At the airport, the preflight went quickly. With the neighboring airplane away, we had plenty of room to maneuver, and we soon found ourselves taxiing for takeoff. On the way to the runway we passed a sad-looking Cessna minus its vertical stabilizer. It looked like the airplane was undergoing normal maintenance except for the vehicles parked nearby. "Someone must have taxied into it," I thought.
My heart always swells with emotion during the climb from hot Phoenix desert to cool northern Arizona pines - especially when the 7,000-foot Mogollon Rim materializes ahead, stretching from horizon to horizon like the edge of the Earth. Despite having crossed it many times before, I always have feelings of foreboding when approaching such a mass. Even the map's most earnest assurances can't quash feelings that we might not rise high enough to surmount it this time. Then follows the breathtaking squeeze of suddenly skimming low over the mammoth Mogollon Plateau, an instant earlier having, at the same altitude, been suspended many thousands of feet above lower terrain.
Peering ahead among tall pines for the airport, I twirled knobs on the radio and announced our intention to land.
"Mogollon Airport is closed," came the unexpected reply from a handheld radio. "Disabled aircraft landed wheels-up. Everyone's OK, but we need to clear the runway."
We took advantage of 20 minutes of circling to ogle streets and homes nestled among the pines. Best of all were the airplanes parked in almost every yard. When the runway was cleared, we landed and visited the advertised home, a stereotypical A-frame-in-the-woods, garnished with a climate-controlled hangar for pampering the lucky owner's airplane. Too rich for our blood, but fitting for future dreams.
After wandering the area, Jean and I rotated skyward in the Flying Carpet, sighed sad goodbyes to cool, shaded air, and shortly found ourselves descending into the hellish heat of summertime Phoenix.
Nothing was stirring at the home field when we touched down - even the lizards were hiding beneath their rocks - and parking was a cinch with our neighbor still gone. A friendly fueler drove up in her truck, armed with a cooler full of cold drinks.
"Gettin' warm," I said in desert vernacular.
"That time of year," she replied, navigating the fuel nozzle up-ladder to the wing. "You hear what happened this morning?"
"Nope," I said, extracting an icy soda from the cooler. "What's that?"
"Midair collision in the pattern...." She gestured toward the empty tiedown beside us. "Your neighbor there was one of the airplanes involved. Ground his prop right off." Reverie broken, Jean and I looked at one another in horror-years of safe flying and now two incidents encountered in the same day. I was almost afraid to ask.
"Everyone OK?"
"It was a miracle," replied the fueler. "Two people aboard each airplane and everyone walked away."
"What was the other airplane?" I asked.
"A high-wing Cessna...parked over on the ramp. The one without the tail."
"They removed the vertical stabilizer afterward?"
"Nope, the pilots landed without it."
It was beyond my comprehension that someone could safely land the Cessna we'd seen when taxiing out. Its stabilizer had been totally and cleanly removed as if by a mechanic. Directional control would have been impossible, and the aircraft's balance disturbed. Scarier still, an inch or two lower and the other airplane's prop would have severed the elevator cables. That night and for many more afterward I dreamed about trying to land that 172, less a third of its tail.
Later I learned that I'd flown that very airplane myself in the past and knew the instructor involved in the accident. As I understand it, he and his student felt a thump when they were struck but didn't realize what had happened until hearing the other airplane broadcast "midair collision" to the tower. With little time to think, the instructor circled down to land. He thought they were goners when he discovered how little control he had.
They apparently managed to touch down on the runway but traveled diagonally off the pavement to the right, traversing grass, the parallel taxiway, more grass, and several hundred yards of ramp before stopping in front of a hangar. Hundreds of closely parked airplanes normally blanket this ramp, but miraculously they'd been moved across the airport for a week to accommodate repaving. The Cessna survived its wild landing roll with little additional damage, and the occupants emerged unscathed except for the emotional toll.
A year has passed, and happily my fear has long since returned to its more comfortable position below my conscious horizon. I keep it at bay by enthusiastically monitoring traffic around me when I fly, and by enlisting all eyes in my airplane to help. Always looking over my shoulder, you might say.
Please keep a watchful eye over your shoulder, too, so we can meet one of these days at a friendly airfield and share feel-good stories about the joys of aviating. Nothing beats flying, but we've got to be careful.
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