The plane was snake-bitten, but that's not what needed fixing |
My "dream plane." |
Other than the day you first solo or the day you finally get your private license, no day equals the anticipation or excitement as the day you buy your first airplane. Not only is buying an airplane a significant investment in terms of money, it’s a significant investment in terms of your commitment to flying. Like a marriage, it’s equal parts lust, responsibility and trepidation. One hopes that one’s sense of responsibility keeps their lust in check, but even so there’s always that fear that you have made a terrible decision.
In 2011, I bought my dream airplane, a 1962 Piper Comanche. The single-engine plane was beautiful—sleek, with a low-slung profile, tapered wing and tip tanks. She had the look of a muscle car with wings, and looked in flight even while sitting on the tarmac. With dual turbochargers, she was able to climb high into the flight levels while loping along at 170 knots. Most importantly, she was the same type of plane my father flew when I was a kid. More than a plane, she was a way to reconnect with my childhood.
During the negotiations and pre-purchase, I did my best to be thorough and careful. I communicated extensively with the seller. I traveled to California to check the plane out in person. I hired a highly recommended mechanic to do the inspection. During test flights, the plane flew beautifully. I was hooked. The plane was mine.
But from the moment I got it home things started going wrong. The plane had not been tied down a week when an inspector from the local FAA office informed me that my prop was illegal. I didn’t understand. The three-blade McCauley is a standard replacement on the Comanche. Mine had been on the plane for nearly eight years, signed off by a mechanic and filed with the FAA in Oklahoma City. It had flown on the plane for nearly 900 trouble-free hours and been inspected regularly. No matter, he said. The STD filed by McCauley listed every variant of Lycoming IO-540 engine, except mine. Though the omission may have been a simple oversight by McCauley, the prop had to go.
As for alternative propellers, it turned out there was no propeller approved in combination with this particular engine on this type of plane. The only solution, therefore, was to find the original propeller the plane came with, or one just like it (In 1962, there was no separate process for approving propellers with engines because it was assumed all planes had just a one type of propeller from which to choose.). The two-bladed Hartzell propeller that Piper installed on the Comanche was no longer produced. Hartzell told me they would gladly make me a custom one for $23,000, or I could try to find one sitting in a hangar or warehouse that could be overhauled for use. After weeks of phone calls, a propeller was finally found. Eight months after bringing the plane home, the plane was ready to fly.
Eager to get started, I got an instructor to get checked out in my new plane. On our first flight, I slowed the plane and pulled the switch to lower the landing gear. Nothing. I checked the circuit breaker for the gear, which had popped. After pushing the breaker in, I tried again. The breaker popped again. I removed the cover for the emergency gear extension mechanism, disengaged the motor, and hand-cranked the gear down. After landing, my mechanic lubricated the push rods and replaced the breaker. But the next flight, the same thing happened. Landing safely after again hand-cranking the gear down, my mechanic pronounced the gear motor dead. In 30 years of flying, my father never needed the emergency gear extension to lower the landing gear. In less than five hours of flying, I needed the emergency gear extension twice.
With the new gear motor in place, I called my instructor to restart my instruction. After two lessons, he signed off on my complex airplane endorsement. I then left a message with him to schedule an instrument proficiency check. I never heard back. The next day, I learned he was killed while doing instrument work with another Comanche owner.
His death shook me, but I was determined to keep flying. My wife and I scheduled a trip to New Orleans. She was an experienced flier, having travelled with me in my old Cherokee to Canada, to the Florida Keys, to the Great Lakes and all over New England. This would be her first flight in the “new” plane.
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After landing in white-out conditions in West Virginia. |
From the start, however, this trip seemed jinxed. On our first leg down, we got caught in severe icing over West Virginia, forcing us to divert to Charlestown in white-out conditions. We celebrated my birthday (and our close call) that night with an extra glass of wine.
On the return trip, we were on our final leg home. A front had moved through the previous day, leaving behind blue skies and brutal winds. Air traffic control was busy dealing with complaints about turbulence. Small planes, business jets and airliners, all were asking to climb or descend in a search of smoother air. As we approached New York City, the bumps grew steadier and more jolting. My wife looked over at me, frowning and silent, yet determined to ride it out.
The next thing we knew our heads hit the ceiling and there was an explosion of air and noise into the cockpit. My wife screamed, certain the plane was breaking apart in flight.
The door blew closed.
“It’s okay,” I told her. “The door just popped open.”
“Get me on the ground,” she yelled. “Now!”
We landed at Atlantic City. My wife told me she would not get back in the plane. I arranged for a car to take her to Philadelphia, where she caught an airline flight home. A mechanic showed me that the gears inside the door handle we’re stripped, preventing the door from latching properly. As a temporary solution, I borrowed set of Vice-Grips to hold the door shut and flew home. I wondered how or even if I would ever get my wife to go flying with me again.
My first annual I told my mechanic that I wanted this plane gone over from spinner to tail—no expense spared. I needed to have total confidence in the aircraft. He understood. A small team of mechanics put in more than 300 hours of work on the plane. Among other things, all the engine hoses were replaced. The exhaust system rebuilt—a turbo as well. The final invoice took up four pages and tallied more than $30,000. After I wrote out the check, the entire crew stood outside the hangar and waved as I took off.
But things kept going wrong. The alternator blew on another trip, stranding me for two days in Johnstown, Penn. The autopilot never worked right. Before one flight, while doing the run-up I reached for the propeller control. It pulled out of the panel in my hand. I almost laughed. Back at the hangar, my mechanic reassured me he could make things right. The plane was just a machine, he said, it could be fixed.
I had begun jokingly referring to my plane as “Christine,” after the murderous car from the Stephen King story and movie of the same name. My plane, if not cursed, seemed to harbor some resentment toward me. My wife didn’t find the name funny. She refused to get into the thing.
After a weekend in Maine, I was doing the run-up in preparation for the flight home and the engine started running roughly. I assumed one of the spark plugs was fouled, but the usual fix of leaning the mixture didn’t work. It was Sunday, so no mechanic was on duty, so I had to leave the plane and bum a ride home. The next day the mechanic called to say the plane was ready. What was wrong with it? Nothing, he said. It started right up and ran perfectly. I could pick it up anytime. His conclusion didn’t reassure me.
Sure enough, a couple of flights later, the roughness returned. My mechanic inspected the spark plugs and found nothing wrong. A week later, as I was climbing out of Westchester, N.Y., at night, the airplane started shaking and losing power. My engine monitor told me one of the cylinders had gone cold. I checked the fuel, the mixture and adjusted the throttle. Nothing helped. As the other five cylinders seemed to be running fine, I briefly considered limping the plane home rather than be stranded again, but I quickly decided to return to the field.
After getting a hotel room for the night. I called the FBO to find out about the plane. The mechanic told me he found nothing the matter, so I flew home that day and told my mechanic to take a closer look. He looked over the plane, checked the plugs, the magnetos, the fuel injectors and the fuel lines and took it flying. Nothing was the matter. He was stumped. Mechanical issues don’t generally correct themselves. He speculated that perhaps a small air bubble or a piece of debris was partially blocking one of the fuel lines, causing the intermittent roughness. But until the problem was continuous and reproducible the best advice he could offer was for me to continue flying. See what happens, he said.
So I became a test pilot in my own plane. As such, I didn’t dare fly passengers or in less than perfect weather. I didn’t fly over water, at night or to someplace where I couldn’t glide to a safe landing. I didn’t fly to any place where I might become stranded from a breakdown. For several weeks, I flew circles around my home airport, carefully watching the engine instruments and waiting for the telltale shudder of the plane. But nothing happened. Five hours, 10 hours, 15 hours… no problem.
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My plane seemed happiest when in the repair shop. |
I began to trust the plane. I started to fly passengers (my wife, however, still refused to fly in it). I ventured farther from my home base. On a warm January day, with blue skies and calm winds, I took off with my brother for lunch at an airport about 90 miles away. Climbing through 2,000 feet I felt the familiar shudder through the control yoke. The plane started to shake and the engine lost power. My engine monitor indicated a cylinder was out. I cursed. I climbed to a safer altitude to see if the roughness went away. After a few minutes it did, so I continued onward.
Near my destination airport, I decided to shoot an approach at a neighboring airport. I called up air traffic control and made my request. The controller assigned me an altitude and heading, and gave me a vector that put me on a downwind to the runway. I was at 2,000 feet and roughly abeam the airport when the engine shuddered and fell silent. As the propeller windmilled, I quickly checked the throttle, the mixture and fuel gauge, which indicated the tank was more than half full. I set the plane for its best glide speed and turned directly to the airport. At a descent rate of about 400 feet per minute. I had about four minutes—or three miles. I explained our situation to the controller and got immediate clearance from the tower to land.
“Do you need emergency vehicles?” the controller asked.
Negative, I said.
After coasting to a stop I radioed the tower to request a tug to tow us off the runway.
“God must love us,” my brother said. “Had we flown another minute we would never have reached the runway.”
As we waited for the tug, I began going over the cockpit to check things over. The fuel gauge in this plane was a single indicator controlled by a knob that needed to be manually set each time you switched one of the six individual fuel tanks. I instantly saw that the gauge was set to the wrong tank, not the one I had selected. The engine quit because I inadvertently ran the tank dry. Had I recognized this, all I needed to do was switch tanks and the engine would have kicked right over. The fault was mine.
I explained this to my brother and apologized. “I could have killed us.”
“Don’t worry about that,” he said. “Given the amount of time we had to get down safely, you did an excellent job.” No one was hurt and no metal bent.
That hardly made me feel better. I’d read accident reports about fuel exhaustion, which always left me thinking, “How could he be so stupid?” I felt disgusted with myself.
Psychologists refer to something called “confirmation bias,” a tendency among individuals to jump to a conclusion or ignore information that contradicts a given conclusion built upon one’s experiences or emotional state. It’s a kind of mental conditioning. When the engine stopped my mind automatically concluded the catastrophic failure that I had been preparing for and expecting finally happened. Conditioned this way, all my training of emergency procedures and common sense went out the window.
Crash investigators like to refer to the “error chain:” the sequence of events or factors leading up to an accident. In many cases, the error chain occurs over a short period of time. In my case, the “error chain” began when I first laid eyes on the plane, and it continued with each problem or breakdown I encountered. The only way to break the chain was to put the plane up for sale.
Two years after buying it, Christine was headed to Texas, where a broker would oversee the sale. It was not without regret because I really wanted this to be my dream plane, but I had to admit this plane had gotten the best of me. Throughout the sale, I worried that the prospective owner would discover my “dream” plane was nothing but a lemon with wings. After the sale, I nervously anticipated an angry phone call from the plane’s new owner, or worse, his lawyer. It never happened. The new owner had no complaints. According to my broker, he has been quite pleased with his purchase. Go figure.
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