A Runway Too Long

There is an old saying in the flying community that the two most worthless commodities to an airplane pilot are altitude above and runway behind. Some airline pilots have added a third – married stewardesses that are faithful to their husbands.

Aviation lore abounds with stories about short runway feats. Most ex-military pilots have probably heard some variation of the story about the cadet that got lost on his first cross-county solo flight. Rather than run out of fuel and make a dead stick emergency landing, he made a precautionary landing in a farm field. The owner of the field informed him that he was only a few miles from the airbase. The cadet hitch-hiked back to the base and sheepishly informed his instructor that he had left Uncle Sam's airplane in a farm field. After an appropriate chewing out and reaming of a certain orifice of the cadet's anatomy, two experienced instructor pilots flew out to farm field with a 5 gallon Jerry can of fuel. The idea was for them to land and one of them to fly the aircraft the cadet had landed back to the base. When they flew over the field where the cadet had safely landed, they agreed that the field was too short to make a safe landing and a take-off was certainly out of the question. They returned to the airbase and sent mechanics to the field to dismantle the aircraft and truck it home.

Another story that I have heard concerns a military flight operation also. The event allegedly occurred at the Middlesboro, Kentucky airport during the Eisenhower administration. The sole runway at this airport is between two mountains. Natives call them hills, but they look like mountains to a flatlander. It is not at right angles to the hills; it runs from the base of one hill to the other. Every approach is sliding down the hill to the threshold and every departure is climbing at a rate sufficient to get over the hill or making a turn to avoid hitting it. The prevailing wind is down the valley between the hills so a cross wind is the normal condition. The story is that president Eisenhower flew into Middlesboro to dedicate some Federal Facility. The regular Air Force One at that time was a beautiful VC-121E Lockheed Constellation called Columbine that can still be seen at National Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio. There was no way the 4-engined Connie could land at Middleboro. The story goes that the 4-engine rule for presidential transport was waived and Eisenhower flew to Middlesboro in an Air Force C-131D like the one in the photograph. Supposedly, after the landing, the Air Force flight crew refused to fly the aircraft out and it had to be dismantled and trucked out. I have hear this story from so many people that I have never bothered to verify it. I really doubt that Eisenhower actually flew in a twin-engine C-131D when he was president. It may had been a campaign visit before he was elected or a press plane or just a completely fabricated story that has been told so many times that no one questions it.

The story that I can vouch for is a reverse twist on the short field landing stories.  I was working at the FBO located on a medium sized airport in 1950's.  A lot of our business involved flight training and we used Cessna 120's for training planes. The airport was a controlled field so all the aircraft had VHF two-way radios. The technology then required a separate crystal (very expensive) for each frequency you wanted to transmit on. You could turn a crank to receive any frequency just like your old AM radios at home. Most of our trainers only had 4 crystals. One was for our tower, the other three were the universal frequencies for emergency, control tower and flight service stations.

A young man showed up one afternoon and inquired about flight instruction. His family had just moved into the area from Wyoming. He had already completed about half of the FAA requirements for a Private Pilot Certificate and wanted to complete his training. He had been flying a Luscombe Silvaire , so the transition to the Cessna 120's should be easy. The Cessna has a control wheel and the Luscombe a control stick but they are both tail draggers with similar flight characteristics. (Luscumbe owners – do not bomb my house – I said similar, not identical). One of our instructors flew with the young man and signed him off to solo the Cessna after a 45 minute ride. The radio procedures and long concrete runways didn't seem to give him any problem although he had not encountered either in Wyoming.

Soon the young man was ready to make a cross country solo flight to another controlled field about 80 miles away. The procedure then was for the student to land at the destination and have his log book signed to verify that he had really landed there. The young man took off and returned in about the right amount of time so the instructor didn't pay real close attention to the signature in the log book. A few days later, one of our air-taxi pilots flew a business man in one of the training planes to a tiny 800' runway airport near the airport the young man had supposedly flown to. Eight hundred feet is plenty of runway for anyone that has flown a Cessna 120 very much but we never let student pilots do cross country flights to that airport. The airport operator asked our air taxi pilot if the policy had changed since he had signed a log book for a student pilot a few days prior.

When the air taxi pilot returned, he confronted the student with this information. The student confessed that he was intimidated by the radio and long runways where he supposed to land. He saw the short grass runway and decided it was much less scary to land there.

And that's the truth!

Bowinkle T. Propwash