffled by pilots’ reliance on the autopilot. But perhaps this attitude comes from my Air Force training early on and particularly from a black, black night at low altitude over the Atlantic Ocean. In October 1973, the war in Vietnam was winding to a close. For the previous three years or so, I had been flying the Lockheed C-141 Starlifter to Southeast Asia and all over the Pacific Ocean, supporting the US missions in that part of the world. Then, a new crisis: Israel had once again been attacked by Egypt, and the Air Force was tasked with supplying arms to Israel.

From its birth as a modern nation in 1948, Israel has fought its neighbors for its survival. In 1967, in the famous Six-Day War, Israel had defeated the adjacent countries (Syria, Jordan and Egypt) in one week. Six years later, on the holy celebration of Yom Kippur, it was happening again. But this time, it was against a slightly different background. The oil-rich countries of the Middle East announced that they would cut off all oil shipments to any country that supported Israel in the conflict. This included any nation that aided in the resupply of any materiel. That meant that if the United States wanted to support Israel, it would have to do it without the air bases outside of its own borders.

The Lockheed C-141 was the Air Force’s second-largest cargo aircraft. Its four jet engines allowed it to cruise at just under Mach 0.8 with a range of 5,000 miles. It weighed about 70.5 tons empty and more than twice that fully loaded. It was the perfect aircraft for the mission. So here was the plan.

The US Air Force Military Air Command would pick up bombs and small arms ammunition from supply depots in the States, fly to Lajes Field air base in the Portuguese Azores (where we still had landing rights), and then to Tel Aviv, Israel. Aircrews would rest at Lajes; the airplanes would keep moving. This was a normal operation, but there would be two new wrinkles that nearly put me and my crew into the Atlantic. First, we were not allowed to fly over any other country’s airspace or land in any other country en route. Second, under no circumstances would we leave an airplane on the ground at Tel Aviv. The Air Force did not want to see a burning US aircraft at Tel Aviv on the evening news.

My logbook entries from that time show that my crew and I picked up loads in Indiana and Arkansas, then flew eight hours or so to Lajes to rest, then picked up an incoming airplane and flew it for seven to eight hours to Tel Aviv, and then the same distance back to Lajes for a beer and bed. We flew two uneventful trips from Lajes to Tel Aviv and back. We flew past the Rock of Gibraltar and then straddled various airspace boundaries as we made our way east across the Mediterranean Sea. About 150 miles west of Israel, a pair of Israeli F-4 Phantoms showed up off our wingtip and escorted us nearly to touchdown.

As we taxied in, we opened the cargo doors so we could begin offloading as soon as we came to a stop. The refueling truck slid in next to us as we stopped, and while we sat with the engines running, we received a weather briefing, filed our flight plan for the leg back west, unloaded our cargo, and filled with fuel. Then, it was time to call for taxi and head back west for another eight hours. Not one extra minute was spent on the ground.

The third trip, on October 28, was different. The first four hours of our flight east were uneventful. Then, the master warning light illuminated, along with the small warning light that indicated that the elevator artificial-feel system had failed.

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While small aircraft have cables running from the control yoke to the elevator, large aircraft do not. Movement of the yoke on large aircraft causes hydraulic valves to open and close, which, in turn, moves the elevator. The pilot gets no sensory feedback from this movement of hydraulic fluid. So, to give the pilot the sense of aerodynamic feel that we are all accustomed to, the good engineers at Lockheed included the elevator artificial-feel system. This was a system of springs that sensed the aircraft airspeed from the central air-data computer and adjusted the amount of pressure that the pilot would feel from movement on the yoke. Just as in smaller aircraft, the greater the airspeed, the harder it was to pull back on the yoke. Great system, and it worked almost all the time.

When the system failed, it generally failed in the mode that required more back pressure on the yoke than expected. There was an in-flight reset procedure, but if that did not work, the system had to be reset on the ground by the maintenance folks. So in our case, the system failed, and when we disengaged the autopilot, the nose of the plane dropped immediately—and hard. The copilot and I regained control of the airplane, reengaged the autopilot, and had a long chat with the flight engineer and the books about our approach and landing. The plan we devised was that we would fly an ILS approach with the autopilot engaged, and then we would disengage just as we needed to flare. At that time, the copilot and I would jointly haul back on the yoke and get the nosewheel up just high enough to land, and that worked ok.

We had no maintenance support at Tel Aviv, and the flight engineer was not able to reset the system. On another day, we would have left the airplane for the maintenance folks, but that was not an option. I knew that I could have refused to fly the airplane, but I also knew that it was going to be moved by somebody, immediately. I felt that it was not fair to put someone else into this situation, not knowing how to react. At least we knew what to expect and how to handle it. Our takeoff briefing was normal, with one addition: At rotation speed, both the copilot and I would pull back on the yoke, and as soon as we got the aircraft into the climb-out pitch position, we would engage the autopilot.

Another eight hours back, and we had time for a lot of conversation. The aircraft was certified for Category III landing operations, meaning that if we had the proper ground equipment, we could let the autopilot capture the localizer and glideslope, engage the autothrottle system to hold the airspeed, and allow the autoland system bring up the nose at 50 feet agl and set the airplane on the centerline. What could go wrong?

It was nearly midnight on a moonless night. The only lights to be seen were those on the island, about 20 miles away. We descended to about 2,000 feet, rechecked all frequencies and switch settings, and prepared to watch the autopilot do its thing. Though I had never done this before in an aircraft, I had done it over and over in the simulator.

Flaps were set at the approach setting, landing gear was down, and airspeed was established for the approach. We were on a 45-degree intercept to the final approach course for Runway 15, about 15 miles out. The localizer needle started to move off the edge of the case, and the aircraft began a left turn to intercept the final approach course to Runway 15. As the airplane began to roll out of the turn, we realized that there was a problem with our plan. We just did not know what.

We were all set for some type of downward runaway pitch excursion. Both the copilot and I were set to pull back on the yoke if necessary. However, as the airplane started to roll out of the turn, it began a smooth but rapid nose-up movement. Simultaneously, the airspeed began decreasing toward the stall speed. We already had gear and flaps deployed, exactly the worst position to be in with the airplane moving toward a stall. This was where training just kicked in.

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I don’t remember what I said, but I remember simultaneously disengaging the autopilot and autothrottles, rolling into a steep turn to the left and smoothly shoving all four throttles forward, and staring hard at the attitude indicator as I did so. As soon as the nose moved up, the lights of the island went out of sight—there was no horizon to be seen. To the left as we turned, there was nothing but black. No ocean, no sky—just black. Aircraft attitude and airspeed were all that mattered.

The copilot and I performed a steep turn on instruments, not much different from the ones that instrument students still practice. All that training kicked in without thinking. Fly the airplane. Attitude, airspeed, altitude, roll out on a heading of 150. Re-intercept the localizer. The autopilot worked on the earlier approach into Tel Aviv—try it again—carefully. The only thing we did differently this time from our earlier approach into Tel Aviv was using the autothrottle. So, skip the autothrottle, and see if that solves the problem. We would fly this approach exactly like the approach we flew eight hours before. Except it was night, and we had the lack of visual cues that nighttime brings on landing. This entire event, from pitch-up to rollout back on final, took less than two minutes—the time it takes to make a 360-degree steep turn.

Landing was otherwise uneventful, except that our adrenalin levels were sky high. It all went quickly. The rest of the crew did not know how close we came to putting the airplane into the ocean. It was just us two pilots that were shaking.

We were met, as was normal, by the maintenance crew. We pilots and the flight engineer described what had happened as best we could. The maintenance crew said, “Hmm,” and we all went to bed.

It was quite some time before I realized what had happened. I was so focused on the malfunction of the elevator artificial-feel system that I did not realize that the aircraft was making the same rookie error that every student pilot makes. When we roll an aircraft into a bank, we need to increase our lift, because our lift perpendicular to the horizon has decreased. We do this by increasing the angle of attack, and the only way we can increase the angle of attack and hold altitude and airspeed is to increase power. The airplane did this and added the correct amount of nose-up trim to hold the level turn. However, it was slow to add power to hold the airspeed—just like a student pilot.

A failure to increase power will result in either a loss of airspeed or altitude. This is true in Cessna 172 or in a Boeing 777. Or in the Starlifter. In our case, the aircraft was calling for more power because the altitude was fixed and the turn to final was causing the airspeed to dissipate. But just like a beginning student learning steep turns, the autothrottle system was behind. It was trying to add power, but it came in late. When the airplane rolled out on final, the plane was low on airspeed, and the only thing it knew to do was to increase the pitch to hold altitude, which just caused the airspeed to drop more. Bad cycle. The solution for any impending stall is to decrease the angle of attack, while following up with increased power. I have always thanked Lockheed for giving us an aircraft with an abundance of power—because we had enough to make the runway.

This story appeared in the December 2020 issue of Flying Magazine

The post Final Turn in the Azores appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

I’ve been flying for 30 years and never experienced a hiccup from an airplane engine while airborne. That changed a few minutes into a recent flight. This story can’t rival a sudden engine stoppage and forced landing—it’s a story of an engine that seemed on its way to quitting—but I hope it provides some useful lessons.

It was unseasonably warm on February 23 in the Upper Midwest, with a bell-clear, blue-sky day beckoning for some flying. I never have to worry about finding something to do in an airplane because I have an ongoing project of landing at every airport in North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa and Wisconsin, the four states neighboring Minnesota, where I’d already landed at all 135 airports.

If there’s flyable weather at my home base of St. Cloud Regional Airport (KSTC) in Minnesota, there’s a good chance there’s good weather in one of the other states. So a friend and I headed out to northern Iowa in my Mooney, starting out in the northwest part of the state and heading east toward Decorah (KDEH), landing at all airports along the way. We ended up at Decorah an hour before sunset and fueled up for the return home.

We took off uneventfully in fine weather on an instrument flight plan to Anoka County-Blaine Airport (KANE) in Minnesota, climbed to 6,000 feet, settled into cruise and leaned the engine to rich of peak. After about two minutes of conversation, I began to feel a vibration. It felt exactly like the roughness you feel when going lean of peak and beyond, to the point where the first cylinder or cylinders begin to lose power—that is, “leaning to roughness.” However, the vibration continued to get worse, and the engine seemed to be on its way to destruction, peaking in about 10 seconds, so I knew I needed to land as soon as possible. I hoped for an airport because I still had power, though Iowa farm fields would be an option if necessary.

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I started a left turn toward the nearest airport, holding altitude in order to maximize my glide range. During that turn, I considered specifically where I wanted to go. I could make a 180-degree turn back toward Decorah, where I knew they had an FBO with repair facilities. Or I could do a 90-degree turn back toward the nearest airport at the time, Cresco, Iowa (KCJJ), where we had been earlier. I decided to go to Cresco; I learned quickly that when your life is on the line, all other inconveniences are secondary.

This is where I confirmed that an iPad running a big moving map—the ForeFlight app in my case—can be a lifesaver. When making that turn, I knew generally where Cresco was because I was just there but not a specific heading. I simply turned the airplane in that direction by pointing the symbolic airplane using the moving map. I identified the town visually, and I adjusted my heading to maintain a ground track straight to where I knew the airport was. If I had used the nearest-airport feature on the GPS, it would have taken longer.

I declared a mayday call to the Rochester, Minnesota, approach controller with whom I was already in contact, and she provided information on direction and distance along the way.

Once established toward the airport, the glide-range circle shown on ForeFlight told me I was not yet within gliding range, and for that reason, I maintained altitude. All of the above took place in 20 seconds. At that point, I turned my attention to the engine, and at once, I found that the engine monitor flashed that cylinder No. 3 in my Lycoming IO-360 was running at something like 450 degrees F. I left the throttle wide open and pushed the mixture in full rich. A few seconds later, the engine started to become smoother and restored to normal after no more than 10 seconds. The cylinder-head temperature dropped rapidly. I waited until I was within gliding range, stayed high for a couple of miles beyond that, began a descent into a tight traffic pattern suitable for a possible dead-stick landing, and landed uneventfully.

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We taxied to the ramp and were quickly greeted by the local police and the airport manager who had been called by Rochester. Cursory inspection of the engine revealed nothing unusual. The airport manager, Clair Pecinovsky, put me in touch with Mike Connell, an airplane mechanic at Decorah, and he graciously offered to come to Cresco to look over the engine, including the fuel injectors, spark plugs and borescope. In the meantime, we returned home via a rental car.

The inspection revealed no damage to the engine, but one spark plug on the misbehaving cylinder No. 3 had a cracked insulator. After conferring with Connell, my own airplane mechanic and some more research, the best theory was that the No. 3 fuel injector experienced a partial obstruction leading to a leaner mixture, demonstrated by the resulting higher exhaust-gas temperature—as shown in the data dump from the JP Instruments EDM 700 engine analyzer—which led to a detonation or preignition event perhaps instigated by the cracked plug (most likely detonation).

The spark plug was replaced, and the next week I hitched a ride in a friend’s airplane, circled the airport to confirm all was well, and flew home uneventfully with a deliberately rich mixture. At a safe altitude over my airport, I put the engine through its paces of various mixtures, RPMs and power but could not cause any anomalies.

I’ve been a Monday morning quarterback and came up with the following suggestions for others:

• Don’t have regrets about calling mayday. I received a benign call from the FSDO afterward, and that was it.
• Don’t wait—reflexively push that mixture in full rich as you start your turn to see if that helps. It apparently did in this case.
• The engine went back to normal so promptly, I briefly considered proceeding home. Resist the temptation. Make the precautionary landing.
• Go to the nearest airport. All other considerations are secondary when it comes to threatened power loss.
• If you don’t have an engine monitor, get one. I’m considering getting an audio alert for temperature alarms because I still can’t believe I didn’t see that flashing cylinder-head temperature. I’ll be checking more frequently, at least for that flashing warning.
• Invest in a panel or yoke mount for your iPad or other moving-map display; it provides a wealth of safety information.

This story appeared in the November 2020, Buyers Guide issue of Flying Magazine

The post Detonation Grounds a Mooney appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

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