On a bright July afternoon I drove to the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio, and found a small, well-kept grass strip with a wooden FBO building that glowed blindingly white in the sun. Zero-Two-Eight was sitting lopsided in a tiedown. Back in the 1970s, someone had wiped off the right landing gear in a bad landing. The original style landing gear was no longer available, so a shorter current-production gear had been fitted. Zero-Two-Eight took on a permanent starboard list. The upper and lower cowls were off, and the engine looked a bit naked. Pete pulled his 10-year-old compact up next to the plane and applied the jumper cables. The Lycoming roared to life, and we spent a few happy minutes watching the vacuum gauge, ammeter, oil temperature, oil pressure, and tachometer acting relatively normal. The tach bounced a bit, a flaw that Pete assured me I would quickly get used to.
Since Zero-Two-Eight was out of annual, we didn't go flying. At the time, I remember telling myself that this was good since I didn't want to get too attached to the airplane before I'd made a final decision about buying it. OK, I admit it; I'm a little na�ve. All right, a lot na�ve. I told Pete that I'd check on a couple of details, talk to the bank, and get back to him. I drove home, alternating between feeling like a big-shot aircraft-owner-to-be and worrying that I was going to get in over my head.
I was investigating several other planes and dragged my feet a bit about talking seriously to the bank. But in early August, I took a deep breath, called the bank, called the insurance agency, and then wrote up a formal offer to Pete. I had asked Pete what it would take to get Zero-Two-Eight back into annual. He had shrugged and said, "I dunno, maybe a thousand dollars?" He had also estimated that it would take another $400 to install a Mode C encoder.
Thinking I was being a really sophisticated purchaser, I offered $1,600 over his asking price if he could get the plane back into annual and get a Mode C installed and working. I assumed that his "thousand dollar" price for getting it into annual was what he would have to pay to get the plane up and running. Since he was an A, a thousand bucks would go a lot farther for him than it would for me. The extra $200 was supposed to be for his time and to cover some of the little things that always crop up when you try to fix up old stuff. Like I say, I thought I was being really sophisticated.
Pete liked the deal and got a ferry permit to take the plane to a nearby FBO with more facilities. He estimated he'd have the plane up and signed off by the end of August. In late September, Pete called me, asking if I could reverse-engineer a small brace that he'd found which had corroded. He couldn't get a replacement part, and a local shop had wanted $370 to duplicate it. Well, heck, I'd never bought a plane before; I didn't know if this was usual or not. I got the replacement done and back to him, along with a material certification, a description of how the part had been made, and a dimensional report showing that the new part was an exact duplicate of the original except for the corrosion. Pete said that part was all he needed and the airplane would be ready the next day.
The "next day" dragged on into October. Finally I got the call on October 10 to come and pick up the plane. I made arrangements to fly to Columbus. I also arranged to have an instructor with experience in the Aero Commander 100 check me out in the airplane so I could fly it home.
I went to the airport early, almost unable to contain myself. My first sight of Zero-Two-Eight was when I spotted her apparently taxiing aimlessly up and down the taxiways and hanger rows. It turns out that the resident AI was trying to calibrate the compass against his GPS. When he was done, he brought his notes into the office to have a new correction card typed. His greeting to me was brief: "Well, she's done, but I'm not gonna release her to you until Pete pays his bill."
I offered to hand-carry the bill to Pete and present it to him along with the check from my bank. My theory was that whatever the AI's bill was, it would look payable if I handed Pete a large check for the plane. It turned out I was right; I hadn't looked at the bill from the AI, but Pete wrote a personal check for more than $4,000 without a blink and handed it to me to take back to the airport. He also gave me a couple of good-sized cardboard boxes full of manuals, catalogs, spare parts, notes that he had compiled on the repairs that he had made, templates for parts that he'd made, oil change records, and various flotsam and jetsam that an airplane owner accumulates over time. Pete didn't look well, and I inquired after his health as politely as I could. Pete said that he needed an operation, but he'd be fine as soon as the sawbones would leave him alone.
When I returned to the airport, I was excitedly collecting keys and logbooks to add to the cardboard boxes I was stacking in the rear seats. After a delay of about three hours or 15 minutes, depending on whom you believe - me or the lying clock in the FBO lounge - the instructor arrived. He briefly glanced at my logbook and the pilot's operating handbook. We were through the preflight and taxiing out in moments.
He set the altimeter to the local airport altitude and made the first takeoff. I watched with growing horror as I saw the compass generate a full 30 degrees of error. We flew west while we checked the instruments. The gyro compass was an old horizontal model that rotated opposite to every other one I'd seen. It drifted enough that it had to be reset every four or five minutes.
My instructor tuned the number one radio to the Columbus ATIS and reset the altimeter. He grunted and then told me that the altimeter was "about 300 low on barometric." We returned Com 1 to the local airport unicom and asked for a radio check. Com 1 transmitted weak but acceptable, but Com 2 was dead - no transmit or receive. We checked the local VOR and found that the nav was as dead as Com 2. Back to Com 1 to ask Columbus for a transponder check, which came back good. I almost didn't believe that in the litany of inoperable equipment we would find something that wasn't an absolute disaster. I had no idea that an airplane with all this stuff broken could be found airworthy after an annual inspection.
The instructor proceeded to try some steep banked turns, slow flight, and a couple of stalls. Satisfied, he told me, "You've got the plane." Numb and shocked, I flew like a robot, doing what he told me, treating the airplane like it was just a heavy Cessna 150. Training took over, and I dully flew through a half-dozen touch and goes. "You've got a nice touch with her, I'm satisfied you won't have any trouble. I'm going to sign you off."
After we tied down the plane and the instructor was scribbling in my logbook, my brain finally found my mouth and I burst out, "I'm not competent to navigate that plane back to my home airport. None of the navigation instruments are working. Is there anybody around here who would be willing to fly back with me? I'll take care of their flight back here and the cab fare, of course."
I guess none of the people present in the FBO had ever heard a pilot admit he couldn't do something with an airplane. The silence was thunderous. The faces were dumbfounded, except mine, which was growing red. After a moment the pilot of a transient Beechcraft quietly said, "That takes a lot of common sense and guts to admit that. You're the first pilot I've ever met who can admit when he's over his head. There'd be a lot less accidents if more pilots were like you."
That's high praise and the first time I'd ever been accused of having common sense. Naturally, after thanking him, I set out to correct his misconception: I borrowed the AI's GPS and flew home with it. I mailed it back to him the day after I landed with the biggest thank you I could manage and immediately ordered an identical unit for myself.
Two years later, I'm still trying to fix up Zero-Two-Eight. Using the GPS caused my pilotage and dead reckoning skills to atrophy. I almost didn't pass my private pilot checkride because of this. (Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that I was a student when all of this took place.) I suspected that Pete had a heart of gold and a spirit of solid steel. I was right. Turns out he had a chest full of cancer, too. He died without ever flying again. I miss him.
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