I Learned About Flying From That

So I recently got back from my third aerobatic contest, the Northern California Aerobatic Challenge at Paso Robles. I finished in second place, a nice surprise considering some serious obstacles were encountered along the way.

After the Apple Valley contest (where I finished in sixth place), the plane developed a crack in the right fuel tank. Replacing this tank definitely falls into the “heavy maintenance” category, as it includes removing the wing from the aircraft, ripping open the top of the wing, replacing the tank, recovering the wing, doping and painting it, reattaching the wing and flight controls, and a thorough test flight.

The general consensus, based on previous wing tank replacements in this airplane, was that there was virtually no chance the plane would be done in time for Paso Robles. The lead time for even getting a new fuel tank was estimated to be several weeks.

There was some talk of flying a standard Decathlon or trying to work out a deal to use one of the northern California airplanes, but nothing ever came of it. Which was fine with me, becase after flying the Super D in the high density altitude at Apple Valley, I want more power, not less.

Paso Robles was pretty much written off in my mind until a week or so before the contest, when I heard that not only did we have a tank, but it had already been installed in the wing and the maintenance department was preparing to reattach it to the fuselage. Within a few days, the plane was back on line and ready to go.

As usual, I ferried the Super Decathlon to the contest. It’s always a nice change from instructional flying, because I don’t have to do anything but fly the plane and enjoy the view. Oh yeah, and navigate. The Super D has no navigational equipment of any kind on board, so I get to fly cross country using nothing but a compass and sectional chart. In an era of $300 GPS receivers, this kind of pilotage is something everyone learns in primary training but typically never uses again on non-local flights.

A persistent stratus layer along the coast made the navigation somewhat challenging. Many of the typical waypoints were under the clouds and I was left with a homogenous mountain range to find my way up to PRB. But find it I did.

So things were looking up on Thursday. The weather was great. The plane was in good shape. And I had a coveted early time slot reserved for practicing my sequence in the aerobatic box (every competitor gets 15 minutes of practice time the day before the contest starts). I took off around 10 a.m. and ran through the sequence once just to shake off the rust. I was pretty happy with how it went, and felt good during the climb back up to 5,000 MSL.

I came into the box a second time and pushed the nose over to gain speed, wagging the wings good and hard as you’re supposed to when starting a sequence. It was on the third wing wag that the stick froze — and I mean it locked up tight.

Initially I didn’t realize that it was only the ailerons that were immobilized. All I knew was that the airplane was 45-50 degrees nose down, approaching Vne, and some very important bits were not working properly. There had been no grinding, binding, clicking, or anything else in the control system. It was perfectly smooth and normal right up to the point where it froze.

They say time slows down when something like this happens. I wish. I’m sure there was a moment of denial on my part, but it didn’t last very long. I pulled the throttle to idle and was moving my hand down to the elevator trim slider when I realized that the stick would still move back and forth, just not laterally. It had stuck so firmly that I initially thought both elevator and aileron control had been lost.

The relief didn’t last long, becase it was about this time that I realized that the ailerons were deflected and the aircraft was rolling right at about 10-15 degrees per second, slow by aerobatic standards but more than enough to get my attention now. As I raised the nose, I instinctivly glanced at the outboard sections of the left and right wings, but there was no apparent abnormality with the control surfaces.

By this point the Super D had rolled about 40 degrees to the right. I started to use ever increasing force on the stick, hoping to overpower whatever obstruction was in the system, but it was to no avail. I used both hands. No good. Then I made a fist and whacked the stick from the side as hard as I could. Nada.

Time for plan B, the only alternative: full left rudder, which I had already started to feed in while working on the stick. Thankfully it stopped the roll. I added in some throttle to increase airflow over the tail, which improved rudder authority enough to overcome the deflected ailerons and return the airplane to a semblance of level flight.

So there I was, slipping through the sky without any idea of where I was headed. Lord only knows what the folks on the ground were thinking. I took a moment to catch my breath and then keyed the mike to let the starter (the contest equivalent of an air boss) know there was a problem.

Eventually the stick came free on its own after a couple of minutes of me just sort of slopping through the sky trying to figure out how I was going to land it like that. When I got it back on the ground, Bill and I pushed the plane into the hangar and spend the next eight hours taking it apart. Every cover came off, the seat came out, the carpets and floorboards were removed, the bellcrank tunnel came out, the stick boots were pulled, the wingroots were pulled off, the whole nine yards. We inspected the airplane below the floorboards (where the cables run) from the tailcone to the firewall with flashlights, mirrors, and more.

Eventually we found an unused 2″ pop rivet near the wing root aileron pulley. If you’ve never seen one, pop rivets have a long metal shaft that is used to drive them. We had one of the competitors who is also an A&P look at it and he was able to duplicate the jam using the pop rivet. My theory is that when I pushed over to go into the box, the negative Gs allowed the rivet to float up to the control cable, which was moving back and forth during the wing wags. Eventually it got stuck in the pully.

Anyway, we visually inspected every single inch and component of the aileron system and didn’t find anything else, so we test flew it again without incident. But that’s the first time I ever seriously considered bailing out of an airplane. I was totally calm about it, but the adrenaline really kicked in, so much so that later on when we were working on the airplane, I got really sleepy once it wore off.

Last year the airplane had a broken elevator cable during a flight. So now that the ailerons have had their moment in the sun, I’ll be expecting the unexpected from the rudder.

Just kidding. But it does prove once again that the first few flights after maintenance are one of the most dangerous times to be in an aircraft. The wing had been off the plane for the installation of the new fuel tank, and the mechanics did it pretty quickly. So that’s probably what happened — they just left an extra pop rivet in there. I rather like the composite planes that have the translucent inspection panels in the tail so you can look for this stuff before flying. Of course, in this case, that wouldn’t have helped since the object was in the wing root.

Throughout the next couple of days, I was regaled with stories of other aerobatic pilots who’ve been killed by FOD (foreign object damage). The guy who won first place related how his first aerobatic instructor got killed in a Yak 55 when some FOD got stuck in the elevator during a sequence.

So I’m not sure I won second place as much as it was God paying me back for all the hell He put me through.

With respect to the infamously confusing aerobatic box at Paso Robles, it didn’t confuse me, but it did get Bill. On his 2nd flight, he torqued out of the hammerhead and didn’t realize it until he was nose down, and then when he saw the box markers at an angle, he corrected the wrong way and zeroed that maneuver. He also did the final maneuver on the Y-axis, so that knocked him out of contention. He was probably tired after working his tail off to help find out what was wrong with the plane, so I think that played a part in it.

The key at PRB seems to be ignoring the runways. If you look beyond them, you’ll notice that the field section lines that radiate out across the valley are perfectly aligned with the box. But yes, it’s tough because the box is a square and it’s overlayed on a triangular runway.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t difficult to fly the airplane in the competition. I thought after the incident with the aileron jam that I might be reticent to fly the Super D really hard, but I just went out to have fun and ended up flying it harder than ever. It was great being down near sea level instead of up at 8000 foot density altitudes.

The flight home was interesting, too. On the way back the clouds obscured the southern half of the state, so I flew back in formation with the Pitts (he has a GPS) and we just circled down through a hole over Huntington Beach.

As always, when I got back many people asked how the contest went. I can sum it up by saying “I learned about flying from that.”

  15 comments for “I Learned About Flying From That

  1. Jon
    June 22, 2005 at 8:53 am

    Holy cow!! That’s a crazy story. I’m glad everything turned out okay in the end safety-wise AND that you also went on to place second. Nice!

  2. Ryan Ferguson
    June 23, 2005 at 8:43 pm

    Great job handling the problem. Control failures are among the most serious of all in-flight emergencies. Kudos to you for keeping your cool and working the problem until you solved it.

    The only control-jam problem I’ve ever had was in a two-hole Pitts, which I was flying solo. Foolishly, I felt that tightly belting in the front seat cushions would be sufficient to keep them down during akro. On a humpty bump I saw one of the cushions float up to the top of the canopy. When it came down, it wedged itself between the front hole stick and the seat tray. I had no aft elevator control, but full forward travel was available… which I used to float the seat cushion up a second time, sort of like a seat-cushion russian roulette, hoping that it’d land in a better position the second time (it did.) I’ve often wondered since then what would have happened had the seat cushion managed to find its way to block the stick at low altitude on short final. Probably wouldn’t have been a good day. Walking away from that incident was a result of nothing more than good luck following bad judgement.

  3. Ron
    June 23, 2005 at 11:06 pm

    Ryan,

    Thanks for the kind comments. It seems that many people have a FOD story of one kind or another, and a surprising number of them are not things that were simply the result of a lax preflight cockpit inspection.

    BTW, congrats on your HS125 type rating (or, as the Brits who built it might say, ‘good show old chap!’). I enjoyed the blow-by-blow account of your checkride.

  4. Graeme
    July 22, 2005 at 7:51 pm

    Wow Ron. I would have been terrified. I’ve flown good ole “SA” myself and Its a powerfull beast if you don’t know how to tame it. Lucky for you though. I would have done everything Sato tought me. PARE. Thats
    P – Power – to idle
    A – Aeilerons – Neutral
    R – Rudder – Opposite
    E – EJECT!

    A true pilot like yourself DOES hang on to the airplane AS LONGGGGGG as possible…great job for not giving up. I know when I do my sim work. I don’t give up till I know I’m wayy too low..then I hit the SILK (chute)

  5. Sal
    August 25, 2005 at 3:50 pm

    Ron- I was at this contest flying a red and white Super Decathlon (59AC). I saw you after you came down and you were wrenching on your wing in the same hangar as me. At the time, I couldn’t believe how composed you were. This was my first contest and I was flying primary (which I was lucky enough to win). Anyway, you showed some great perseverance by continuing to dig until you found the problem…and then you went out and kicked butt like nothing ever happened. Nice job, Congrats man!

  6. Ron
    August 25, 2005 at 10:35 pm

    Sal, thanks for the kind comments, and congratulations on your win at Paso Robles!

    Does this mean we’ll be seeing you in the sportsman category at Delano? It’s the only category where you’ll see every aerobatic aircraft type flying against one another. Pitts, Extra, Sukhoi, CAP, Bellanca, Edge, and of course, who could forget the stock 220 hp Stearman? If you thought primary was fun, you’ll love sportsman.

    Anyway, hope to see you next week!

  7. Sal
    August 26, 2005 at 7:24 am

    Yep, I’ll be there. I’ve been practicing the sequence for the last month. It’s been a lot of fun preparing for this contest. I’m learning to fly the Super D closer to it’s limits to make it look good…hopefully 🙂 It’s a big jump from primary!

  8. peter
    October 25, 2005 at 3:39 am

    whilst on a flight from Durban to Johannesberg RSA our 737 800 was being flown by the second pilot,he touched down short of the runway which lead to an interesting landing,followed by profuse apologies from the captain and cabin crew,however the mood was lightened when i pointed out that any landing you walk away from is a good landing.Peter

  9. August 8, 2013 at 8:54 am

    OK, backlinked to this from your most recent post…Man, this tale is up there with our earlier “Blogging in Formation—Flight I’ll Never Forget” series. This is your equivalent of my “The Sky Fell” episode that I wrote, lol!

    Also reading the comments and seeing the others who saw you that day tells even more of the story…and you’re one pretty damn cool cucumber–great piloting qualities my friend!

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