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Recent |
June 19,
2009
Dear
readers,
In selling airplanes all over the US and
sometimes all over the world, I’ve been involved in many
deliveries. Some of them I do myself and some of them I have
done by experienced ferry pilots. There are many good,
professional pilots to choose from, but each time I use pilot
extraordinaire and long-time best friend David Board, I usually
get a bonus. He gets the airplane where it’s going safely,
then like as not, he also brings back a cracking good flying
yarn. This is his latest, from this spring when I asked him to
deliver an old 172 to Central America. I think you’ll enjoy
it.
It
took over 7 months of struggling with giants to get that 52 year
old airplane through the FAA export certification process. And
to be fair to all concerned, the old crate did have a few hidden
paperwork problems that I failed to catch initially, the major
one being the wrong engine model for this particular aircraft
hanging on the engine mount and married to what was then, by
default, the wrong propeller. However, in my own defense, my
initial inspection of the aircraft took place in a barn
somewhere in central Florida one Sunday morning, so I was almost
1000 miles from home and my technical data resources were
slightly limited. This meant having to rely on the information
contained in 50+ years of spidery scrawl scratched in the
yellowing pages of the aircraft's old maintenance log books. But
actually there were no serious issues of personal or public
safety at stake here, and as proof positive of my unlikely
contention, I submit to you, my reader, that all of these
technical discrepancies ended up being reduced to simple
paperwork issues… Issues that were eventually solved by the
process of FAA STC's and 337 forms and the exchange of that
other ubiquitous form of government paperwork... U. S. Dollars!
And so, while this paper-chase was tirelessly
stumbling along its course, and as all the fees and
unconstitutional taxes were being dutifully paid, I spent what
little free time I had donating more blood, sweat and tears, in
an effort to get this ancient but noble aluminum flying machine
to the point that I felt I could really trust it to fly me
safely over the 2200 miles... through as many as 5 different
countries..., sometimes over mountains and jungles and very
desolate inhospitable swamps... and maybe even a few hours
flying over the open waters of the Gulf of Mexico... in order to
be able to deliver this prestigious prize to it's new and
rightful owner who happened to live in the Republic of Honduras,
(and who by the way, despite being a very intelligent and savvy
individual, had little or no understanding of what he was in for
when he paid, what for him was a small fortune, for this classic
Cessna 172).
Eventually then, just two weeks before
Easter 2009, and after those 7 grueling and frustrating months,
my herculean labors finally bore fruit and I was handed a
pristine certificate of export which meant that, from the point
of view of the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration), this old
Cessna 172 met all the airworthiness requirements of both the
FAA and the CAA (Civil Aviation Authority) of the country it was
being exported to. Two days after that, this old bird was
fuelled, fully loaded with bags and maps and tools and
documents, and she was ready to take off on what for me was to
be another exciting flying adventure. All that was left for me
to do, it seemed, was pluck up the courage to put my butt in the
left seat, yell "clear prop" and "Viva Zapata"
maybe, and then coax and cajole this venerable old bucket of
bolts and rivets up into the sky and off on this 'magic carpet
ride' south from Wheeling, West Virginia all the way to San
Pedro Sula, Honduras, in Central America. It was a tough and
sometimes dangerous job, but someone had to be fool enough to do
it! I thought that it was only fair that this fool was none
other than me!
San Pedro, Honduras from Wheeling ,
West Virginia would be a flight of just over 1530 nautical miles
if a person could fly there the way the Mexican Crow might do
it! But the impact of the largest asteroid ever to hit the
planet millions of years ago, the vagaries of the weather in the
tropics and the combined efforts of the Mexican and U.S.
governments, had all conspired to foil any serious hopes or
aspirations I may have had of being able to make this flight
with anything like the grace and elegance of the sacred 'Corvis
Mexicanus.' For one thing, that would mean departing U.S. soil
somewhere close to New Orleans and flying due south for hours
and hours over the storm-ridden and shark-infested waters of the
Gulf of Mexico until, if I was very lucky, I would arrive
somewhere on Mexico 's Yucatan Peninsula . And even if I made a
clandestine stop at Wal-Mart's secret aviation fuel tank
department and extended the range of that Cessna 172, common
sense dictated that such a long flight over open water was just
not a good idea. Not in this creaky Old Cessna with its antique
0300 Continental engine marred as it was with a dubious
maintenance history. Sacred Crows, you see, don't have to stop
at airports to refuel, nor do they have to pass through customs
and immigration offices and fill out visa applications or flight
plans or pay fees and fines and so on. And anyway, from what I
saw of them on this adventure, the sacrosanct and spirited Crows
of Mexico were a tough bunch of highly intelligent birds that
were more likely to peck your eyes out with their boney beaks
than cooperate with the hum-drum process of border bureaucracy,
despite the brightest of badges and uniforms. However, as a
brow-beaten, two-legged, wingless human pilot - I didn't even
come close to enjoying all the rights and privileges universally
afforded the magnificent Crow - not when it comes to migrating
south anyway! So I was forced to choose a much more circuitous
route!
The Flight Begins
The
very first leg of this journey took me from Wheeling , West
Virginia , 140 miles to an airport close to Huntington , West
Virginia . I had actually planned on going much farther than
that at the time I took off, but from the outset, this flight
was plagued and beset by all manner of tedious problems and
discomforts that began with, or perhaps I should say were
dominated by, very strong winds, and some seriously turbulent,
cold and lumpy air. So this relatively short 140 mile leg, that
should have taken me no more than 90 minutes on a good day,
ended up taking me almost 4 long and laborious stress-filled
hours. And of course, as anyone who has flown one knows, 4 hours
of flying is perilously close to a full load of fuel in a 1957
Cessna 172.
There had been thunderstorms ahead of a
cold front the day before I set off, so I was trying to sneak
out close behind the last of them. This was a strategy that had
worked for me hundreds of times before. Behind this particular
cold front however, there was a wide band of some significantly
strong and gusty winds as well as a solid overcast of fairly low
and frigid clouds. On my departure from the Wheeling airport for
example, the bases of the overcast were only about 1600 feet
above the hill tops, therefore, flying at about 2300 feet above
mean sea level put me 500 feet below the cloud bases and only
700 feet of clearance above the tree tops. The thing that I
didn't like about these conditions was that in the event of an
engine failure I would have had less than 90 seconds of glide
time to figure out what I was going to do before the trees began
to impede my progress! Those 90 seconds of course equate to 'no
time at all in the real world.' On the bight side... visibility
was fairly good at about 10 miles or better. But the idiotic and
malevolent wind this day was blowing right smack on my nose at
more than double the speed that was forecast and this reduced my
100 mph speed through the air to a disgusting, depressing and
disappointing 45 to 50 mph of forward progress over the ground
below me. So at this avian snail's pace, I bounced and bumped
and battled my way south-west, and every time I looked down
below me I saw old folks out for a Sunday drive and the
occasional convoy of old West Virginia coal trucks, who were all
passing me up on the crooked winding West Virginia roads below.
After an hour or so of this kind of insult I began to feel as if
I were piloting an aluminum rickshaw rather than a U.S.
certified airplane. I remember thinking to myself "Thank
goodness Lance Armstrong isn't down there practicing for next
year's Tour de France... because if he were, he would have
doubtless passed me up and left me in the dust on his bicycle
too!" and that might have proved too much for me to bear.
Not that I am claiming that this was the roughest
flight I have ever had the misfortune to have flown - far from
it. I was actually knocked unconscious by turbulence once
descending into Martinsburg , West Virginia . I was the only
pilot at the controls of a Cessna 172 XP at the time and I still
have the scar on my forehead that serves as a bleak reminder of
that event. My two non-aviator passengers were quite shook up
about that incident at the time! But that, as they say, is
another story. This flight, however, had to be right up there in
the top ten most uncomfortable flights I had ever made. In fact
it was so rough and so ridiculously uncomfortable, that I am
sure that I will never ever be able to completely erase it from
my memory and I will doubtless occasionally re-live it from time
to time in the form of a recurring nightmare. A nightmare that I
will probably wake up from, having thrown myself out of bed, all
tangled in my parachute of bed sheets! And if this level of
discomfort wasn't enough grief for one flight, about an hour and
a half later I began to experience that other bone-chilling
pilot's nightmare: a prolonged attack of Carburetor Icing
Syndrome! This flight, it seemed, was going south in more ways
than one!
This Carburetor Ice problem began to happen
very slowly at first and at about the same time as I began to
fly into what I can only describe as 'cascading veils of frozen
and falling precipitation that seemed to hang like huge eerie
drapes below the battleship grey clouds around and above me.
When you find yourself in this kind of situation you basically
have two choices: you can either try to fly around these ghostly
apparitions, attempting vainly to avoid them, and in doing so,
risk getting lost or disoriented in the process; or you can
chance it and fly straight through them and risk getting
yourself lost and disoriented that way instead. My progress on
this day had been so slow and difficult that I didn't feel I had
the fuel reserves to take the scenic, meandering route,
especially as there was no way to know how long that route would
end up being. I didn't want to be caught out low on fuel with
only 90 seconds of glide time to oblivion, so I elected to
maintain my course, turn on the pitot heat and plough right on
through the veils of virga. And so, it was just about this time
that I began to notice the engine had mysteriously begun to slow
down and increasing throttle position didn't seem to correct the
problem.
When this began to happen, I did what any
pilot would do in a Cessna 172, and with some trepidation I
gingerly applied full carb heat. Straight away after pulling the
carb heat control things got a lot worse, not better, and the
engine now coughed and sputtered and lost even more RPMs. This
for me, however, was music to my ears, because then I was sure
that the problem was almost certainly going to be carb ice.
Carburetor icing after all, was something that I could fix right
there in the cockpit and the least of all possible evils I could
be facing at a time like this. After all the ice cleared from
the throat of the carb, that old Continental smoothed right out
and began to pick up the pace again. The only problem now was
that as soon as I took the carb heat off again the carb ice
syndrome would gradually begin again.
Feeling slightly
more relaxed, I then checked the outside air temperature and it
looked to be about 38 degrees Fahrenheit or just 6 degrees above
the freezing level. This also made a kind of reassuring sense to
me. I knew the induced low pressure in the throat of the
up-draft carburetor and the accompanying drop in air temperature
that always accompany a drop in pressure was making the intake
air just cold enough to bring down to where the dew point and
the freezing point coincided: 32 degrees Fahrenheit or 0 degrees
Celsius. Now the problem for me this day was that when
conditions like this are ripe for it, the hazard of carb icing
will persist unless something in the equation changes. It made
no sense for me to keep pulling the heat on and pushing it off
again. What if the cable broke while I was doing this? Flying
with the heat on isn't recommended practice either! With the
heat on the engine is sucking down a much richer mixture and I
was already worried about the fuel situation. Normally when I
find myself flying in carb icing conditions, I can simply change
altitude and escape the very exacting conditions that are
necessary for this ice formation. Going up in altitude is always
my preference. As soon as the outside air temperature gets a
degree or two lower there is usually less moisture content in
the air and the conditions for carb icing dissipate completely.
But on this day I had a solid overcast 500 feet above me and
trees and hill tops 700 feet below me. So I was stuck there at
this 'ice critical' altitude and there was nothing that I could
really do about it.
The Flight Ends
By
now this first leg of my journey to Honduras had turned into
such a monumental struggle that when I got close to Huntington ,
I decided to simply give up flying for the day and see if
tomorrow would be any better. So I landed at the little
satellite airport of Chesapeake just across the Ohio River from
Huntington in the state of Ohio . I was getting critically low
on fuel by then anyway, and because of the late start the light
was beginning to fade and I didn't want to make any part of this
flight by night if I could help it. To my surprise the first
person I met on landing was an ex-student of mine who had come
to me for her instrument ratings maybe 10 years before. Now she
was a flight instructor herself and working this day at this
very airport. This stop turned out to be quite a wonderful and
unexpected reunion for both of us. When she learned that I was
on my way to Honduras with this old bird, she insisted that we
go out to dinner that night as she wanted to hear all about this
adventure and she had stories of her own she wanted to share
with me. And after dinner she was kind enough to make sure I was
comfortable camping out in the lounge of the FBO right there at
the airport.
Now I had everything I needed for a good
night's rest and I was poised to make an early start in the
morning. My ex-student even left me the keys to the airport
courtesy car. This is a car that the FBO has to loan out to
stray or stranded pilots like me. I fell asleep listening to the
tin on the hangars rattle in the wind all night. At daybreak the
following day I was able to drive myself a mile or two to get
breakfast at the local Bob Evans restaurant. And an hour after
first light I was cranking the engine with the old pull start
control wire and ready to go again but now in much nicer
conditions. It struck me as I was leaving that I have been
flying airplanes for almost 40 years, and in that time I had
witnessed and been a part of many changes in the wild and
wonderful world of general aviation. There was a time not so
long ago when the hospitality I received at the Chesapeake
airport was common place in America . In fact the airport that I
ran for over 20 years was just such an airport. But those
courtesies and that type of kindness have been rapidly vanishing
of late. It was to the point now that they are the exception
rather than the rule. My arrival 'out of the blue' at Chesapeake
turned out to be a reminder of a bygone era. It was sure good
to meet up with that young flight instructor, Dola, and to meet
her kind and generous boss Nelson who was valiantly trying to
keep up the great American tradition of airport hospitality. And
now refreshed, I was heading south again although I still had
maybe 2000 more miles to go on this journey before I, too,
became something less that a footnote in the history of what
feel sure is destined to soon be an extinct and mostly forgotten
way of life!
They tell me that millions of years ago a
huge asteroid or meteorite caused a gigantic crater that filled
with sea water and created what we now call the Gulf of Mexico .
And there are those that claim that this cosmic collision was
also responsible for the extinction of the Dinosaur era. As I
now left the Chesapeake airport and headed directly for that
great meteor crater I was feeling a bit like a dinosaur myself!
Now as I look back over the last 40 years, perhaps strangely in
a way, all of the changes that I see coming along just make me
glad rather than sad to be something of a dinosaur. Glad to
think that I got to experience so much of the history of
aviation since the Wright Brothers took to the air about 100
years ago. And old, yes, I may be that today, and yet, as old as
I am, I am still young enough at heart to enjoy this adventure
we call flight - and I have enjoyed it here in the land of Piper
and Cessna and Beechcraft where it all began. And I am healthy
enough to even revel in this freedom to fly - fly almost
whenever and where ever I choose. And I am thankful and so glad
to have lived in what was surely the only country in the world
where for a while at least, aviation was the domain of the
common man. A country where even a humble and hard working
middle class man like myself could still enjoy being part of the
great American aviation dream and enjoy a truly wonderful way of
life!
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