Some Flying Experiences

Some of my other airplane blogs tell of a few of my flying experiences but here are a few more.

I loved airplanes from as long ago as I can remember. I built many, many airplane models and remember setting in the 4^th or 5^th grade at my desk looking at a book on how to fly an airplane and acting like I had the controls while all the other kids were out for recess. At around 14 I rode my scooter to a local airport and paid an instructor pilot to take me up for a short first flight. No way a kid could do that now and not sure how I got away with it then.

At 19 (1967) I joined the United States Air Force (USAF) rather than be drafted into the army, remember Viet Nam was going all out at that time. I had gotten a short deferment so I could finish my Airframe and Powerplant (A&P) school at Spartan’s School of Aeronautics in Tulsa, OK. With a new FAA A&P license I asked to get into aircraft electronics in the USAF to broaden my aircraft expertise. I spent 4 years as an Electronic Warfare (EW) Technician on B-52 and FB-111 aircraft but when it came time to reenlist, I cross trained into Air Traffic Control and spent the last 5 years in the USAF as a controller at multiple different airbases.

My first assignment after finishing boot camp and the EW technical school was at Carswell AFB, Fort Worth Texas working on B-52D EW equipment. Up to this time I could not afford to take flying lessons but it was still my dream. I finally decided it was now or never so even on the little pay an enlisted man makes I managed to budget about an hour of instruction every couple of weeks at a Ft Worth airport named Meacham Field. This was a controlled airport (has FAA control tower) and is located in the middle of a lot of residential housing.

First Solo:

You must have 8 hours of flight instruction to solo and in that 8 hours you learn to fly the airplane, land and take-off, use the radio, become familiar with controlled airport operations and learn how to recognize a stall (airplane stops flying). That’s a lot to learn in 8 hours and you don’t really get competent in any of those tasks, only barely acceptable. 8 hours is the minimum time but you can take as many hours as necessary until your instructor feels you are ready.

I had a lot of basic airplane knowledge by this time with my A&P license and reading every book possible on the subject so I was ready to solo right at 8 hours. The day of my solo was perfect weather, not a lot of wind and sunny. My instructor rode with me for a couple of touch and go’s and then told me to taxi to the coffee shop on the ramp. He got out of the airplane (Cessna 150 high wing 2 seat trainer) and said “Make three touch and go’s and then come back to the coffee shop”. That’s when my heart started pounding in my chest and I knew I was on my own from that point on.

I called the tower for taxi instructions to the active runway and taxied as directed. There wasn’t a lot of traffic in the pattern that day but there were three or four making the circle that I had to be aware of. I did my engine run-up test, Magnetos checked, everything in the green, then called the tower for take-off clearance. I was cleared for take off and taxied onto the runway and lined up with the centerline. Full power was applied and I started on my first solo flight. Take-off was normal and as I passed the end of the runway I realized I was all alone up there and by the way, I have houses everywhere with no landing spots available except on the runway I just left.

That’s when everything went to hell. I’m a quarter mile off the end of the runway still climbing at full power up to the pattern altitude of 800 feet above the ground and the engine starts banging and making a hell of a noise. Scared the crap out of me but the engine kept running. I had no idea what was going on with the engine so I checked the oil pressure and it was still in the green and all the instruments looked normal but something was definitely wrong.

This is where my inexperience came into play. I should have immediately called the tower and declared an emergency, I did not do that. The tower would have given me priority to the runway and even alerted the crash trucks to head to the runway or wherever I might have ended up off the airport. I quickly realized that if I pulled the throttle back to reduce the RPM that the noise decrease some but not completely. I reduced power to about 80% which barely kept the plane climbing. I even followed several other aircraft around the pattern until I finally got the plane back on the runway after my first solo flight. I never told the tower I had any problems at all. After being an Air Traffic Controller for around 10 years (both USAF and FAA), I know for certain that what I did was not uncommon. New pilots are afraid of the FAA and won’t call for help until sometimes it’s too late to help them.

I taxied back to the coffee shop and stopped the engine in front. I walked into the coffee shop and saw my instructor setting with several other instructors. He looked at me as I walked up  and said “Congratulations on your first solo”. I said “I only got to do one time in the pattern because the engine started sounding like it was coming apart”. His jaw dropped along with the other instructors and they thought I was kidding but I finally convinced them I wasn’t. We all walked out to the airplane and opened the engine cowling. It didn’t take but a second to see that the whole exhaust manifold had blown off the engine and was banging up against the engine firewall. In addition, hot engine gases and flame was then able to blow directly into the engine compartment causing a major fire hazard. None of them could believe this actually happened and especially on my first solo flight.

A couple of valuable lessons learned on that flight:

1                    Always alert the controller when things are not normal, they are there to help.

2                    Always expect the unexpected or at least think through the possible scenarios and have a back-up plan.

3                    You must remain calm and think through your possible actions.

I was every lucky that I had reduced the power because that reduced the risk of an engine fire (not a good scenario in any circumstance). One thing I did know from all my airplane experience is you never turn back towards the runway after engine failure unless there is no other option. Too may pilots try and they end up in a fatal stall/spin accident trying to make a tight turn at slow speed. I didn’t have a lot of options either way due to the residential housing all around the airport so glad that engine kept running.

A couple of days later I did another solo flight and this time completed all three touch and go’s.

Pilot’s License:

I continued taking flight instruction, when I could afford it, so flew may an hour a month or even less. In addition, I had been reassigned to Pease AFB, New Hampshire so finished my lessons at an airport at Sanford, Maine, which is an uncontrolled airport (no FAA tower). By this time I was flying a Piper Cherokee low wing 4 seat trainer. When I finally got my required 40 hours flight time I went for my pilot’s test and passed with no issues. I was now a fully certified private pilot with 40 hours in my log book. It was winter in New England at this time but my first goal was to take my wife for a cross country flight around three points: Sandford, Maine to Concord, N.H. to Manchester, N.H. then back to Sandford. It would take about an hour to make this circuit but the weather was a bit questionable. Spoiler alert, this is important.

There was snow on the ground but the runway was dry. The visibility was over 5 miles with moderate cloud coverage around 5,000 feet above the ground. The biggest issue was snow showers would roll past that would bring the visibility down to around 3 miles for short periods. We took off from Sandford and had a pleasant flight to Concord then turned towards Manchester. Up to this point I had flown through several snow showers with no problem. I was proud to show my skills to my wife since we had been using our money for a year or more to get me to this point.

Prior to getting to Manchester I noticed the ceiling was getting lower and the snow showers were getting longer in duration. It kept getting worse, I kept getting lower so I could always keep the ground in sight. I had only a basic training of instrument fight and was not qualified to fly only on instruments. When we went over Manchester I was barely 200 feet above the ground, the snow was steady and visibility less than half a mile. I remember seeing people walking to their cars and looking up as we flew over. I knew I was over Manchester and I was following the navigation aid called a VOR that would take me back to Sanford Airport. My biggest concern was that the ceiling and visibility would get worse and I would lose sight of the ground with easily predictable results. I also knew there was a TV tower along my path back to Sanford that would be taller than my current altitude. The worse moment was when my wife asked me if we were ok. I was sweating bullets but was able to stay calm through what was happening. I also did not want to scare my wife so I explained that I know where we are and I’ll follow the VOR to the airport so we are doing ok. A lie I know but what else could I do.

I was able to bypass the TV tower and gradually gain some altitude up to about 800 feet but was still in steady snow with half mile or less visibility. The VOR does not give range information, only direction so it felt like a long time to me to get from Manchester to Sandford. I was too busy flying the airplane to do any cross VOR checks with the radio to find our exact location. Just as we broke out of the snow shower I see the Sanford Airport directly in front of me.

I immediately relaxed knowing we had made it ok when all of a sudden a big white single engine WW II trainer flew directly across in front of us. The owner of the fight school owned a Texan AT-6 and was up in the pattern doing touch and go’s. Once again this scared the crap out of me but I pulled in behind him and landed safely. The Texan also landed and I had to admit to the owner that I made the typical newbie mistake of flying into weather, expecting everything would be ok. I also said I was going to get my Instrument License.

I continued with my flight training over the next few years and eventually got a FAA Commercial Instrument License and many hundreds of hours in my log book. I also bought a 1946 Cessna 120 (2 seat high wing tail dragger) when I got out of the USAF in 1976 and flew that airplane almost every day. What I finally realized was that flying only an hour a month does not make you a safe pilot. Only putting lots of hours in the air and practicing multiple emergency procedures does that.

Just a couple more short stories:

I was out of the USAF and working for a flight simulator company on DFW airport but had a friend that had just bought a used Piper Cherokee. Since I had my A&P license I would do minor maintenance for him and in return he would let me use the airplane as I wanted. He was having intermittent radio problems so we decided to try and fix them since I had all that USAF electronics training. Our plan was to take the radio out of the instrument panel, open it up so I could place it on my lap then fly south of Fort Worth while I tried to find what was causing it to cut in/out. I can’t remember why we decided to do this while flying but here is the picture: Jim is flying the plane, I’m in the co-pilot seat with the radio spread out on my lap, we are over open fields south of Fort Worth and the engine dies! I’ve actually had several engines die on me while flying but it was usually caused by pilot error. My first thought was we had plenty of places to land the airplane in the open fields but how was I going to explain why I had the radio torn apart when the crash investigators showed up. Remember, I also had several FAA license by this time and they were going to take a dim view of my decisions.

Jim was getting very excited by this point since he was a relatively low time pilot. I told him to just keep flying and pointed to a big field where we would land if I couldn’t get the engine running again. I checked all the engine instruments and immediately saw that one fuel tank was half full but the other one was empty! I then looked down to the fuel selector on the floor and of course it was on the empty tank. This aircraft would not feed from both tanks at the same time so you had to occasionally change this valve to keep the airplane balanced. Jim did not do this and starved the engine of fuel. We were only about 1,000 feet and losing altitude quickly. I switched to the other tank and pulled the throttle back to idle. Luckily, the propeller continued to windmill so it quickly fired up and started running normal again. We headed back to the airport and landed and I never did get the radio working. BTW the feeling you get when the engine suddenly stops is not one of my favorite feelings.

After becoming an FAA Air Traffic Controller I was assigned to Burns Flat, Oklahoma to work the tower at a close USAF airfield; old Clinton-Sherman Air Force Base. This site was used by the USAF and FAA to train their pilots and since it was out in the middle of nowhere in west OK, they had it to themselves. The tower was closed on week-ends so my other controller friends and I  had the run of the place; 13,000 foot runway, huge ramp and no one watching what we did.

My first day in the tower I see some guy pull a Benson Gyro-glider onto the ramp behind his car. I asked the other controllers who he was and they said he’s one of us and he’s been trying to teach himself how to fly that thing so it would be a good show. Davie tied a long rope to a stout tie down ring on the ramp then tied the other end to the front of the Gyro-glider. The wind is strong in west OK so the goal was to have the wind turn the rotors which would lift the Gyro-glider and pilot up to about 75 feet and fly like a kite. This actually does work but Davie wasn’t having much luck. He would get into the seat and the rotors would start to turn but he could never get enough lift to make it fly. He then stood beside the Gyro-glider and with the less weight, it would lift off the ground. Get the picture, Davie standing next to the gyrating Gyro-glider flying it with the stick about 3 feet off the ground with a rotor blade just a few feet over his head. He would land it, get in again and have the same non-flying results. He finally gave up and towed it back home. That afternoon Davie came to work and we talked in depth about his activities and that’s when I learned what was causing his failure to fly. Shortly after he bought the Gyro-glider he decided to tow it to the ramp and perform the procedure just described. On the way to the ramp the blades, which were not tied down, started flapping and bent so far that one broke about 8” from the rotor hub. These blades are made from wood components all glued together. Davie had an engineering degree so he decided he could fix this minor problem. He took both blades off and used a saw to cut them to the same length then reattached them to the rotor hub. Simple. What he didn’t consider was he lost a significant amount of the lift capability of the rotor with the loss of those cut off segments from both blades. Luckily Davie never got it flying and sold it to some other sucker.

This did not end Davies adventures. He bought a surplus parachute and decided he was going to parasail with it on our ramp. This was an old WW II round parachute, not one of the modern steerable types we see now. He talked me and another flying friend Charlie into being his ground crew. Once again during a week-end with the airport to ourselves, we used Charlie’s El Camino as the tow vehicle, ran out a couple hundred feet of rope and attached it to the parachute harness which Davie was wearing. I spread out the parachute behind Davie and was to help get it inflated as Charlie started driving down the ramp. The plan was for Davie to run as fast as he could behind the El Camino until the parachute lifted him off the ground. We had no idea what we were doing.

After a couple of false starts where Davie would trip with the parachute partially inflated and then be dragged across the cement ramp until Charlie stopped the El Camino, we stopped to reevaluate our plan. I got more help with the parachute so we could get it inflated quicker. The wind was finally strong enough that it would fill with just Davie standing still but would not lift him off the ground. One last try, we had the parachute fully inflated, Davie gave the signal to Charlie to start driving and then began running. He was lifted up to about 30 feet, the parachute started swinging back and forth and then slammed Davie back onto the ramp where he was dragged once again by Charlie for a short distance. We all ran to Davie, sure he had to have broken something. He slowly stood up rubbing his road rash spots and said “I know what’s wrong, I need to remove a panel or two on the parachute so it flies straight and doesn’t swing”. We all looked at him in disbelief, he was still wanting to do it again. At this point the ground crew mutinied and said we were not going to help him kill himself. If you notice in the parasail picture below, they normally do it over water to make the hard landings safer. I have a hundred stories about Davie, what a crazy guy.

During my time at Burns Flat, OK I owned and  rebuilt my 1946 Cessna 120 after part of a hanger fell on it during a tornado. After a year, I had it rebuilt to include adding a starter so I didn’t have to hand prop the engine to get it running. While working the tower one day I got an emergency call from a Navy S-3 Viking (Twin engine jet anti-submarine aircraft). His front windshield had shattered and although it still kept the air flow out, they could not fly high or fast enough to get to a military base to land. They landed on our 13,000 foot runway and taxied to the ramp to park. The aircraft had a crew of four, two pilots and two electronic operators in back. Burns Flat does not have restaurants, motels or anything resembling a small town. We invited the crew up to the tower where they could call their site to decide what happened next. Later that day a Navy cargo aircraft landed to inspect the aircraft and decided to take the two back seat crewmen back to their base and then return the next day with a new windshield and technicians to put it in.  They left the two pilots to “guard” the aircraft since it had classified equipment installed.

Around 5 pm the same day, my shift was ending and I told the two pilots I was going to go fly my airplane and would they like to go. It is only a 2 seat airplane so they were going to have to take turns. Neither had ever flown in a 1946 taildragger and thought it would be fun. My C-120 was in the hanger a short distance from the tower so I taxied it to the ramp and one of the pilots jumped into the co-pilots seat. I told him I would take the plane off but would turn over the controls to him as soon as the wheels left the runway. A taildragger aircraft is a bear to handle while on the ground and it takes training and experience or a ground loop is the result. Even taxing a taildragger is “different” because you can’t see over the nose so you have to S-turn to peek around the nose. I lined up on the runway, applied full power and the tail came off the ground almost immediately. I kept the nose in line with the centerline by using lots of rudder until it lifted off the ground and then said “It’s Yours”. The pilot grabbed the wheel and started our climb out but he couldn’t keep it from starting to turn. I finally realized he had both feet planted on the floor and not the rudder pedals. I explained that this airplane had to be flown not driven like his big jet. After that, he had a great time seeing what flying was really like. He flew us back to the pattern and got us on a high final. He asked where the flap control was and I said “We don’t have any stinking flaps” I then took the controls and put it into a radical side slip. A side slip is accomplished by lifting the nose, turning the wheel to one side and putting the rudder to the opposite side. This dumps the air from the wings and the plane comes down like a dropping elevator; fast with a very unusual view out the side window which is now in line with the runway. The Pilot grabbed the glareshield with one hand and his seat with the other and I could tell he was as stiff as a board. I lost several hundred feet and it looked like we would smash into the runway sideways but at about 20 feet I centered the wheel and rudder and the plane went into a perfect flare and landing. All the pilot could say was “ Holy Sh--! , I’ve never done a slip before.” I dropped him off and before he could warn the other pilot I loaded pilot number 2 into the plane and repeated the whole flight with the same results.

Afterwards we went up to the tower and we talked about the difference in flying jets and flying old underpowered taildraggers. The jet controls are all integrated so much of their flying does not require input from the rudder and they have flaps for landing, never using a slip. It was fun showing these thousand hour pilots that they didn’t know everything about flying.