It had snowed the night before. The mountains and trees around California’s San Jose Valley were covered with a blanket of white. My wife and I discussed the possibility of piling the family into the car and cruising up the mountain to Stanford University’s Lick Observatory. The weather report indicated that there was almost a foot of snow on top. It snows so infrequently here that much of the community "goes to the snow."
We discussed the monumental traffic jam we would encounter all the way up and back. We would be lucky to get as far as the observatory, and if we did, we’d be surprised if we were able to get home before midnight. Why not take the airplane that we had just acquired and fly over the mountains and the observatory? We wouldn’t be able to play in the snow, but we would be able to see the big picture much better from the air. So we tooled over to the Reid-Hillview Airport in San Jose, where we kept our Cessna 170.
During the preflight, I drained about a pint of water from each wing tank and continued draining until there was nothing but pure 80-octane fuel. Although I thought that so much water was unusual, I pushed it out of my mind as I finished the inspection. Everything else checked out OK, and the Continental fired up and ran smoothly.
At that time, Reid-Hillview was an uncontrolled airport. It was late in the afternoon, and everyone else must have been on the way to the mountain, because there wasn’t anyone flying. We climbed out of the traffic pattern toward the observatory. The sun was just disappearing behind us over the Santa Cruz Mountains. The blanket of snow on the mountains and trees was breathtaking. As we approached the top of the mountain, I became apprehensive for some reason. A small voice seemed to be whispering to me, "Don’t go!" "Turn around!" "Go back!" I turned to my wife and told her that I felt very uneasy for some reason and had an urgent feeling that we should discontinue our flying tour of the mountain. Something or someone was telling me to turn around and go back. Perhaps she felt my apprehension, because she didn’t insist that we continue.
"You’re flying. If you feel we should turn back, then we probably should," she said. I immediately made a one-eighty back toward the field. I approached the community water tank, which we used as a pylon to turn into the pattern. I banked around the water tank and headed toward the airport. As I leveled off at 1,000 feet, the engine hesitated, sputtered, stumbled, and then came back to full power. Startled, I scanned all the instruments. Everything looked OK. The engine sputtered again, stumbled, idled momentarily, roared back to life, and then simply quit.
With the prop windmilling, I checked everything and could find nothing wrong, except that it wouldn’t run. I trimmed for the best-glide speed and told my wife to make sure that the kids had their seat belts fastened tight. By this time, we were entering the pattern at just over 800 feet. I shortened the downwind leg to make a very short final approach. Banking onto final, I pulled the mixture to idle/cutoff because I didn’t want the engine to start unexpectedly while we were landing. I touched down for the shortest and best three-point landing I had ever made.
We rolled to a quiet stop on the first taxiway, and everyone heaved a sigh of relief. We crawled out to push the 170 all the way across the airport to its tiedown. The field was still noticeably quiet, with no activity. Everyone, except me, seemed to be taking the experience we had just been through as routine. We were all pretty quiet as we headed home for a good night’s rest.
It was a long time before sleep came, as I mulled over everything that had happened. What if I had ignored that small prompting voice—where would we be instead of in our warm beds? I decided to call my mechanic in the morning and finally slipped into slumberland.
My mechanic met me at the airplane the next afternoon. After listening to my story, he came to the conclusion that the water in the fuel tanks was the culprit—but how did it get there? We began an exploration of the fuel system, starting with the primer and ending at the filler caps. We found that every seal in the system was hard as a rock. The caps had acted like funnels, collecting water and allowing it to drain past the ineffective seals into the tanks. (I normally shake each wing during the preflight. After this experience, I check the fuel before I shake a wing.) I believe that some of the water that had collected in each sump, which I had not yet drained, bubbled back when I shook the wings, so the normal drain procedure did not remove all the water from each tank. We found the primer full of water, and there was considerable water in the gascolator.
After replacing all the seals and O-rings and flushing the system, we never had another problem. In retrospect, I would never fly a newly acquired aircraft, especially if it had been inactive for a long period of time, before having a thorough checkout by a qualified mechanic.
Jean Lloyd Morrison, AOPA 249595, is a retired educator living in Mountain Green, Utah. He has flown for the past 50 years and has logged more than 900 hours.
"Never Again" is presented to enhance safety by providing a forum for pilots to learn from the experiences of others. Manuscripts should be typewritten, double-spaced, and sent to: Editor, AOPA Pilot, 421 Aviation Way, Frederick, Maryland 21701.
Related Articles
