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Never Again

Flying on fumes

After 200 hours and probably four times that number of landings in my soaring club's 180-hp Piper Super Cub, I became relatively proficient at landing when and where I intended. Coupled with that experience were several hundred hours in gliders, which improved both technique and confidence. Little did I know this experience would have a lifesaving side benefit.

Summers in Kentucky are not great for soaring, but one lucky day, the thermals were booming, and everyone wanted to go aloft. With five gliders available at the club, someone was taking off every 20 minutes. The tow pilot on duty that day had been flying for three hours in the 90- degree heat, and I offered to fly a few tows to give him a break. I shouldn't have offered so casually.

Gratefully accepting, he noted that he'd just flown the left tank dry and switched to the right. We had no fuel at our strip, and we regularly flew until the last tank was down to half before making the 10- minute trip to the nearest airport with fuel.

The fuel gauges are glass tubes with orange floats indicating fuel level. When full or empty, the floats are hidden by the fuel gauge mounting attachments. Their constant bobbing made them generally unreliable, but we used them anyway.

Reliable readings can be taken, if somewhat awkwardly, by ladder or by climbing on the strut and using a dipstick. I did neither that day. After all, I'd been told the tank was full by an instructor who'd been flying 30 years, and they don't make mistakes — or so I thought.

My preflight was a cursory walkaround, an oil check, and a mag check while taking out the tow-rope slack prior to takeoff. I happened to glance at the float in the fuel gauge for the left tank — it had indeed dropped below sight. Glancing at the right, and remembering what the instructor had said, I saw only what I wanted to see — a float out of sight and therefore, I assumed, at the top of the right gauge. I never really looked at the fuel gauges again. After all, I was only going to fly three tows and give the job back to the first pilot.

I took the first glider to 3,000 feet. The second glider pilot wanted to go to only 2,000 feet, where he immediately caught a thermal. My last tow was a friend making his first solo in the club's single-seater. I briefed the pilot on where we would be flying and where the good lift was. We would go to 3,000 feet to give him plenty of time to get the feel of the glider.

Climbing through 2,400 feet, the engine coughed twice and quit. Towing requires flying at high angles of attack and very close to stall speed. It didn't take long to push the nose over to keep flying speed. I pumped the throttle twice, reached for the starter button, and the engine fired again — but only for a moment. Listening only to the air rushing by the open window and door, I turned toward the airport.

The glider pilot noticed we were going down, knew that he had paid to go up, and promptly pulled his release. He found a thermal and decided to watch from there to see what was going on.

My thinking process wasn't working very well. There was no emergency check list in the airplane within reach, and the pilot's operating handbook was behind the back seat. Remembering what I could, I changed to the left tank and tried a restart with no success. The normal vibration of the starter, as experienced in the air, was something new to me and made me think something else must be wrong: dirt in the fuel lines? A broken fuel line? Looking up at the fuel gauges, I saw for the first time that both tanks were dry.

I had now lost 1,000 feet and shifted my attention to flying the airplane and getting it back to the airport just below. Using basic glider airspeed and altitude techniques, I flew a close-in pattern and turned final as the propeller stopped windmilling. This had better be a good approach. For some reason, I suddenly thought of how embarrassed I would be in front of my friends if I couldn't make it back: After all, I'm a glider pilot.

Remembering I would have to clear the fence by 200 feet to allow for tow-rope clearance, I moved my hand to the release handle in case I needed to drop the rope. I wished for spoilers, which make glider approaches so easy.

Fortunately, I touched down exactly where I intended and rolled to a stop in front of our hangar. The club safety officer wondered why I was practicing a dead-stick landing where there were still gliders to tow. After hearing the reason, he explained that the right tank had not been filled after flying the previous day. I had flown it dry. Apparently, the instructor had not checked the tanks very well, either. To my surprise, the left tank — the one I had switched to — still had some fuel in it. There was enough fuel, in fact, to fly to the next airport for refueling. The engine might have restarted had I kept trying.

In retrospect, concentrating on flying the airplane proved to be a lifesaving decision. But I also made several dumb mistakes and am lucky enough to have only a learning experience as the result. If the engine had quit 50 feet above the trees, the glider pilot and I might have met a very different fate.


Steve Croghan, owner of a printing plant in Prospect, Kentucky, now has 1,000 hours and flies his 1978 Piper Archer around the Midwest for business and pleasure. This incident occurred in the early 1980s.


"Never Again" is presented to enhance safety by providing a forum for pilots to learn from others' experiences. Manuscripts should be typewritten, double-spaced, and sent to: Editor, AOPA Pilot, 421 Aviation Way, Frederick, Maryland 21701.

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