Flying

The Ultimate Compliment

The word was that Lawrie Trotter was coming down from Darwin to jump at Labertouche during the summer.  He was the “gun” jumper.  He was the “been everywhere, done everything, tough as nails” jumper.

Claude asked Lawrie to throw out a few students at various heights and I was flying the jump ship.  The last student was despatched at five thousand, under an overcaste, and as usual, I did a quick circuit to obtain as much height as possible for the instructor’s exit.  This put us over the top of the clouds at about seven or eight and we settled onto my estimate of the jump run, unable to see the ground.  Laurie kept poking his head out the door, not saying a word.  Finally he turned to me and asked “Where do you reckon the spot is?”  I immediately answered “About here”, since by my estimate we were over the drop zone, and just a little up wind.  In an instant Laurie was out the door and gone, paying me, as the jump pilot, the ultimate compliment.  He had taken my word for the location of the spot.

I of course was sweating it out as I descended through the cloud (don’t tell the department) to see if my estimate, in which Laurie had placed so much faith, was at least close.  It was most gratifying to get my first look at the ground and see him landing exactly on the target.  Laurie and I got on well after that.

Almost

About two thirds of the way through the take off run there was an extremely loud bang.  Everything still looked good, but I aborted the take off anyway and left the plane with the engine idling while I inspected her carefully.  Loud bangs are usually not good.  On the underside of the starboard tailplane there was a brand new bright metal scratch and a very small associated indentation.  Walking back down the strip I found what I assumed to be the culprit, a Coke can laying in the middle of the runway.  Aircraft passes Coke can, prop wash blasts can into tailplane and produces the blemish I had found.  Good hypothesis.  Good enough for me to taxi back and take off again without incident and complete the load.  As I taxied back after landing I could see that the next load was not yet ready, and since the tanks were getting low, I opted to refuel.  As the engine shut down, its last shudder somehow didn’t quite sound right to me.  No big thing, but it was not exactly, just not quite, the way it had always sounded before.  I made a mental note that if time permitted after refulling, I would drop the cowlings and take a quick look underneath.

Time did permit, and with the covers removed, I found the engine mount had broken where it connected to the firewall upper starboard side, and the engine was held in by three instead of four connections to the firewall and was slumped noticeably downward.  I am still unable to understand how it held together for the second take-off.  With the engine and prop torque when the tail comes up, it’s the top right connection that takes the additional force.  The loss of an engine, as in, “departing the airframe”, is usually fatal to all involved, especially at low altitude.

If the next load had been ready, and there had not been time to refuel ….   If I hadn’t been getting to the point of needing to refuel …..  If the load had been ready after refuelling …  If I hadn’t noticed the slight difference in the shut down noises ….  If.  Almost.

Speaking of Almost

I’d dropped the five of them out at thirteen and a half and immediately kicked her over onto her starboard side and pulled back on the controls to put her into a tight, two “g” spiral dive.  This enabled me to descend quickly using the induced drag, and also to lean out of the door and watch the jumpers making their formations.  I’d closed the cowl flaps to minimize the shock cooling of the cylinder heads, but after a few seconds glanced up to check their temperature was not falling too quickly.

All I could see, filling the windscreen and then some, was a light twin aircraft moving left to right, perhaps only twenty or thirty feet away.  Flash. Gone. 

That image lives with me still.  I’m sure he did not see me since I was coming down rapidly from above. He had no business barrelling through an active drop zone, but that would not have made the mid-air collision any the less spectacular.  If.  Almost.

And Now for Comic Relief

The PA32 is good for jumping because of the large cargo door well aft on the port side.  It’s not so good for getting off the ground with a full load of jumpers.  Also you have to keep some airspeed on as they get out to avoid the nose pitching up uncontrollably as the centre of gravity shifts to the rear of the aircraft just before they leave.  All went well, however, and I started the descent only to become aware of a repetitive banging from the rear.  The webbing system used to restrain cargo had come loose.   A single snap held it attached at one end to the interior of the aircraft, while the rest of it, with associated hardware, was hanging out of the rear door doing its best to beat the port tailplane into pieces.  The problem now was to get it back on board before it removed the tailplane entirely.  This raised the secondary problem of keeping control of the aircraft while I moved the fifteen feet or so to the rear door to grab the thing. 

OK.  Undo the seat belt.  Move around to stand behind the pilot’s seat holding the controls from there.  Trim quite a lot of nose down and hold against it with the column.  And then run like hell to the rear (try and avoid falling out the large open doorway) as the aircraft starts to tip nose up.  There was not enough trim.  So run back to the front before the whole thing starts to flutter earthward, crank in more nose down trim, bolt to the rear again, and get a hand on the webbing.  But she is out of control nose up now.  So run back to the front, steeply uphill at this stage I may add and (did I mention) try to avoid falling out the large cargo door.  Retrim, and so on.

It took four or five tries to get it right and stow the webbing.  I wish there had been someone there to film it.   It was quite absurd and by the end I was laughing out loud about it.  The risks were real, but the whole thing was bloody funny.  I wish I had the video.