Post Crash Syndrome

A major aircraft crash with the corresponding loss of life and property is truly a tragedy of epic proportions. Even if the passengers are all lawyers, there is still the tragic loss of an aircraft and the non-lawyer crew members. Fortunately aviation has an excellent safety record and these horrendous events are rare. Not as rare are the many minor aviation accidents that are analogous to a fender-bender in the automobile world. In between these extremes are the incidents where the aircraft and property are destroyed or severely damaged but there are no fatalities or serious injuries.

When these major damage incidents or the fender-bender type occur with a non-professional pilot, the worse damage is usually to the pilot's pride or ego. If a legitimate mechanical failure or extreme act of nature can be blamed, the pilot can spin the story to make him/herself a hero. If the cause was strictly a lapse of judgment or piloting error, it is helpful to try and create an illusion of mechanical failure before the NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) or FAA get involved. Weather phenomena are more difficult to create although wind shear is a good one if the terrain favors it and no accurate measurements are available for the moment the incident occurred. I know firsthand of an incident where a Cessna 182 wheel barrowed (nose wheel hit the ground before the main landing gear wheels) when landing on a very short grass runway. The prop contacted the ground and was damaged.  There is an 80 foot hill at the approach end of the runway. The airport sages witnessing the incident immediately began discussing the severe wind shear that was caused by the hill at the end of the runway. The FAA and the insurance adjuster bought the story so I  er I mean the pilot involved wasn't going to argue with them. They didn't seem interested in the fact the CG was at the forward limit (or just a tad out of the legal envelope) and the nose gear oleo strut was completely flat.

Most military aircraft are designed to operate in a hostile environment where they can literally be shot out of the air. Because of this, military air crew always have parachutes or the aircraft is equipped with some type of ejection seat or capsule. In peacetime operations, these escape devices are used when the aircraft encounters some type of situation where the crew cannot safely remain in the aircraft. Of course the aircraft eventually has to hit the ground somewhere. The military is usually very quick to find and secure these crash sites. The Department of Defense has admitted a few instances where the aircraft was actually carrying nuclear bombs or warheads. Almost all military aircraft, even cargo haulers, have some classified equipment on board that shouldn't show up in a local pawn shop after souvenir hunters have processed the crash site. Even if there were no National Security concerns, the military and it's vendors are very concerned about finding the cause of the crash.

C-54 Skymaster in flight.

Sometimes humor is the best medicine to offset the complex emotions that a pilot deals with after escaping a situation that could easily have been fatal. I was working part time for a large freight airline. One morning the base agent called before dawn to inform me that one of our C-54's had crashed in the trees about two miles short of the runway. I lived very close to the crash site and he wanted me to meet him there as quickly as I could. Then he made a strange request. He wanted to know if I had any dark colored house paint. My father was a building contractor and I assured him that I could obtain some quickly since the stores were closed at this hour of the morning. He told me to get the paint and a big brush and meet him at the crash site as quickly as I could. It only took me about ten minutes to get dressed and get some dark blue paint and a brush out of my Dad's storage shed in the backyard.

Five minutes later I was driving on a farm path up towards the flat top of a plateau of about two or three acres area. About the same time I saw the State Trooper car blocking my path I saw through the morning mist the vertical tail section of the C-54 sitting at an odd angle. The base agent came running up to the car and beckoned for me to follow him with the bucket of paint and the brush. He just ignored the cop asking him what he was going to do. There was already a short section of ladder leaning against the tail. While I watched in disbelief, he took the paint and brush and climbed up the ladder and quickly painted over the company name of the freight airline. The cop was shouting at him that he was going to have to arrest him but didn't do anything to stop him from moving the ladder to the other side of tail and painting over the name on that side also. Then the base agent walked up to the cop and said, "Thanks, you can put on the handcuffs now".

It was then that I realized that the pilot and copilot were sitting in the company van that he had used to bring the ladder to the crash scene. From the back seat of the cop car, he instructed me to take the crew to the emergency room to be checked over and then bring them to the base office at the airport. He seemed confident that he would be there and not in jail. I later learned that obscuring the company name was the highest priority the base agent had in a crash if there were no injuries. It must be done before the news people showed up and started taking pictures. Those pictures got saved as file photos and could come back and create bad PR for the airline years after the incident.

The crew was in great shape and suggested we get breakfast instead of going to the emergency room. I was afraid of getting into trouble so we agreed to do both. After breakfast and several hours in the emergency room, we arrived back at the airport about noon. By this time, the airline owners and the various representatives of the government had all arrived at the airport and were sitting around a long makeshift table hastily set up in a corner of the cargo building. I had gotten acquainted with the crew during our time together. The pilot was a jolly, heavy set guy with a bushy mustache and had logged thousands of hours in the left seat of a C-54 including participating in the famous Berlin Airlift. The copilot was on his first C-54 flight for the airline. The pilot was completely calm and the copilot was as fidgety as a woman of the evening at a Woman's Temperance League meeting.

An airport fireman was waiting to meet us when we arrived. He escorted us to the area where the conference table was set up. The pilot stopped and surveyed the situation for a moment. All the dignitaries' eyes were fixed upon him. He cleared his throat, looked at the trembling copilot and spoke in a loud stentorian voice. "I told you to wake me up when it was time to land!"

And that's the truth!

Bowinkle T. Propwash

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

The Bridge of Grant County

Crittenden is a small town in Grant County, Kentucky. Interstate Highway I-75 passes through the county and there is an exit for the town. Near that exit a railroad bridge passes over the Interstate highway. As long as there are airplanes and bridges; people will be flying airplanes under bridges. In the majority of cases, there is some FAR (Federal Air Regulation) that prohibits the activity but that has never been a sufficient deterrent to prevent it from happening.

This story involves none, one or maybe two flights underneath the bridge described above. The highway under the bridge was under construction at the time of these flights but it was paved and ready to be opened to traffic soon. It was a rainy Sunday morning and the pilot's lounge at the FBO was filled with real pilots, student pilots, wannabe pilots, hanger pilots and a few other liars. The weather was forecast to improve to VFR (Visual Flight Rules) conditions in the early afternoon so the weekend fliers were just waiting until they could fly legally. While they were waiting, they was seeing who could tell the best story (lie).

One seasoned CFI (Certified Flight Instructor) had a reputation for being a very efficient story teller. He was spinning a yarn about being with a student down in Grant County where the railroad bridge crossed over the new highway being built. Conveniently, the student was not present to back up his story. It seems that he simulated an engine failure to see how the student would handle the emergency situation. Since it was a single engine training plane, the proper course of action is to find a suitable flat place that you can glide to and hopefully make a landing that you can walk away from. The student chose the unopened highway as an ideal place for an emergency landing and proceeded to do it. When the instructor was satisfied with the way the student handled the situation, he restarted the engine and abandoned the landing approach. That was when (according to his story) he realized that he didn't have enough room to climb high enough pass over the bridge. His only choice was to put the nose down and fly under it. He swore the student pilot to secrecy so it wouldn't do anyone any good to try and verify his story.

Also in the room, there happened to be a Captain for a large airline who was also an ex fighter pilot. He had a rather low tolerance level for flying stories that couldn't be verified by a reliable witness. He made a remark about the instructor's story being in the same category as something you avoid stepping in while walking through a field where bulls are grazing. The instructor retaliated by claiming that the captain had gotten so used to autopilots and copilots and electronic gadgets that he had forgotten about "real" flying like he did when he was a fighter pilot. The insults flew back and forth until the captain declared that "if you and that student flew under that bridge, I'll take the same airplane and student and fly under it inverted". Inverted is airplane talk for upside down.

This was a challenge neither party could walk away from and save face. The room was totally quiet as the captain and instructor just stared at each other. Who would blink first? That is when the FAA came to the rescue. There was an Air Traffic Controller in the room that did some moonlighting for us as a CFII. That is an instructor that teaches instrument flying. When he stood up and walked to the center of the room, we thought that he would give them both an out by telling them that they could lose their pilot's certificate for flying under the bridge and he would just forget about the instructors story and not file any complaint against him.

We were all surprised when he said that he thought the challenge was a good idea except without the student on board. He had a pilot scheduled for a instrument flying lesson that afternoon and they could be in a position to witness the captain flying under the bridge inverted. He suggested that the captain would agree to believe the instructors story if he surveyed the situation and decided it was safe to fly under the bridge inverted. It seemed to be solution worthy of King Solomon. Quite a few wagers were made concerning whether the captain would do it or back out.

Soon the weather cleared and the FAA guy and the pilot learning instrument flying took off in the instrument training aircraft and positioned their aircraft where they could see the bridge. The captain took off in the regular training plane and flew to the location. He lined up with the long straight stretch of highway and flew towards the bridge at an altitude of about 100 feet. When it looked like he was going to fly right into the side of the bridge, he rolled inverted, flew under the bridge, rolled back to normal and headed back to the airport.

Now the trainee pilot with the FAA instructor was under the hood the whole time. That is a device worn when you are learning how to fly on instruments. He could not see anything outside of the aircraft; just the instrument panel. So there was still just the captain and the FAA guy to verify the story. We found out months later that the captain hadn't been a fighter pilot at all; he had flown cargo planes in the military. In fact he had flown in the same unit as the FAA guy and they had been buddies.

And that's the truth!

Bowinkle T. Propwash       

The Height of Wagering

CVR’s (Cockpit Voice Recorders) have taken a lot of fun out of flying for the cockpit crews. The early ones would only record the last 30 minutes of the flight so you could get your overnight negotiations with the stewardess done early in the flight and there wouldn't be any voice record of it for the desk flying, ground pounding, busy bodies in the flight standards department. But before CVR’s, you didn’t have to worry about what you said in the cockpit unless a fellow crew member ratted you out.

This story is about those days without CVR’s when AA was starting to phase out their magnificent DC-6B’s with the passenger door always on the right side instead of the left like all other airlines. They had just started flying the wonderful Convair 990 on the Idlewild to Greater Cincinnati to Houston route. The redeye schedule for this flight landed at Cincinnati about 3am.  One beautiful clear night I had finished fueling the EAL Saint Pete flight about 2:30 and decided to go visit a buddy in the radar room.

The radar room I visited was the home of the Airport Surveillance Radar (ASR) radar. This radar gave heading (azimuth) information but did not have any altitude measuring ability like the Precision Approach Radar (PAR) at a few busy airports and military bases. The ground controller would give the pilot heading corrections right down to the touchdown point. He/she would also advise what the aircraft altitude should be as the aircraft made the approach. The ground controller could not actually monitor the altitude; just tell the pilot how high he should be at that point in the approach. Cincinnati airport had just built a new runway with an ILS (Instrument Landing System) and the pilots preferred that to the ASR approach. The controller couldn’t force the pilot to make a radar approach but they often asked them to do it as a favor so they could stay in practice.

My buddy had never done an approach with a jetliner since they had just been landing at Cincinnati for a few days. Their approach speed was a bit faster than the propliners and that would keep him on his toes.  It was a clear night so an instrument approach wasn’t really necessary but maybe the captain would indulge him. I got settled in the radar room in the observer seat where an FAA trainer would sit with a new controller. My buddy called up to the tower cab and asked them to see if AA Flight 2 would accept an ASR approach. We had a monitor in the radar room so we could hear the communications between the approach controller, tower, and ground control. They were all the same person at this hour of the morning.

Soon AA2 was handed off from Indianapolis Center and reported to Cincinnati approach control that he was at the Mount Healthy intersection at 29000 MSL.  Lots of captains were stubborn about using the new fangled Flight Level nomenclature. The approach controller asked if he would agree to a ASR approach. He surprised us when he not only turned it down but asked for a visual approach. The wind was calm but they had been directing the little traffic they has to land towards the north on Runway 36. Approach control cleared him out of 29000 and to report over the Dry Ridge VORTAC at 10000 for a visual approach to Runway 36. The captain really surprised us when he came back and asked to land to the south on Runway 18 straight in from his present position. There was really no reason the controller could refuse his request and there was no other traffic. Now Mount Healthy intersection is about about 25 miles from the approach end of Runway 18 and he was about 5 miles high. That meant he was going to lose a mile of altitude for every 5 miles he traveled over the ground. He would be traveling about 200 miles per hour so he would be on the ground in about 7 or 8 minutes.

We were sure the passenger's ears would all be popping with a decent that fast but that was the captain’s discretion. The crew had to walk right by the radar room on the way to AA flight OPS so we propped the door open and waited on them. Soon the captain, who looked like he had just stepped off the set of a John Wayne movie, came sauntering down the hallway. My buddy stopped him and asked him if he had some kind of emergency that he needed to get on the ground so quickly.

The captain grinned and replied. “The copilot bet me $20 I couldn’t do it”

.

And that’s the truth!

Bowinkle T. Propwash