Never Again: Lights Out
Electrical failure at night
By Gary Souder
As a student pilot many years ago, I thought How could I ever be as comfortable flying as I am driving a car? Years later, I am now as comfortable flying IFR as I am going for a Sunday drive in a car. My son and daughter have learned to fly as well. My wife has many, many hours being a devoted passenger in our Cessna 172.
My son works and lives in Texas. We live in Kansas. Several years ago, my son and I thought it would be nice to fly to Indiana to visit his grandmother, my mother. He would fly commercially to Will Rogers World Airport in Oklahoma City and I would fly my Cessna 172 down and pick him up at the ramp—you could years ago—and then proceed on to Indiana from there.
Everything went smooth as silk. We stopped at School of the Ozarks in Missouri for fuel and continued on to our next planned fuel stop at Mount Vernon, Illinois. Again the weather looked doable, but light rain was possible. Our next leg would take us to our destination, Clark County Airport in Jeffersonville, Indiana. The sun would be going down on our final leg but I was confident of flying IFR at night.
Little did I know how much my knowledge and experience would be needed in the next hour. Shortly after lifting off the rain started—heavy rain instead of light, and darkness came early because of the clouds. Having my son as a backup pilot with me and just rain without turbulence, we proceeded on and arrived safely at our destination.
We had a great visit with my mother and left in a couple of days to return, reversing the routing we had used a couple of days earlier. This time the weather was perfect, severe clear. We stopped for fuel at the same airports and departed the last stop, School of the Ozarks, for Will Rogers where my son would catch his return flight for Dallas-Fort Worth.
Everything was going smoothly and we could see the glow of Oklahoma City on the horizon. About halfway through this final leg we lost all battery power. The cockpit went dark, but we still had good visibility with a moonlit night. The engine kept running perfectly on the magnetos. Then off in the distance we spotted the runway lights at the Muskogee Airport. The immediate decision was to go for this airport and find out what was wrong. We lined up for final and about a mile out the runway lights went out—and we had no radio to turn them back on. With a clear night and my son using two flashlights—one pointed at the threshold and one to see the airspeed indicator—we made an uneventful landing. Taxiing up to the closed airport facility, all of a sudden, everything in the airplane came to life. Now it was decision time. Everything seemed to be working fine. It was a clear, beautiful moonlit night and we still could make Will Rogers in time for my son’s flight.
Off we went and everything continued to function perfectly. I dropped off my son, he made his flight, and I stayed there for the night. The mechanic the next morning said he suspected the battery solenoid was going bad. He replaced it and I never had any more problems.
The real problem would have been to have lost battery power during the rain at night a couple of days prior in heavy IFR conditions. Never again will I let confidence in flying trump weather and daylight.
Gary Souder lives in Topeka, Kansas. He is an instrument-rated pilot with 3,000 hours total time.
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