Learning Experiences

The Piper Cherokee Six is a wonderful airplane. During the years I flew for small charter companies, I carried all kinds of different loads in them. It seems that if you can fit the cargo through the cavernous rear doors, the airplane will fly.

In 1976 I was flying for a Connecticut company and was its junior pilot, recently hired from a full-time instructing job in Nevada. I had a fair amount of flight time, but nearly all of it was in simple fixed-gear trainers. I had not yet been checked out in the company's Cherokee Six.

My checkout with the chief pilot started with a flight across Long Island Sound to pick up an engine at the overhaul shop. He had me do some maneuvers en route to the shop, and I shot the landing at our destination.

After the chief signed the necessary paperwork, two shop technicians wheeled out the freshly overhauled and painted IO-540, mounted on a wooden frame and suspended by a movable hoist. We positioned the hoist near the rear of the Six, and with the help of technicians, we worked the engine through the rear door.

Before our flight the company mechanics had replaced the Six's rear seats with a sheet of heavy plywood. Carefully cut, it gave access to all the seat-belt hard points along both sides of the cabin. We tied the engine's wooden frame securely to these hard points with thick tie-down straps, and we used more than we needed. "We wouldn't want this baby to shift in flight, that's for sure!"

We thanked the technicians after securing the engine, and then I performed an abbreviated walk-around before we climbed aboard. After I did the run-up check I taxied onto the single, rather short runway, which had some trees off its departure end. The picture made me a little uncomfortable, but the wind was fresh and clearly favored a takeoff toward the trees. After putting the Six on the last available inch of runway, I advanced the throttle smartly.

As the airplane began to roll, the chief pilot turned in the right seat to check on the engine. Almost immediately he gave a cry of alarm, covering my hand with his and yanking the throttle back to idle at the same time.

Instinctively, I glanced back just in time to see the IO-540 flip backward through the cabin's rear bulkhead and into the aft end of the fuselage. The Six came to a stop, and considering how far aft that engine was, I was surprised that the airplane hadn't come to rest on its tail. I taxied back to the ramp without further incident.

When we examined the damage, we found that the wooden frame holding the engine was still lashed firmly in place. The engine, which the chief pilot and I had assumed was bolted securely to the frame, had merely been resting on the cradle the frame provided. It was not fastened to it in any way! The shop technicians who had helped us load and watched us secure the frame were not pilots. They assumed that we knew what we were doing, as indeed we should have.

When we got the engine back onto the wooden frame, we strapped it to the seat belt hard points to make sure it would not shift again. The cabin's plastic rear bulkhead had been destroyed, but damage to the tail cone was limited to some dents. Neither the chief pilot nor I, nor the overhaul shop's airframe and powerplant mechanics assessed the damage to be severe enough to preclude flying the Six home. Even so, the chief pilot and I held our breath when we took the runway again. Our flight was uneventful.

It had been a close call. Had we taken off, the engine might have shifted during the steep climb needed to clear the trees off the end of the runway. There's no doubt in my mind that the airplane would have been so far out of its center of gravity envelope that it would have been uncontrollable. If that is not enough, the control cables for the Six run along the bottom of the fuselage. It is possible that parts of the IO-540 may have jammed one or more of them when it came to rest. It's not a pretty thought.

Flying is safe, and it's so routine that it's easy to become complacent. Even when pilots make mistakes (and we all make them), aviation often has an amazing capacity to absorb errors with little or no ill effect. That is, no ill effect beyond the intense, momentary stress of a sudden, unexpected lesson - a lesson one hopes to never repeat.

But as I learned from this experience, pilots can never drop their guard. We must actively hunt for potential danger that's not always obvious. As pilots we must check, double check, and then check again, assuming absolutely nothing. We must teach ourselves to "what if" every segment of a flight and when the "what-if" answer isn't pleasant, we must train ourselves to reject those circumstances, even if it means canceling a flight.

Both the chief pilot and I thought we were being careful and thorough, yet we missed what should have been obvious. If I had not advanced the throttle so smartly, that IO-540 might have stayed in place until after takeoff. On such threads our lives sometimes hang.