Two Pilots & an LSW: May You Live In Interesting Times

Isn't that the old Chinese curse?

Nothing new on Kaylee. She's getting ready as best she can for her travels to Thailand. We're getting ready to get our plane tickets to go out there when she graduates in November. We may go out a day early and look around while she's finishing up there. We have to figure out what to do with the red mini van, too. Lots to do on that coming up.

The rest of this the moms don't want to read. Seriously. It's about an airplane thing you don't want to know about. I'm fine.

I had an interesting day. A very nice man named Larry flew into Kokomo to pick me up in his Super Decathlon, and take me back to his place in Ft. Wayne, where he had a T-6 he wanted some dual in. He'd bought the plane, and went down to Florida to do training with a famous guy, Thom R., and got 10 hours in...except most of it was upset recovery, unusual attitudes, etc. Every lesson included that. When he left there with 10 hours, he didn't feel comfortable just landing it. Someone else flew it home for him, he soloed it, and on his first solo, ran off the runway. He got back up and did it again, correcting his mistakes, and did a good job with it. And then it sat for over a year. He just finished the annual, and called me for training in it. That's the set-up.

We went out and did basic maneuvering, turns, slow flight, steep turns, rudder work. He was doing fine so we then came in for a landing. His home airport is only 3000' long, surrounded by trees and houses. I said I wanted to do the first landing at a longer strip, so we went to a nearby 5000' runway. Coming around, he was too fast down final. I doublechecked the flaps handle was in the down position, and it was, and I hit the hydraulic power push just in case he'd forgotten it and that's why we weren't slowing down. It didn't do anything. He executed a go-around, properly. We are climbing out, he pulls the gear up, and we notice...hydraulic fluid. A lot of it, all over the floor. I ask him to check, and the flap handle is down but the flaps position indicator says they're up. I ask him to attempt hand cranking them down. Nope, not enough hydraulic pressure. Then I ask him to check the pins on his gear. Sure enough, he says the pins are still in, the gear is down even though the handle is up. Except it "doesn't look quite right". I don't have gear indicators in the back seat. I have him yaw the plane around, try to push down into the emergency detent, none of it causes the pins to look "normal". He says he only sees about half the pin.

So now to recap, we have no hydraulics. No flaps. We may or may not have brakes (they're hydraulic). The gear may or may not be locked, and thus may collapse on landing.

I told him that we weren't taking this back to his home airport with a short runway surrounded by trees and homes, for a no-flaps landing, and that we needed to stay here on the longer field and have someone come get us. I had him pull the throttle all the way back to see if the gear horn went off. If it did, the gear was definitely not locked. It didn't go off. That gave me a measure of hope. I went through the POH in the plane over both emergency procedures to make sure I hadn't forgotten anything. We came back around for a second landing attempt. He leveled off too high, and I said "You're too high. Lower the nose, you're too high." He had power in, so we were doing okay...and then he surprised me and pulled up and flared up there. The plane stalled too high, the right wing dropped in a heartbeat. I got power in, we came down on the right main but I caught it, and thought "whew!" And then...he felt like he needed to get out of there, that he wasn't in control, so he jammed in full power. I yelled "NO!" and tried to pull the power back out, but he had it forced up all the way, and I couldn't move it. Now we've accelerated, and he yanks it off the runway and tries to pull and keep pulling back. We're off the runway in the air, wallowing hard. I'm fighting him, for all the marbles. He's pulling and trying to make it fly, and I'm pushing the nose down and trying to make it fly. I ended up overpowering his inputs, and got us back in the air. I had him take a minute, and we spoke very calmly. I said "Well, the gear is definitely down". I told him to relax, breathe, make small corrections, called out his airspeed, told him when to level off, and he made a nice touchdown out of it. Started over-correcting on the landing roll and I had to grab it again to get us stopped. We taxied off, found a good quiet spot out of the way on a ramp, and shut down. I had hydraulic fluid all over my socks and shoes and pants. I couldn't get out of the plane because my feet were slick, and so was the side of the airplane and the step I needed to use to get out. He had to hold my leg/foot in place while I jumped to the wing.

We had a long debrief talk about all of that, and then he flew me home in the Super D. When he gets the plane fixed, he's going to call, and we're going to go back up. He's probably reliving it all tonight too. We had multiple issues, one on top of the other, we didn't know each other yet, I'd never seen that plane before, and other than that one time frame where we fought on the controls, we actually otherwise communicated and worked well as a team. He didn't freak out on me, and we both worked the problems carefully. In the end we walked away. We both learned a few things from it. I've aged another 5 years. He kept saying that I saved it, he knew if he'd taken it up himself, if I hadn't been there, he'd be wadded up right now, and that he's grateful I was there. I'm not so glad I was there, but as Steve said, that's about as bad a scenario as you can get (with the engine still running), and I was able to do what needed done, so there's that.

My pants, socks and shoes are in the dryer now, after I tried washing the hydraulic fluid out of them. Hopefully it worked, those are my favorite shoes.

What a day...