Grounded

The agitation and anxiety of waiting to fly

It has been weeks since I last flew a plane. Both my airplanes are in the shop. The Piper Comanche is getting a fresh coat of paint; the Ercoupe in for a series of small squawks. While I expected the paint job to take a while, the Coupe should have been finished weeks ago. 

          In retrospect, I may have made a tactical error telling the Coupe mechanic “there’s no hurry” to finish the plane. Now, the fellow tells me I need to find another mechanic. A part he needed took weeks to arrive. By then winter set in, and his hangar is unheated. He’s been beset with health issues and, truth be told,  he’s lost interest in his work. He said he’d get the plane ready for the flight home, but that was three weeks ago. Geez.

            I joked with my wife that it looks like I need to buy a third airplane. She didn’t find the joke very funny. 

            As I wait, I find myself getting increasingly agitated and anxious. Agitated from the pace of the work and the mechanic’s excuses. Anxious over the rust my flying skills are accumulating. Flying, after all, is a perishable skill. Part of this anxiety stems from the fact that right before my planes went into the shop I had a couple of in-flight mechanical failures, one of which required an emergency landing.

            In the first, I was flying in clouds being vectored by Boston approach into Logan airport when my airspeed indicator dropped to zero. Not knowing how fast one is flying can be a problem, especially when you’re in the soup. Generally, when this happens the pitot tube becomes blocked and the speed of the wind rushing by the plane cannot be measured. This can be by ice, a bug or sometimes a blob of water. 

            The situation, however, is less dangerous than it sounds. As a pilot, you know how fast your plane should fly given a certain power and trim setting for the plane in various configurations (with flaps or gear extended). With that knowledge, you can compensate for the loss of the airspeed indicator. 

            Landing without incident, I canceled my scheduled flight. I then needed to try and fix the problem. Despite being one of the busiest airports in the country, Boston Logan is perhaps the worst place for a small plane to break down. Unless you’re flying a 747, there’s no one on field able to repair a small, piston-driven plane.

            After borrowing a screwdriver from a receptionist in the business terminal, I crouched under the wing of my plane in the pouring rain to remove the pitot tube from under the wing in an attempt to dislodge what I assumed was blocking it. 

            After blowing through the tube, I put it back together and called ground control to ask for a high-speed taxi run to see if my airspeed indicator was now functioning. There was a pause on the other end as the controller pondered what must have been a highly unusual request, but she came back cheerfully with, “I think we can arrange that.”  A few minutes later the tower cleared me onto Runway 4 Left for the test. The runway is 7,800 feet. I needed less than 1,500 feet to tell me the system was still broken. I taxied back to the general aviation terminal to wait for the weather to lift enough to fly visually back home. 

            Turned out the pitot tube wasn’t blocked at all. The 60-year-old tubing that connects the tube under the wing to the airspeed indicator in the cockpit had simply broken, brittle from age. The tubing was replaced.

            A couple of weeks later, I was flying at 6,000 feet between Lynchburg, Virginia, and Florida—the first leg of a trip to the Bahamas—when my engine suddenly surged and the plane started shaking. One of my two magnetos—devices that supply the electrical pulses to fire the spark plugs—self-destructed, forcing me to land at the nearest airport, which happened to be Anson County Airport in Wadesboro, NC. There was no sense of mortal danger, but the incident forced me to spend a couple of nights on the flight terminal’s sofa as a replacement part was shipped. My Bahamas trip was scrubbed. 

Individually, neither of these incidents should affect me much. My training and the redundancy of the airplane’s systems made for a safe landing in each case. But given the proximity of the two incidents to each, other along with the aggravations with my mechanic and the loss of both planes, I’m beginning to feel as if the Aviation Gods are trying to tell me something. 

            I tell myself shouldn’t listen to them. I will get the planes back and be back in the air. I’ll shake loose the rust and regain my confidence. I think the anxiety I feel is simply an extension of the ritual I go through before every flight. Spooling up in preparation to fly. Not out of fear so much, but caution, an awareness of the need to be careful and thorough. After all, there’s an old saying in aviation: “It’s better to be on the ground wishing you were in the air than it is to be in the air wishing you were on the ground.” So I’ve learned to respect my anxiety.

            Still, two incidents in as many months is unusual.  I’d be foolish to not listen to those voices and consider what I might have done differently or need to do in the future. As pilots, we never stop learning. Every flight is a chance to critique oneself, to improve. 

            I know a pilot who miraculously survived two mid-air collisions and a ditching in the Atlantic Ocean in mid-winter after his propeller flew off the plane. I can only guess what the Aviation Gods were telling him after all this. Incredibly he still flies.

            Some lessons are harder than others.