Flight Lesson: Take a load off

One of the cardinal rules of flying is to always be aware of your aircraft’s load capacity. Put more into an airplane than the allowed load and you take off at your own peril.

The Taylorcraft two-seater I learned to fly in was a great little airplane, especially for a student pilot like myself. It was forgiving of errors, responsive, and had a good-size wingspan for smooth low-speed flying and easy landings. The one thing it was not designed for was carrying heavy loads, as I would find out.

My brother owned the airplane and had decided to sell it. A man in the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, area, about 90 miles south of where we lived, said he was interested and would like a demo ride. I only had about 40 hours, but offered to fly there and do the flight. How difficult could it be?

The small airport had only a grass strip, barely 1,000 feet long, with a line of tall elm trees at the far end. I was shocked to see the man who answered the ad; he must have weighed close to 300 pounds, maybe more. The possibility of an overload should have entered my mind, but it didn’t.

He asked a few questions, looked the airplane over, and we climbed in. The grass was dry and recently cut short. The wind was light. Except for those elm trees at the end of the runway, everything seemed fine.

I taxied to the runway, and noticed the takeoff run would be slightly downhill. In hindsight, that was likely the difference between success and disaster—that, plus some fuel had burned off on the hourlong flight down. I had an uneasy feeling getting into takeoff position, but for some reason did not act on it. I pulled on the flaps, pushed the throttle all the way forward, and released the brakes. We started moving—very, very slowly. As we picked up speed, the tree line was getting closer, the elms getting bigger and bigger. Halfway down the runway, realizing the trees were a real problem, I tried to decide if I should stop before the point of no return, or if we had passed it already. I kept on going, and finally there was enough speed to lift the airplane into the air. It was hard to tell by how many feet we cleared the elm trees, but a person on the ground later said it could not have been more than 10. The man took the controls, did some maneuvers, and we landed.

“Thanks for the flight, but it’s not what I was looking for,” he said, not surprisingly. Strangely enough he did not say anything about the close call, and just seemed relieved to be back on the ground.

I should have remembered to consider all the factors in taking off: the weight, the length of the runway, the tree line at the end. If the runway had been wet or slightly uphill, the grass a little higher, or a little more fuel in the tanks, the result would have been a disaster. My inattention to one of the fundamentals of flying almost resulted in what might have been a fatal accident. Flying home gave me time to understand that was a valuable lesson to learn, but a very careless way to learn it, especially when another life was involved.