Proficient Pilot: True Confessions

“Hey!” my girlfriend yelled from the back seat of the little “Airknocker” and over the roar of the mighty 65-horsepower four-banger. “Our football team is on the field practicing. Why don’t we go down for a closer look?”

This is when immaturity and stupidity easily overcame common sense and good judgment. A bad case of machismo prevented me from saying no. Without a second thought, I lowered the nose and nudged the airspeed from 80 to 100 mph. The fabric-covered airframe began to quiver at such high speed. I then turned to line up the goal posts as if forming a gunsight in my windshield.

This was in 1955, long before aeronautical decision making had been introduced and—unfortunately—many years before we could buy a get-out-of-jail-free card by completing and filing a NASA report, although this might not have benefited me because my buzz job was definitely an intentional violation of the regulations.

The next day, our flight over “UniHi” was the talk of the school. Everyone had heard about it. Word of the flight also had spread beyond the campus, and it wasn’t long before I found myself sitting in a conference room at the regional headquarters of the Civil Aeronautics Administration (FAA’s predecessor) with four CAA inspectors conducting the inquisition.

After being chastised, one of the suits stuck out a hand and asked me to surrender my temporary pilot certificate. This was devastating. I don’t think that I had ever before become so instantly depressed. I tried to hide my emotions but a few tears made their escape. I wasn’t at all sure that I could survive 90 days without flying.

But then a strange thing happened. Two days after losing my license, I received an envelope in the mail from the CAA. Inside was my permanent private pilot certificate. There was no letter or explanation, just the certificate. Gee, I thought, the government inspector must’ve had a change of heart. I celebrated by calling the airport, reserving an airplane, and taking my girlfriend for another flight. We were careful, of course, to fly high—in an Aeronca, that’s anything above 1,000 feet agl—and well clear of the football field.

Ninety days later, the mailman delivered another envelope from the CAA. This one contained my old temporary license, the one that I had been forced to surrender. Why, I wondered, would they have sent me that?

I have been forever thankful for three things. The first is that the right hand of the government had no clue about what its left hand was doing. The second is that such a suspension in those days was not made part of a pilot’s permanent record. Otherwise, my airline career might have died aborning.

I am most grateful, however, that my recklessness was not more severely consequential. Approximately 25 percent of all aircraft accidents occur during flights made below 1,000 feet (not including takeoff and landing accidents), and many of these are CFIT (controlled flight into terrain) accidents. In other words, because of pilot error, perfectly sound airplanes are unintentionally flown into the ground. In some cases, low-flying pilots tangle with wires or power lines. At other times, they misjudge their ability to maneuver in the vicinity of obstacles.

On occasion, pilots experience a mechanical or engine difficulty with their airplanes and have insufficient altitude with which to safely cope with the problem (such as a case of fuel starvation or carburetor ice). Having to select a forced landing site when already close to the ground might not provide a reasonable option.

Maneuvering at low altitude also can lead to a loss-of-control accident, usually the result of an inadvertent stall or spin. Even those proficient at stall and spin recovery have discovered that recovering from a control loss near the ground can be far more challenging than when practicing the same maneuver at altitude. In many cases, recovery from a loss of control below 1,000 feet can be impossible.

This makes it worth reviewing the adage that states “the three most useless things in aviation (especially during an emergency) are the altitude above you, the runway behind you, and the fuel left on the ground.”

Web: www.barry.schiff.com