A tailwheel airplane settles on another GA aircraft after an attempted crosswind landing.
As pilots, we like to think that the ‘stuff’ will never happen to us, yet it happens to our fellow aviators more often than we like to think.
Some years ago, the board that governs our local port district elected me as a commissioner. Among other things, the Port operates our busy, non-towered local regional airport. In that role, every time there has been an airplane accident at the airport, I get called to the scene, and as a result, I have been surprised by the amount of ‘stuff’ (often unreported) that I have seen happen.
Over time, I have found the mishaps are most often (but not always) due to lousy pilot decisions. And, it is usually not just one poor decision but a series of them in a row that results in the accident. In hindsight, the outcome is almost predictable. But it is not just ‘low-time’ private pilots that are afflicted; it can and does happen to any of us regardless of flight time or ratings. Below are a series of accidents I have been called to over the past couple of years, wherein it will probably be evident to you when the unfortunate pilot decision-making started, and also one where (sometimes to the relief of the pilot) issues related to the airplane itself caused the problem.
In the first example, the pilot was retired, held a private license, was in his late 60s, and had spent the last year restoring a 1950s vintage, fabric-covered, tail dragger airplane to like-new condition. He completed all the right touches in loving detail, including wood paneling on the instrument panel (apparently considered an attractive option at the time) and overhauling the original Franklin engine. Of course, while he had been working on it all year, he had not flown the airplane, nor did he have any significant other time or training in tailwheel aircraft. The day he completed the plane was beautiful, with a 10-knot wind right down the center of the runway, which was only 100 feet from his hangar. He could not contain his enthusiasm, so he decided to try it.
The first three take-offs were a little wobbly from a directional point of view, but the airplane was lightly loaded and got airborne before anything disastrous happened. The landings were all bouncy, but the landing gear on this particular airplane had good oleo struts, and they helped smooth things out a bit. To the pilot’s relief, given his lack of experience, the whole flight was working out very well, and he was starting to think he was quite ‘the’ pilot. But then, the perpendicular runway, which, because it was much longer and better paved, had an increasing amount of traffic despite the 10-knot crosswind. So, our pilot decided that since the other airplanes were doing just fine on the crosswind runway, he might move over there and join them.
Tailwheel airplanes become entirely different animals in the presence of a crosswind, something he promptly discovered. On his first landing, the aircraft bounced some five feet in the air, and with the crosswind from the right, it started drifting to the left off the runway. He compensated for the drift by applying a lot of right rudder and (inadvertently) a touch of right brake. On the second touchdown, the airplane was closer to the centerline but now headed around 60 degrees off the runway’s direction. He decided to go around since the plane was almost perpendicular to the runway center line. Adding full power but without sufficient airspeed, the airplane came back down again, this time on the grass; it then bounced back up again to about 10 feet and, with the engine at full power, ran into the top of an airplane parked on the ramp, adjacent to the runway. Fortunately, the pilot was not hurt, but he had totaled two general aviation airplanes, and the fire department spent a couple of hours cleaning up a 40-gallon low-lead fuel spill.
But, it is not just private pilots.
The commercially licensed pilot had several thousand hours in fixed-gear airplanes but was relatively new to airplanes with retractable landing gear. He decided an efficient, small, single-engine retractable was just what he needed to fly back and forth from his island home, and so after diligently looking for quite a while, he bought one. But, after the purchase, winter weather set in, and he did not fly it much for months.
Finally, a decent day arrived with good weather, and he had some spare time, so he decided to get current. The departure from his home airport went smoothly, and the flight to our airport only took 15 minutes. He was arriving from the west, and it just so happened the wind was negligible; rather than making a proper pattern entry as was his habit, he elected to make a visual straight-in approach from 10 miles out, direct to the east-west runway.
The problem with straight-in visual approaches is that many cues pilots use from pattern flying are absent. For example, pilots lose the habit of lowering landing gear on downwind (or over the initial approach fix if flying IFR). Things also get forgotten at times when the pilot’s routine is changed, especially while on approach and in high workload situations.
Our pilot had everything nicely lined up on his long final. He crossed the approach end of the runway a little fast for reasons he did not grasp, floated about halfway down the 5000-foot runway during the flare, then made a very gentle landing on the fuselage, followed by a quick, sliding stop, all with the gear handle still in the retracted position. We had to close the airport for an hour while we moved the airplane to a local mechanic’s hangar. The prognosis was, what with sudden engine stoppage and fuselage damage, that little airplane would never fly again, and the insurance company would total it.
But not just lack of recent flight time results in problems.
The corporate pilot had an ATP with several thousand hours flying the twin-engine, pressurized turbine aircraft. He flew it professionally nearly every day, year-round, for a local corporation. Like often happens in corporate aviation, his day usually started at about 0500 and involved flying construction managers to a site about 500 miles away. He would then wait around all day, trying to nap on the local FBO’s frayed, dirty and worn couch, later to fly the return leg late in the afternoon while his passengers drank beer in the back and discussed their business day. The pilot repeatedly made this type of flight and had the whole thing down cold. He memorized everything, including approaches, frequencies, power settings, airspeeds, and even the complete menu at the layover location restaurant. He had done it so often that he complained about it being incredibly dull and was thinking about finding another line of employment.
The weather on this particular return flight was CAVU, and the winds were calm. The runway in use ran to the west, and given he was returning from the east, he elected to make a very long, straight-in visual approach. He came over the approach end of the runway on speed and glide path, noticing that the power he was carrying was slightly less than expected, something he attributed to the airplane being light. When he reduced power to begin the flare, it seemed the plane floated a bit more than was expected, and then there was this funny ‘ting,’ ‘ting,’ ‘ting’ noise as three of the propeller blades from each engine made gentle contact with the pavement. The funny tinging resulted in him pulling back on the control wheel slightly, which caused the tings to go away entirely. At this point, he suddenly realized that he had forgotten to lower the landing gear in his relaxed and bored state of mind. His next move was his most dangerous one.
Both engines went to full power, and although both were vibrating in a novel fashion, he pulled up and entered the traffic pattern. Hoping no one had noticed, he lowered the gear and began another approach by turning to base and final. This landing attempt, now with the gear extended, went just fine. He pulled the airplane up to the FBO front door only to find the chief pilot standing there, motioning for him to pull the aircraft further forward before shutting down so that when the passengers exited, they would have to walk aft to enter the building. That struck him as odd, as it was company policy to pull up right in front of the door. The line guys opened the aircraft door, and the passengers, seemingly oblivious to what had just occurred, walked the short distance aft to the building, then out to their cars and drove home.
If they had walked around the front of the aircraft, they would have noticed that all three propeller blades on both engines were bent 90 degrees, about one inch from the distal ends. Evident to the chief pilot, who had witnessed the whole thing from his office window, he promptly arranged the towing of the airplane to the maintenance hangar, where it was out of sight. He had another aircraft of the same model pulled out, and the next group of passengers boarded as if nothing had happened. The pilot, however, never flew for the company again. Sometimes, you get what you wish for.
And finally, one mishap where the airplane failed the pilot.
The airplane was an older King Air. The ATP-licensed pilot had nearly 10,000 hours in King Airs. The flight was returning from a sunny south location, and the aircraft’s owner and his family were on board as passengers. The weather was about 2,000 feet overcast with five miles of visibility, which resulted in the pilot electing to make a GPS approach. When reaching the initial approach fix (IAF) and still in instrument conditions, the pilot lowered the landing gear, just as the checklist called.
Right after he moved the gear handle, there was a loud ‘bang’ from somewhere forward of the pilot’s seat. Shortly after, both main landing gear showed green lights, but not on the nose. The pilot continued the approach until below the clouds and then asked the FBO on the Unicom frequency to look at the airplane as he made a low approach. The FBO reported that the nose wheel was retracted, and the pilot then decided to circle the airport in visual conditions. At the same time, he had the owner-passenger in the right front seat run the appropriate emergency checklist. None of the checklist procedures produced a green light for the nose wheel, and the pilot decided to land and hold the nose off as long as possible, ideally until the propellers stopped moving. He accomplished the landing quite well, with the airplane sliding to a stop, nose down on the runway centerline. As it turned out, the chain from the electric motor to the nose wheel mechanism broke. Even though this was not his fault, the pilot was still quite sheepish about describing what happened when I interviewed him at the site. The other pilots hanging around to see what happened described it as, “Well, stuff happens.”
Flying requires constant attention, operational currency, and the repeated use of procedures and habit patterns to make it safer. Ironically, experience, repetition and high flight time are not necessarily protective, as they can lead to boredom and accidents. Finally, airplanes are not perfect; machines sometimes break.
Reducing the inevitable ‘stuff’ that happens is our highest responsibility. Hoping it is the airplane you can blame, not yourself, isn’t a solution. We must know our limitations and those of our machine’s systems to enjoy our freedom to fly.
