Survival
Skills
or
Props
That Go "Bang" in the Night
Ernest Gahn taught us that, in aviation, fate is the hunter.
Another lesson in his book was that our skills as pilots can help us
survive if we become prey to this hunter. In the episode that
follows, fate plays the role of both hunter and saviour.
Interwoven between those plays of fate, survival skills bind all of the
events together, in a fight to live through a desperate
situation. As usual the story starts out innocently enough.
Everything was going as planned. As we climbed through 5000
towards 7000 feet, it was as if we were in space rather than the
atmosphere. There was only a thin line of gold left along the
western horizon behind us and the rest of the sky was already jet black
and full of stars. The black sky was absolute, cold and crystal
clear, with no clouds or moon. The time was Christmas Eve in
1971. Christiane and I were starting out on a thousand mile trip
home to visit the family for the holidays.
This trip was going to accomplish several ends and we had been planning
it for over a month. I had just made the switch from running an
airport and soaring center to a desk job in engineering, so the flight
was going to get me back into the air plus give me some much needed
practice on my brand new instrument rating. It would also take
both Chris and I back to Charleston for the first visit with the family
since my father's death in October while flying in a North Carolina
airshow.
The preparations had included considerable searching for a suitable
airplane to rent for the trip. I had found a new, fully
instrumented Grumman AA1-A trainer in San Antonio that would take us
there and back for about the same rental price as the airline tickets
would have cost. The week before our departure, I had driven down
and gotten a check out in a Grumman Yankee, which consisted of three
takeoffs and landings, plus a stall series. It had been my first
flight in a Grumman, and on the night of the 22nd, I made my first solo
flight in the AA1-A, ferrying it to Austin after a poor preflight done
by the light of a flashlight. I tried the next day to fly again
before we left, but the weather had been lousy and unflyable.
But now we were on our way and I was beginning to relax. The first two
hours of the flight had been straightforward and without any
surprises. Center had brought us back down to 5000 feet from
7000, and as we approached the VOR that marked the last leg before a
fuel stop in Alexandria, Lousiania, Chris asked what we would do in the
event of an engine failure at night. The question didn't make me
as nervous as it should have. I knew about her psychic powers by
then. The week before, we had been going down an Interstate
highway on a BSA motorcycle at 75 mph, when she asked me what would
happen if a tire blowout occurred, and about 90 seconds later the rear
tire went. That example was only one of her many accurate
premonitions. I glibly explained that we would simply ask center
for a vector to the nearest lighted airport, then glide there and land.
What I didn't tell her was that I had been nervous about that
possibility ever since we took off. I had been on many single
engine night flights with my father throughout my childhood, but I was
still a bit nervous on this trip since I had done very little night
flying on my own other than to occasionally practice night landings to
keep current. As a result I was taking every precaution that I
could think of, such as flying high to get maximum glide range in case
of trouble, burning thirty minutes out of the second tank, then back to
the first tank and burning that one dry to get some solid figures on
our fuel use, and in general being jumpy about the slightest change in
engine noise.
Less than five minutes after the question, the whole airframe shook
with a tremendous bang, followed by unbelievable vibration and
noise. My hand reacted by reflex immediately
and yanked the throttle back to idle. Still , the
vibration felt capable of destroying the airframe, so much so, that it
seemed as if the whole aircraft was shaking violently over six inches
in every direction. I knew I had to get the engine stopped
completely but at the same time I knew I also had to get that vector
that I had just spoken to Chris about. I pushed the mike button
and cleared the frequency with a few "maydays," and at the same time
pulled the mixture back. . . no change in the vibration with the engine
dead and windmilling.
Center came back and asked what the problem was. As I told him
that we had just experienced a complete engine failure and needed a
vector to the nearest lighted airport, I started to bring the nose up
to slow the plane down enough to stop the prop. No such luck, the
Yankee stalled and fell off into a quarter turn spin before I could
recover, and the prop hadn't stopped. I tried it three more times
before I was successful, each attempt with the airplane trying to fall
off into a spin.
I was scared. A better word would be terrified. Only four
months before this flight, I had experienced a catastrophic engine
failure in daylight, and over friendly terrain. I knew how close
that had been, and here I was, at night, no airports in sight, over
terrain that I knew was mostly pine forests and swamps, and the only
road I could see was two lane, bumper to bumper with holiday traffic,
and car lights that flickered under the trees hanging over the
road. It seemed to be just a matter of time until. . .
Center came back with a vector, "Turn right to 120 degrees." I
started a right turn. . .
"You've turned too far." The voice was calm and authoritative,
but it didn't come from the loudspeaker, rather from the right
seat. Chris didn't have a pilot's rating at that time, but she
had been around me and flying long enough to know that I wasn't
functioning up to par. She repeated the heading, and I turned
back toward it. Center came back with the information that the
assigned vector was to Fort Polk airfield, and the distance there was
20 nautical miles. The Grumman had a glide ratio of under 10 to
1, so, with an altitude of less than a mile it was clear that we were
not going to make it. I told him that making Fort Polk was
impossible, and that the best thing that he could do for us was to make
sure that someone would be looking for us and that they knew about
where to start looking.
All of a sudden my brain put the pieces together, and I knew what had
happened. At lunch that day, a friend (who was also an A&P)
had gone with me to the airport to look at the plane. It had less than
50
hours total time so I had not been too concerned about it's safety, but
during a walkaround, Gary spotted a large nick in one of the propeller
blades. It had been dressed out with a file to a smooth cavity
with the radius of my little fingertip, and was about three eight's of
an inch deep. There was a logbook entry noting the repair, signed
by a certified mechanic. The bang must have been the propeller
failing as a result of a stress crack originating from that nick.
Almost a foot of the prop would have ripped off. I leaned up to
the windshield, explaining my theory to Chris. We could barely
see the silhouette of one blade. Bumping the starter carefully
brought the other blade into view, and it was noticeably shorter.
The voice from center was back. He had found a card with helpful
suggestions in the event of an engine failure, and was reading a litany
of suggestions such as ". . . check your fuel selector, check your
mixture control, etc., etc." The list seemed to go on
forever. When the frequency was finally clear, I told him that we
had a broken prop. There was no response and we glided on in
silence. I sat there trying to visualize what it was going to be
like when we hit the trees. Chris told me later that her thoughts
at the same time, were of concern for my mother in having to go through
personal effects from an air crash twice in three months.
Center came back and handed us off to Fort Polk tower. After
establishing contact with them, all I could do was repeat my request
that they have somebody start looking for us as soon as they lost radio
contact.
The altitude was down to 1500 feet and there was nothing but blackness
below us. The fear began to come back. I couldn't simply
sit and wait, so I decided to see if I could use just enough power to
drag us on to Fort Polk. I hit the starter to get the prop
windmilling. The results of that attempt got my complete
attention. The vibration was worse than I remembered and I was
certain that if I allowed it to continue, the engine mounts would fail
and the engine would separate from the airframe. I felt that it
was going to be better to go in under control rather than out of
control. As a result, I was back to the routine of stall and spin
recovery to get the damn vibration stopped, but this time under 1000
feet. I was getting better, this time it only took two tries.
In the midst of the second prop stopping, stall-spin recovery exercise,
I saw something I couldn't believe--we were over the end of the
runway! It was if someone had just turned on the lights. I
called tower and told them that we had the airport made. The
airplane was over the threshold with the runway heading 90 degrees off
to the right. I made a steep left turn to get in a good position
to start the final approach, then another 180 to head back toward the
runway on a short final. I called tower and asked for the length
of the lighted runway. I had already assumed that since it was a
military base, it's length would be at least 5000 feet. With that
in mind, my plan was to shoot for touchdown at the midpoint of the
runway so that I would have some options in case either an undershoot
or overshoot situation developed.
There was no answer from the tower on the length request. Something was
wrong. This was not Fort Polk. It was simply a runway, a
very short one at that, and... I was extremely high. So much
for plans based on 5000 feet of usable runway for the landing. I
was almost at the threshold of a runway that was 2700 feet long, and
still had almost 500 feet of altitude.
Years of glider flying began paying off. I put the Grumman into a
full slip and it came down like a brick. Touch down was at about
the one third mark, and we came to a stop 700 feet later. My
adrenaline level was off the top of the scale. I slid the canopy
back, and the next thing I knew, I was running up and down the runway
yelling at the top of my lungs. Christiane was more
subdued. She simply brought up the possibility that we were dead
and just didn't know it yet. I went back to the cockpit and
picked up the mike. "Is there anyone on this frequency that can
relay a message to Fort Polk tower?" There was a short pause and
the deep, measured voice of a professional pilot came back out of the
dark. He must have had some of the same suspicions that Chris had
had, because it took several exchanges of transmissions to convince him
that we had not crashed. He also guessed, correctly as it turned
out, that we had landed at Leesville Municipal Airport, ten miles short
of the goal center had set for us.
The entire drama had taken less than five minutes. For most of it
I had been sure that we would not survive. It was five minutes
that I would never forget, and it seemed more like twenty four hours
than five minutes. Fate had picked the most desolate spot
possible to sever the prop. Fate had also given us the vector to
the unreachable airport that took us directly to the only landing area
in range.
Throughout the episode I had been challenged to use many of my skills
that as a pilot up until this point had only been practiced as
exercises in improving general pilot proficiency. I saw those
same skills now as survival skills. Stalls and spins for
example. How many pilots practice them with only an eye toward
pleasing the instructor, or passing an exam. That night knowledge
and skills with stalls, spins, slips, deadstick landings, stopping the
prop, and even radio procedures, prevented one of "those nights" from
becoming a fatal evening. If you are a new pilot, think about it
when you are out in the practice area. If you are an
"experienced" pilot, remember that there is a hunter out there and ask
yourself how long has it been since you practiced some of those old
skills.
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