I obtained my private pilot certificate in 1970 in a Cessna 150. We all remember our first solo. During mine, a United Airlines flight came in and I needed to extend downwind. A little frightening.
My wife followed with her own solo a few years later, for safety for our little family of two children. Rules were different back then, and our first family flight was in that Cessna 150, with no seat belts for our 4-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter.
We progressed in experience in our flying club’s Cherokee 140, Cessna 172, 182, and 205—each requiring more skill. The 182 would land nose first and porpoise if I didn’t slow it enough. A carrier pilot friend had advised me it wouldn’t porpoise if I landed slow enough.
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The 205 had a useful load of 1,550 pounds, an amount almost equal to its empty weight of 1,750. So even more, especially with only the pilot on board, it had to land “full stall.” Some said it couldn’t be landed that way with full flaps, but by then I had the habit of always landing slow. I should have learned that earlier because on my private flight test in the 150 I did well but didn’t land slow enough for the examiner, a crop dusting pilot, and had to land again.
For my check flight in the 205, the instructor found some people so I could fly it with six occupants. My wife and I had made several trips with those six on board. By the time I stopped flying I had a commercial license with instrument rating and owned a Bonanza F35 and had 2,000 hours.
But at the time of my “I Learned About Flying From That” moment, I was a private pilot with about 500 hours experience with about 25 in type.
I had a need to pick up a load of steel in Long Beach, California. I flew the 205 from Santa Barbara (KSBA) to Long Beach (KLGB) for the pickup. Shifting loads is a big risk, so I secured it well and carefully calculated the weight and balance. On the flight home with the load, the airplane lifted off easily with light elevator effort.
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That was the first hint of the problem. Fortunately, I always try to make full-stall landings and it did stall, making a surprisingly soft landing. Obviously the balance was too far aft. I recalculated and could not find an error. In a careful postflight inspection, I shook the tail and heard water sloshing. The tail cone contained a lot of water. Its drain was plugged and it was tied down outside, so rain had gotten in.
During that flight, I had come close to entering an unrecoverable stall spin. Had that happened, during a postcrash inspection the water would have been gone, and the load restraints would probably have been broken. A clear case of pilot error in not calculating weight and balance, or making an error in the calculation.
Cleaning the water drain is important. Shaking the airplane and listening for water is something I always did after that flight.
The 205 later met an unfortunate end. In 1977, a club member took off from Lake Tahoe Airport (KTVL) southbound into rising terrain. He crashed in a blind canyon, killing his wife and a friend. He and the friend’s wife survived. Months later, he came to a club meeting. His face was badly scarred. The club learned about flying from that.
Many other lessons were learned at the club.
A Cessna 182 was flown into a mountain just north of Santa Barbara by a club member while trying to get down through a cloud layer without an instrument rating. A Cherokee 140 was on a mountain flying lesson with a club member as a student. They encountered a downdraft and crash-landed. There were no injuries. Only the club’s Cessna 150 and 172 survived. They learned about flying from that.
These lessons I had to learn on my own and should have been taught to me. One cannot depend on the owner’s manual performance data. An example is the comparison of two Cessna 182s. They were owned by two flying clubs I also belonged to. One met the handbook climb at 0 msl and maximum gross weight of 974 fpm. The other’s climb rate was half that. I almost crashed the slow one during takeoff on a trip to Canada.
Another is mesa runways. Here one can expect a downdraft at the mesa’s edge, often at the beginning of the runway. If the headwind is strong enough, one might crash on short final. I survived my first encounter with those conditions by using full power.
Finally, I received a lot of instrument time on an old stand-alone simulator. All pilots will recover from disorientation if the horizon appears. I logged enough instrument time so that looking at the artificial horizon allowed me to recover from disorientation.
That saved my life when I flew my Bonanza into LAX and on turning to intercept the localizer, the artificial horizon started to tumble. I began to follow it and quickly realized that it was wrong. I switched to needle, ball, and airspeed and recovered. In the process I flew into the path of a parallel runway and a commercial jet had to do a go-around. The controller phoned Santa Barbara, my base, and upon learning that I was a good pilot, didn’t require a report. At home we installed all new gyros.
My first flight instructor told me, “if you have time to spare, go by air.” Don’t fly if conditions are bad, be it the airplane, weather, or yourself. The Santa Barbara Flying Club survives today.
I learned about flying, and I am here to write this column at the age of 86.
This column first appeared in the March Issue 968 of the FLYING print edition.