Flight Lesson

I decided to go flying recently in my Cessna 150E to practice landings at Ukiah Municipal Airport in Ukiah, California. After a normal preflight and runup, I took off on Runway 15, flew the pattern, and had a good landing. The airplane was close to rotation speed on a touch-and-go when I noticed a nosewheel shimmy. I increased back-pressure to take some weight off the nosewheel. The airplane rotated and took off, but the shimmy continued. I thought, oh no, this is an engine problem. I was still accelerating and climbing, so rather than try to force the airplane back on the runway I continued to climb.

At about 200 feet the climb stopped. There was no safe place to land straight out, so I began a shallow left turn. I radioed Ukiah traffic, declared an emergency, and told them I was having engine trouble and to clear all runways because I was attempting to return.

The airplane started losing altitude during the turn. By the time I was lined up over Highway 101, which parallels the runway, I was at about 100 feet. I stopped the turn in hopes of gaining some altitude. The stall horn was chirping. I looked about 20 degrees to my left and there was the runway. It was close, a quarter-mile. But there was no safe place to land between me and the runway, and it would have meant another 20-degree turn. As badly as I wanted to land on the airport, I knew attempting to reach the field could be a fatal error.

I radioed Ukiah traffic again and said I would be landing on Highway 101. This stretch of 101 is two lanes in both directions with a large, grass center and a dividing barrier. I set up on the fast lane so the right wing would be in the slow lane and the left wing over the median, where there are no signs. There were no cars in front of me, but I couldn’t see what was directly below me or behind me. I didn’t want someone driving up underneath me, so I nosed down for a burst of speed.

I leveled at about 20 feet, hoping someone behind me wasn’t texting while driving. I made a flaps-up landing, came to a stop in the slow lane, and shut down.

I climbed out of the aircraft and turned around to look at traffic. Right behind me was a fire truck. The firefighters were returning from putting out a small brush fire and saw the whole thing. I gave them a thumbs-up and went to the back of the airplane. Pushing down on the rear of the airplane, I rotated it 90 degrees so the tail was off the highway and rolled it back to clear the traffic lanes. I then sat down on the tire to call my wife, also a pilot, who was at the airport and had watched the whole thing. I wanted to let her know I was safe.

Looking back, had I not been wearing active noise reduction headsets I probably would have heard it was an engine problem and aborted the takeoff. Once off the ground I didn’t panic. I knew the location of all my nearby emergency landing areas at that end of the runway. I didn’t get sucked into the “I can make it” mindset. I trusted in the skills I had been taught and what the aircraft was giving me, and thanked God once on the ground.

My only question is, how do I enter this in my logbook?