In
recent years, even I have had to acknowledge that I have
entered, albeit reluctantly, the category of the mature airman.
As such, I have joined the ranks of those with a successful
(read survived) flying history spanning fifty years or so and it
is natural for the august members who inhabit this strata to be
occasionally asked by our younger brethren about things that
they consider worrisome in their own flying career. Crashing
would be one.
How many times, they will ask, I have
been involved in occasions where the retail worth of the
airplane I was flying was rapidly and substantially reduced?
It's a complicated question to answer, especially if you take
the Clinton-esk approach to it and say it depends on what your
definition of crashing is. I choose to do that, since it reduces
my record of shame by fifty percent if I don't count flying the
Super Cruiser through the top of a large Oak tree as a crash. My
point there being that the airplane did not come to a complete
stop, which I maintain is a basic requirement for a certifiable
airplane crash.
Strangely enough, at the time of this
happening I had every intention of crashing the airplane and it
was a failed attempt. Circumstances, which I won't recount here,
had given me a choice of either crashing into the top of the
tree or the trunk of the tree and since the top looked so much
softer I had chosen it. Imagine my delight when the rugged
little Piper came out the other side of the tree, still flying
but looking considerably more ragged that it did when it entered
the canopy.
So with the Super Cruiser caper eliminated
as major blot on my career I'll move along to the one time I
really did the deed.
In the summer of 1968 I was
running a little flight school on a sixteen hundred foot sod
strip at the bucolic little town of Buckhannon, in Central West
Virginia. We were using a Citabria, a Champ and a J-3 for
instruction and with our low overhead we could offer rates that
had students driving by the bigger airports with their new
Piper's and Cessna's to come and fly with us.
One of
the many aspiring aviators that came to us to learn to fly was
named Joe-Joe, and therein hangs the tale of how I managed to
crash one of the safest and easiest to fly aircraft ever
designed.
I'm not sure why Joe-Joe wore the double
name, but I think it had something to do with his being
descended from the large Italian community that had formed
around Clarksburg in the early part of the century, when
immigrants had come to work in the mines and the factories. He
was short, personable and a snappy dresser, complete with the
gold chain around his neck. He worked as a salesman for a large
pharmaceutical company and his desire to be a flyer was almost
palpable. Apparently this was something he had thought about for
a long time and after his first lesson he jumped in with
unbounded enthusiasm and bought every pilot related accessory he
could find, including a license plate for the front of his car
that identified him as a pilot.
I remember Joe-Joe as
an average student, neither slow nor quick to pick up the
nuances of flying an airplane, but always very enthusiastic
about learning and just completely in love with the whole
package of aviation. He always showed up on time for his lessons
and spent hours just hanging around the airport, talking with
the other students and being part of the airport scene. Often
times he cheerfully volunteered to help out with the endless and
thankless chores that always needed to be done around the field,
such as washing airplanes and sweeping out the hangar.
It
didn't surprise me then, shortly after I had soloed him in the
Champ that he came to me and wanted me to help him buy an
airplane. He had his eye on an Ercoupe that was owned by an old
gentleman who was retiring from flying and had mentioned around
the Clarksburg airport that he wanted to sell it. I went there
with Joe-Joe a few days later, looked at the airplane and gave
it my blessing. A few days after that he called me and said he
had bought it and asked me to come to Clarksburg and check him
out in it. I did, and after three or four hours he was
comfortable flying it from the 4200 by 100 foot runway there
where he had rented a hangar and where it would be convenient
for him to get to the airplane.
I went on
back to the flight school and for a few weeks I didn't hear from
Joe-Joe. He called one day to say he had been flying the Coupe
and getting along well, but he'd like to be able to bring it
into our little strip and visit with his buddies here. I agreed
to fly in with him and get him checked out and comfortable
landing the airplane on a short, grass strip.
I had a
break in the schedule on Sunday afternoon and I agreed to travel
to Clarksburg and fly with him. I had a solo student drop me off
there and Joe-Joe was waiting for me with the Ercoupe, standing
proudly in front of the airplane by the terminal restaurant, the
airplane shiny and well kept in the September sun.
I
started the lesson by having Joe-Joe do slow flight and we
worked on maintaining speed by attitude and altitude by
throttle. He seemed at home with the concept and after an hour
or so of this drill we headed south for our airport.
It
was a hot, early fall day and the wind was a gusty crosswind
when we turned final for what would be runway 26 if we could
have painted numbers on the grass. Joe-Joe was flying the
airplane well as we approached the runway, sliding down the air
over Doctor Goulds's potato field next to the airport, holding
the speed at 65 miles an hour with the attitude of the airplane
and keeping just enough power on to carry us to our intended
landing spot about a hundred feet beyond the fence that bounded
the airport. The closer we came to the ground the more unstable
the air felt and I could see the windsock switching back and
forth in the distance. When we were about 200 feet from the
boundary fence and 50 feet above the ground the airplane
encountered a strong downdraft and suddenly started to lose
altitude. Before I could react, Joe-Joe quickly pulled back on
the yoke.
I've
read that Ercoupes are designed not to stall, but I'm here to
tell you that they are champion mushers. The airplane dropped
out from under our butts as I slammed the throttle forward, but
it was too late. We hit the plowed ground of the potato patch
with a bone jarring impact, bounced once and with the second
impact the nose gear dug in and the airplane started to go over.
In my mind's eye I can see the still rotating
propeller slow and start to bend backward as the airplane turned
a slow summersault. We slammed into the earth upside down and
the canopy shattered and crushed down until we were hanging
suspended upside down inside a dark compartment, quiet except
for the ticking of the cooling engine. The master switch was
still on and since my first impulse was to release my belt and
lower myself to where the canopy had been and which was now the
rich brown soil of the potato patch, I became completely
disoriented and couldn't locate the switch in the darkness. Fire
was foremost on my mind and I imagined that I could smell smoke
and suddenly I became a one man tunneling machine. I started
digging down in the soft ground until I got beyond the airplane,
turned left and popped my head out in the daylight beside the
fuselage. A quick look proved there was no smoke and therefore
no fire and my panic calmed. I called the good news in to
Joe-Joe and he followed my escape route out of the ruined
airplane and we stood in the sunlight and surveyed the mess that
had been a beautiful airplane moments before.
In
the years since, I've thought a great deal about what happened
that day and I think the painful lesson served me well in the
many hours of instructing and of demonstration flying that were
to follow. Skill is achieved in flying, as in many other things,
not by always doing things perfectly, but by making mistakes and
learning how to avoid them. In flying however, there is a narrow
window of error to safely allow the student to learn. My mistake
as a low time instructor was letting my student get himself into
a situation that I couldn't get him out of.
Joe-Joe
got the Ercoupe repaired and owned it for the next twenty years
or so. I felt terribly guilty for letting him smash his ship,
and for as long as I operated an aircraft repair shop I provided
free maintenance for the airplane as well as having our paint
shop apply new livery once the repairs were completed. Joe-Joe
continued to fly, but I think the experience scarred him and he
was never a confident pilot after that. This of course, made me
feel even worse as his hours logged became less and less each
year. Toward the end of his ownership of the Coupe he wasn't
leaving the ground without another pilot in the airplane.
He
would however, make his way solo over to the ramp in front of
the airport restaurant on Sundays when diners filled the place.
There he would do twenty minute runups with the canopy sides
slid down and the long white scarf he wore whipping back along
the side of the airplane in the prop wash. This was a romantic
and nostalgic sight for the older aviators looking out from the
restaurant, and of course the girls dining there liked it too.
In
the years since, I've thought a great deal about what happened
that day and I think the painful lesson served me well in the
many hours of instructing and of demonstration flying that were
to follow. Skill is achieved in flying, as in many other things,
not by always doing things perfectly, but by making mistakes and
learning how to avoid them. In flying however, there is a narrow
window of error to safely allow the student to learn. My mistake
as a low time instructor was letting my student get himself into
a situation that I couldn't get him out of. 
