Learning Experience

The last rays of light were trickling through the trees as I stepped out of the hangar and onto the ramp. Mosquitoes were beginning to swarm, a common occurrence in Florida in the summer. Our Schweizer 300C helicopter sat awkwardly in the twilight. By no means a pretty helicopter, the Schweizer was pure function, and had served me well so far in my training for a commercial certificate. It was designed to be rugged enough for the training environment, and I had done my fair share of hard set-downs with the helicopter surviving unscathed.

My instructor Mark walked up behind me. “I assume you did a good job on the preflight,” he said. Unlike my previous instructor, he had only a headset, and no helmet. The instructor for my private certificate would always wear a helmet on night flights, because, according to him, crashes were much harder at night.

The plan for this flight was to fulfill the dual cross-country requirement for the commercial certificate, and we had planned and reviewed our course earlier in the day. We would depart Leesburg for Gainesville, Florida, and return home just over two hours after departure.

The night was cool for a summer night in Central Florida, but we kept the doors off of the helicopter anyway. Strapping in, we began the start-up procedure. Master on, fuel checked, lights were out, fuel pump on, mags to both, and after a push of the starter button the engine roared to life. After warming up, we turned on the linear actuator that increases tension on the belts of the clutch, and the rotor blades slowly started spinning.

Now at operating rpm, I performed a mag check and made a call on the common traffic frequency. Carefully I lifted the helicopter into the air, juggling the cyclic, collective, throttle, and anti-torque pedals. We ascended into blackness, the intermittent flashing of the strobe the only light in the sky.

The helicopter happily hummed along as we neared our half-way point. A glance at the engine instruments confirmed that everything was indicating as it should. I flicked on the collective friction and tuned the nav-com to Ocala’s CTAF frequency, listening to the traffic. Ocala was to our west; I looked below and noticed we were over a forest. I asked myself where I would go if the engine failed, and since I didn’t like the answer I climbed a few hundred feet higher.

After we passed Ocala, Mark mentioned I should listen to Gainesville’s ATIS and get my frequencies in order so I could call the tower. The crackling ATIS came through slightly broken, but audible, and I jotted the winds down on my kneeboard. I switched to the tower frequency. As it seemed we were the only ones inbound, I called that we were 12 miles south and requested a stop and go with a departure back to the south.

“Report a three-mile final for Runway 29.” the tower controller responded.

I repeated the instructions and glanced at the gauges, which is something you constantly do in any helicopter. Engine temperatures were all in the green, altitude was looking good, airspeed right on 70 knots, and the directional gyro was lined up with the compass. I noticed the manifold pressure was higher now, almost in the yellow. I was slowly descending and added a little collective to hold altitude. The manifold pressure now neared the red line on the gauge.

“Hey, Mark, it seems like I need to keep adding power to stay level,” I said with some concern.

“Let me fly for a sec,” he said, and as he took the controls the helicopter started vibrating. It felt as if someone were kicking us in the back. Immediately we looked around for a landing area, and found that we were over an immense swamp.

“Gainesville tower, helicopter Niner-Zero-Foxtrot, we seem to be experiencing some engine trouble,” Mark called on the radio, not a trace of fear in his voice.

“Roger, will you be able to make the airport?” the tower responded.

“That’s probably going to be a negative,” Mark said. He was concentrating hard as he looked for a place to land.

I had been certain the problem was a fouled plug or something simple, and we would surely be able to nurse the helicopter to the airport, now three or four miles away. Realizing that Mark thought we would not make it there sent a chill up my spine.

About a mile ahead, a lit road snaked its way through the swamp, and to the right was what appeared to be an empty field, a very dark square in the middle of nowhere.

“Tower, we’re going to try for University Boulevard,” Mark calmly stated.

“Understand you are landing on University,” the tower said.

Mark asked me to call out any obstructions such as trees or power lines as we descended toward the road. The engine was kicking ferociously now, forced to run against its will. The cylinder head temperature and oil temperature were in the red.

As we descended I called out the grass median, and Mark agreed we should land there. It separated the two lanes of traffic shining below. With partial power, we dropped out of the sky toward the median, both of us hoping the engine would keep its fire burning just long enough for a landing. At 300 feet, our landing spot looked great. It was when we hit 100 feet that I saw the wires.

“Wires!” I shouted as Mark pulled up on the collective.

“I see ’em!” he yelled as he fought with the helicopter to maintain altitude. The rotor rpm was beginning to drop now, to the low side of the green line. Without rotor rpm we wouldn’t be flying much longer. The wires passed beneath us, dangerously close. There were telephone poles and wires all around us, not to mention the cars on the road.

“Why are there so many wires?” Mark said, frustrated now. We passed above another set of wires and looked down the road. It appeared that the criss-crossing of the power lines briefly stopped a few hundred feet ahead, and the opening looked to be enough for us to fit in. As we flew over the last wire in the series he dropped the collective down and we descended into spotty oncoming traffic.

“Tree!” I shouted as we narrowly missed a tall pine on our left. Cars coming up the road hit their brakes as they saw the landing light falling from the sky, and Mark flared hard and put us down in the left-turn lane as a car whizzed by.

The skids ground into the pavement but finally slowed the helicopter to a stop, and the two of us exhaled. We let the helicopter spin down as a crowd started to gather outside.

As it turned out, someone had oversped the engine on start-up previously, and this resulted in the engine’s main bearing getting spun, which caused the internals of the engine to overheat to the point that the connecting rods bent almost 90 degrees. The damage was minimal, other than the $16,000 to replace the engine components, but Mark and I emerged from the incident unharmed and we did no damage to anything on the surface.

The landing was a very real wake-up call for me; previously I had been a bit lax about always having a landing spot picked out, and after this experience I vowed to never get myself into that situation again. It was also a humbling experience, because with my limited flight time I probably would have tried to make the airport, which seemed oh-so-close. If you fly long enough, you are going to experience a failure of some kind, and it is your ability to cope with these failures that will save your life. Always have a landing spot picked out, because you never know when you’ll need it.