CHARLENE
By
ALAN EDWIN MALONE
Delta Skydivers had a problem. Getting up was the problem. Nobody was
worried about getting down. Back in the late 1960s, most of us had several
surplus parachute rigs that we’d pack during the week and bring with us to
the drop zone. We had been jumping from an old straight-tail 172 for quite
a few years. We had had that airplane so long that we’d even paid for the
thing. Unfortunately, somebody decided to lend it to our insurance agent to
take on a fishing trip, and he lost control while trying to take off from a
beach. The bird ended up in salt-water surf, a total wipe-out. This left
Delta with about four thousand dollars in cash but no airplane.
The good news was that Harry Shannon, a college student who had his A&P
license, had joined the club. Harry’s dad had a seaplane maintenance base
in Houma, Louisiana, and they thought that, between the two of them, they
could probably keep a Cessna 180 running if we could scrape up enough legal
tender to buy one.
That was why I found myself on an airliner with a one-way ticket to
Florida and a cashier’s check for five thousand dollars, to pick up this
supposedly flyable 180 that somebody had heard was for sale, and fly it back
to New Orleans. I was supposed to thoroughly check it out before I gave the
guy the check. Of course, the only way I had of getting home was in the
plane. I didn’t think the seller was about to run me back to New Orleans if
I didn’t buy the bird, and in those days I didn’t carry around enough spare
cash for a Greyhound ticket.
I arrived late in the afternoon and found the Cessna. It looked like it
had seen better days. The thing was, the guy only wanted five grand for the
thing. I didn’t know much about used airplanes, but I would have guessed
that a five thousand-dollar Cessna 180 would look about like this one. It
looked like a horse that had been rode hard and put away wet.
I spent that night on the seller’s couch, and the next morning I hitched
a ride out to the airport. Somebody had piled a lot of spare parts in the
back of the airplane where the rear seats had once been.
I checked the fluids and got the bird running. I taxied out and ran her up.
I have no recollection of that first pre-takeoff check, so it must have been
pretty much okay. I was in my middle twenties at this time and my concept
of what constituted an airworthy flying machine was not as picky as it is
now.
I remember that she accelerated nicely and got right up off the ground.
I flew a couple of patterns and shot some touch-and-goes. Then I taxied
back in and shut her down. A guy in a pickup truck drove up and handed me a
handbill that explained that this airport had just acquired a control tower.
I had been ignorant of this fact, and had therefore made no attempt to make
contact with the controllers during this test drive. These were the good
old days when you didn’t have to lawyer up when you did something like that.
The handbill gave the frequencies and procedures for the newly-controlled
field, and that was that. Nobody even asked me to phone the tower.
I gave the money to the owner and he endorsed the title over to me. I
topped the tanks, got a green light from the tower, and the Cessna and I
headed out toward the airplane’s new home.
In those days, navigation was very primitive, compared to what we do
now. Even the coffee-grinder V.O.R. was inop. , so I was using the classic map,
compass, and clock method to get me from central Florida to New Orleans.
As I headed toward the Gulf Coast, I realized that I had no idea how
accurate the compass in this aircraft was. I noted that it was about
half-full of fluid, but that the card rotated as expected when I turned the
airplane, and that it held more or less on a constant number when I kept her
aimed at a point on the horizon. I found a highway whose magnetic bearing
could be easily determined
Lining up carefully on the highway, I checked the compass and found it
to be 15 degrees off. I checked the compass correction card and, sure
enough, it said the compass should be off by precisely 15 degrees when I was
on this heading. I ran the plane perpendicular to the highway and found
that those bearings also corresponded precisely to the error given on the
card. Somebody had swung this compass, but had not compensated it for the
magnetic influences of its surroundings.
That was fine with me. What difference did it make whether the compass said
“zero degrees” or “fifteen degrees” when I was headed north? As long as I
applied the correction factor given on the card, I figured I¹d end up where
I wanted to go.
Years later, I met a pilot who always set his gyrocompass to “zero.” He
claimed that, once he had found the direction he wanted to go, it was easier
to steer with reference to this number than it was to try to remember what
heading the airplane was actually supposed to be on. The number on the
heading indicator, he claimed, was a totally arbitrary aiming point for the
machine, so who cared what the actual number was?
Some years after that, I was sitting in the left back seat of our jump
plane, being flown from a drop zone in central Mississippi back to our home
base in Houma. The pilot was employed by a scheduled airline and made his
living making international flights in big iron birds. We had been enroute
for about half an hour when I saw the back of his head start to translate
back and forth very slightly. A few minutes later, he held up the sectional
chart he had in his lap, and turned it this way and that.
“Oh, oh,” I thought to myself. “Nobody ever compensated that compass, and
he never thought of looking at the compass correction card.”
I won’t go into all of the details of what happened in the next ten minutes,
but let¹s leave it at this. Out of four people in the airplane, one (the
international airline pilot) was lost; another (your humble narrator) was
sitting behind him, trying not to throw up from laughing so hard, and the
other two passengers didn’t have a clue what was going on, which was
probably just as well.
Bit I digress. During that initial trip home from Florida, I started
accumulating grease and oil on the windshield, carried there by the
slipstream from a leaking crankcase seal. During my 2 stops for gas, I had
to climb up and try to clean this mess off so that I¹d be able to see to
take off again.
Following my first stop for go-juice, I found that the battery charging
system left something to be desired. The seller must have had the battery
on an external charger for a few hours before I showed up. At that first
stop, we had to jump the airplane off a pickup truck to get it started. The
second time, a good ole’ boy in Slidell, Louisiana hand-propped it to get me
going on my final leg. Yep, we sure enough had us a five thousand dollar
Cessna 180.
When I got back to Louisiana, I found a bunch of jumpers anxious to get
a lift in the new bird. They had filed a waiver to make a jump into a
densely populated area in New Orleans east, and we made a deal with the
tower at New Orleans Lakefront to use light signals for a few lifts.
Everybody was excited about how well our new plane climbed, following all of
those years in the 172. We flew her down to Houma the next day, where Harry
got the electrical system working.
The following weekend, I flew her over to our drop zone, a nearby cow
pasture that a kind farmer had allowed us to use, in exchange for our help
with his hay harvest twice a year. We made a bunch of jumps in the weeks
that followed, and were pleased at how well the plane performed off the
uneven sod. The only thing we really didn¹t like was hitting cow pies on
takeoff, splattering bovine droppings all over the side of the Cessna,
occasionally including the jumpers sitting on the floor next to where the
right door used to be.
As the happy jumping weekends accumulated, we found that our mechanic
and his father became key members of our operation. One time I remember
turning from downwind to base when the front crankcase seal popped out,
covering the windshield with oil. I was pretty much on short final by that
time, so I just went ahead and landed, rolling clear of the runway and
shutting down the engine before any serious damage was done.
Harry had to drive up from Houma to make that repair. I remember helping
him to remove the propeller that evening to get the seal installed.
On another occasion, I was returning to the drop zone after topping off
the tanks at the nearby airport. I decided I should buzz the field to get
rid of some of the cows, who were a little weak in the area of right-of-way
rules. I put the prop forward to make it buzz. That was one neat thing
about having a seaplane mechanic working on our bird. He would strip useful
components off seaplane engines that were about to be sent in for core
credit, and replace them with busted or worn-out parts from our 180. We had
installed a seaplane propeller on our plane for better takeoff and climb
performance. That’s where the cool buzz came from.
Anyway, I headed down the pasture toward my audience that was sitting at
the downwind end of the field. I laid a pretty good buzz on them, if I do
say so, and pulled up, putting a few “Gs” on the bird. About that time, the
jump gods decided that my flying hubris needed a response, so they knocked
loose the hose coupling that was supposed to fasten the left side of the
intake manifold to the left 3 cylinders. I guess the right ones were still
firing, but you couldn’t prove it by me. I completed my zoom and
established a sort of downwind leg at about 300 feet.
The mill was not producing enough horsepower to keep us in the air. I
looked out front and saw a series of chain-link fences around a series of
front yards of neighboring houses. I was paralleling a power line off to my
left, between me and where I would land, assuming that I could drum up
enough energy to hang a 180 and get lined up with the pasture before we got
down to ground level.
That was my most exciting forced landing. I lucked out and made it in,
and we were down and stopped before I had a chance to get too nervous. But
I¹m here to tell you that a 180 flies a lot better on 6 cylinders than it
does on 3.
A few years later, we had gotten ahead of most of the problems that had
been caused by some years of neglected maintenance. We now had a heavy-duty
oil cooler salvaged from a 180 float-plane and several other improvements.
We put a paint job on the old girl and decided it was time to give her a
name.
Hunt Dufour, one of our members, was dating a well-endowed lady named
Charlene. We were all a little bit in love with her, as I remember it, sort
of like we were in love with our airplane. The “N” number ended in
“Charlie,” but we all agreed that “Charlene” fit her personality better, and
in time, through common usage, she became Charlene, the darling of Delta
Skydivers.
An unexpected benefit of upgrading to the 180 was that jump pilots
became easier to come by. Most pilots thought it was kind of boring, making
marginally safe takeoffs in the overloaded 172, and then sitting there for
half an hour plus, just to get up to 7200 feet for a 30-second delay lift.
But there were a bunch of guys who thought it would be cool to get some 180
time. I caught the job of checking these guys out, and discovered that I
enjoyed teaching pilots to fly the 180. Some of them had never handled a
plane with a constant-speed propeller, and almost nobody had ever flown a
tail-wheel plane. A 180 is a very forgiving plane, particularly off a grass
surface. It has great big control surfaces, giving lots of controllability
in all sorts of upwind, downwind, and crosswind takeoffs and landings. And
it was quite a kick for some of these pilots to advance from flying behind
100 horsepower to 225 horses, and not even have to pay for it.
We operated Charlene for many years and she served us well for thousands
of jumps. Some of our members had volunteered to keep a manifest showing
who had jumped, and from what altitude. These folks made sure that we
collected the fees that everyone had agreed to, before the end of jumping
every weekend.
Then, in a series of catastrophic coincidences, all of the grownups in
the club resigned, over a short period of time, and the club was left with
some jumpers and pilots, but with nobody who knew anything about keeping
books. There was nobody to run the manifest or to collect the money.
To make a long, painful, story short, there were many exuberant jump
weekends, with skydivers coming in from out of town for lots of cheap and
free jumping, and inside of a year, Charlene was lost to a mechanic¹s lean.
She was a fine old bird, and I don’t know what ever happened to her.
Like many others, I reached a place where I thought I had made enough jumps
for one lifetime. I got busy with other pursuits and never looked back.
But I’ll always remember my time with Charlene with great fondness.
ON DECLARING EMERGENCIES
BY
ALAN MALONE
There is a whole section in the AIM having to do with “pilot/controller responsibility.” This section tells us who is supposed to do what to whom, under normal and some abnormal circumstances. One of the most abnormal of these circumstances is the emergency.
An aircraft in distress has right-of-way over all other aircraft. That’s where you start out learning the right-of-way rules, because it’s the simplest case. There are no “ifs,” “ands,” or “buts.” If you are out there in your hot-air balloon and an airplane in distress comes toward you, you must get out of his way. If you are a controller working a string of Boeing airliners backed up from Baton Rouge to Los Angeles and a Cessna 150 declares an emergency, you’ve got to move all that heavy iron to make way for the Cessna.
So, how do you achieve this exalted status? Well, you have to have an emergency that requires immediate action. Then you have to declare an emergency, and bingo – you have right-of-way over all other aircraft.
But it gets better. If you are in the middle of an emergency that requires immediate action, you can, in fact, you must, violate any and all aviation regulations to the extent necessary to deal with the emergency. I assume that this does not include whipping out that snap roll you’ve always wanted to try in your 172; but would you like to land on a taxiway or bust through a cloud without a clearance? Be my guest, as long as that action is necessary to cope with the emergency.
Military pilots are encouraged to declare emergencies at the drop of a hat. If the coffee is not hot, or if the supply of creamer is getting low, those guys declare an emergency. Well, maybe it’s not quite that extreme, but I have heard pilots of multiengine military aircraft declare emergencies just because they have had to shut down one of their powerplants. That’s not often done in the civilian realm, where an engine failure is usually considered more of an inconvenience than an “emergency requiring immediate action.” Assuming that nothing else is going wrong on your flight, and that you are able to maintain altitude, or at least maintain a shallow enough glide to make it to a runway, you would usually do just that, provided that you do not need priority handling from a controller.
An example comes to mind from maybe forty years ago. A pilot came in toward New Orleans Lakefront Airport with a reasonable amount of fuel. He was hoping to land at Lakefront, but the weather took an unexpected turn for the worse, and he found that the field was reporting less than a thousand foot ceiling and three miles visibility, the minimum necessary for normal VFR operations.
This gentleman elected to hold at the south end of the Ponchartrain causeway, about six miles west, where he was in VFR conditions. These days, we’d say that Lakefront was in “D” airspace, because it has a control tower. In those days, they called it a “control zone.” In either case, it was an area about five miles in radius that required a thousand and three for VFR operations.
The pilot held for half an hour. IFR traffic was active in the control zone, and the rule was that airplanes operating under Instrument Flight Rules had priority over those flying under Visual Flight Rules.
My friend called the tower and told them that he was running a tad short on go-juice, and that he needed to come in pretty soon. They asked him if he wanted an IFR clearance, and he said negative. He was not, at that time, IFR equipped or qualified. They told him to continue holding.
Another fifteen minutes went by, and he called them back with more urgency in his voice. He was getting critically short of fuel, and needed to come in for a landing. He was told that they were “unable,” due to IFR operations in the zone.
So he finally told them that he was coming in anyway. They asked him if he were declaring an emergency. He said no, I’m just running short of gas and I’m coming in to land. And that’s exactly what he did.
The controllers didn’t know what to do. If he had declared an emergency, they would have been justified in bringing him in ahead of IFR traffic, and everything would have fit into standard procedure. What he ended up doing was to violate the rule that said he was supposed to obey the tower guy’s instructions. He violated this rule for what seemed to him a good and sufficient reason, namely that he was going to be flying a glider pretty soon, if he delayed the last five miles of his trip much longer.
These were the days before lawyers got automatically involved in everything. As I recall, he called the tower, at their request, and they had a confab about the affair, explaining to him that they needed the declaration of emergency before they could let him do what he had to do. He said he was sorry, and the whole affair was dropped.
Another incident, which took place in the Twenty-First Century, involved another friend of mine on an IFR flight, somewhere in the vicinity of Lake Charles, Louisiana. He started developing roughness in his only engine, and told ATC that he needed a lower altitude. They cleared him down, and in the excitement, he busted through the assigned altitude, looking for a runway to land on.
The ATC facility fussed at him over the radio, but didn’t request that he call them on the phone. When he got home, he called me to help him figure out how much trouble he was in.
The first question that occurred to me was, “Did you, by any chance, declare an emergency?” It seemed to me that such a declaration would have simplified the situation, making it legal for this pilot to violate any FAR he needed to violate, for the purpose of dealing with the emergency. He could at least have argued that the airplane was incapable of maintaining altitude, and thus that he was forced by the emergency to bust the assigned altitude.
Nothing came of that one, either. I don’t think the folks at ATC are anxious to plunge into a questionable action, especially when the outcome is successful. In my judgment, however, this pilot made an operational error in not telling the controllers that he was going to continue his descent. If he had been classified as an aircraft in distress, there would have been no question that they were required to clear the airspace, as necessary, to allow him to do what he had to do. And he might have had a talking point with the lawyers, if it had come to that, if he had been operating as an aircraft in distress.
Let’s think a little bit more about an aircraft with engine trouble. It may be that the powerplant has just become uninterested in further toil, but does this necessarily make it an occasion for declaration of an emergency?
Suppose your only engine craps out in the traffic pattern, say, right at the high key position, on downwind leg, just opposite your proposed touchdown point. Suppose furthermore that there are no other airplanes in the area. Is this an emergency requiring immediate action? Sure it is. Is this an appropriate occasion for declaring an emergency?
Maybe not. It seems that there is nothing anybody can do to help you, given the situation I’ve described. You don’t need to get in in front of anyone else. You don’t need priority handling by ATC. You don’t need to violate any of the FARs to deal with the emergency. So what’s the point? And to whom are you going to declare this emergency? I would argue that you have more important business on your agenda than fooling around tuning your commo radio to 121.5 and fumbling with the transponder, setting it on 7700. Why not just go ahead and land, just as you had planned to do in the first place?
Then there is the story of a guy who departed early in the morning in a Piper Aztec, from a strip way out in the middle of nowhere. The cloud bases were low, and the visibility on departure iffy. He obtained his clearance via radio prior to departure, and headed for his destination, which I remember being San Antonio, Texas.
A little while later, one of his engines quit. He went through the emergency routine, was unable to get it going again, shut it down and successfully feathered the propeller on the dead engine. At this time he had reached cruising altitude, and he noticed that the airplane was maintaining that altitude just fine. In his mind, he was flying a slightly asymmetrical Cessna 210.
Was this an emergency? My friend had about an hour and a half to go, at his reduced speed, to reach his destination. The airplane was under control and he had plenty of fuel aboard. San Antonio had good instrument approaches available, along with emergency equipment, in case something were to go wrong. This did not seem to him like an emergency. What’s more, immediate action was not required, so he called ATC, told them that he was now conducting a single-engine operation, and kept on trucking. They asked him if he wanted to declare an emergency, and he declined. He did not need priority handling, and there was nothing anyone on the ground could have done to help him.
He made it in and taxied with his single engine to a location where a mechanic could tend to the problem. In his mind, he had used his authority as pilot-in-command to make some decisions which, in retrospect, produced a successful outcome.
The rule that addresses this issue of “pilot-in-command” is FAR 91.3. The rule has three parts:
(a) The pilot in command of an aircraft is directly
responsible for, and is the final authority as to, the operation of that aircraft.
(b) In an in-flight emergency requiring immediate action, the pilot in command may deviate from any rule of this part to the extent required to meet that emergency.
(c) Each pilot in command who deviates from a rule under paragraph (b) of this section shall, upon the request of the Administrator, send a written report of that deviation to the Administrator.
Imagine this pilot’s surprise when the FAA guys wrote him a letter requesting the report required by part (c)! He responded that he had not declared an emergency, had not even requested priority handling, and that he was merely exercising his authority under part (a) of that rule.
The FAA claimed that he had violated another of the Federal Aviation Regulations, namely 91.7:
(a) No person may operate a civil aircraft unless
it is in an airworthy condition.
(b) The pilot in command of a civil aircraft is responsible for determining whether that aircraft is in condition for safe flight. The pilot in command shall discontinue the flight when unairworthy mechanical, electrical, or structural conditions occur.
This hapless soul was busted for not discontinuing the flight, the moment he lost that engine. The FAA contended that he should have returned to his place of departure and landed. They were not impressed by his contention that the departure airport was socked in, that there was no emergency equipment at that airport, and that it was totally deserted at that time of the morning.
In retrospect, it probably would have been better for him if he had kept his problem to himself. Would declaring an emergency have helped in this case? We’ll never know, since to this day, he claims he did not have an emergency. We can speculate, however, that he might have ridden a different legal pony if he had declared an emergency. He might have argued that “immediate action,” i.e. flying another hour and a half on one engine, was required by the situation, and that he was exercising his authority as pilot in command of an aircraft in distress.
Of course, this would have required ATC to move goodness knows how much traffic out of his way, causing delays and traffic snarls we can only speculate about.
Another philosophical take about emergencies was the subject of an article in IFR Magazine a few years ago. The author posited that loss of communication during an IFR operation, in IFR weather, constituted an emergency.
He invented a scenario, as I recall, of a Cessna 172 flying on an IFR flight plan in the clouds, with a destination of DFW, the hugely busy airport serving the Dallas/Fort Worth area. This author suggested that the pilot should not comply with Part 91.185, which spells out in great detail what a pilot ought to do in this situation.
In this age of GPS navigation, suggested this author, the pilot should punch in the “go-to-nearest” function of his navigator, proceed to the nearest airport, and land. He said that this action would cause less hazard to safety and much less interference with the orderly flow of traffic at the huge Dallas terminal. According to this theory, the emergency authority of the Pilot-in-Command would supersede the procedures laid out in 91.185.
I am dubious, considering what happened to the Aztec pilot, as to how the FAA would respond to such a theory. Clearly, the only way that ATC would expect this 172 pilot to land short would be if he encountered VFR conditions, in which case the entire IFR operation would cease to have any relevance, and the admonition to “maintain VFR and land as soon as practicable” would apply. Seems to me that a corollary of this author’s thesis might be that the 172 pilot lie about it and claim that he had landed in VFR conditions, assuming that he had been able to find the airport and descend below the cloud bases without hitting any microwave towers or causing a midair collision.
So, the subject of when to declare an emergency and when not to do so, is somewhat obfuscated by some stories of pilots who chose not to pull the trigger. The primary use of the declaration of an emergency is to give a pilot right-of-way over other aircraft, to require ATC to give priority handling when it is needed in an urgent situation, and to give the pilot some leeway with the FARs when he is under the gun. It should be used judiciously and, I would argue, sparingly; but it should be used when appropriate. What that means is left to the judgment of the pilot. That’s why I think the subject deserves some consideration ahead of time, to prepare the pilot for proper judgment-making should the possible need for a declaration of an emergency arise.
