Accident Report: Doing it yourself

Looks like there’s no one around to hear your ritual warning cry of “Clear prop,” but you give it all you’ve got anyway, then hit the starter to get the propeller swinging, tweaking the throttle for an easy 1,000 rpm warm-up power setting.

All good so far, so after attending to the preliminaries, you ease the power up a bit to taxi out to the runway—but the aircraft doesn’t budge. That’s OK, the wheels are resting in small depressions in the grass of the flight line after all. So, you push up the power a bit more, your feet guarding the brake pedals against an anticipated lurch forward—which doesn’t happen.

Are you starting to get that what-did-I-forget feeling?

You run through the possibilities of a preflight omission: The tires aren’t flat, you distinctly remember removing and stowing the wheel chocks, and the tiedown ropes—at least the ones you can see—are in plain sight, undone and lying neatly coiled beneath >the wingtips.

But there’s another tiedown rope you can’t see—and the circumstantial evidence strongly suggests that the airport and the airplane are still joined by the tiedown rope fastened to the ring underneath the tail (and now there are people showing up at the field, some of them standing by to watch you taxi out and take off).

Here are your choices:

Set the throttle at idle, set the parking brake, and jump out and untie the tail.

Try to get the attention of one of the strangers on the ramp to come over to your side of the airplane so you can open your window and ask them (over engine noise) to untie the tail rope.

Shut down the engine and do it yourself.

If every detail is not carefully arranged, an airplane left to its own devices can go on an unsupervised and dangerous runabout.Please vote for option number three. Believe me when I tell you that there are many people out there who wished they had after more convenient-seeming ideas went awry. Avoid option two like the plague—bystanders and propellers just don’t mix. Option one isn’t much better.

That seems obvious, but it’s still surprising how strong the temptation can be to try to shortcut the safest option. You may have to suffer a few weeks of good-natured razzing about the tiedown rope if someone you know happens to be among those observing when you shut down to straighten things out, but that’s a far better predicament to be in than becoming the star of a YouTube video about a pilot trying to corral a runaway airplane.

A more complicated scenario confronts the pilot whose airplane must be started either by hand-propping the engine to life or using external power to engage a starter. If every detail is not carefully arranged, an airplane left to its own devices can go on an unsupervised and dangerous runabout—leading to what the NTSB might describe as a “loss of control on ground” accident as it did concerning a mishap at a Missouri airport on November 10, 2019.

According to the report, “the pilot reported that, after starting the airplane with a ground power unit (GPU), he exited the airplane. He disconnected the GPU and removed the wheel chocks. The airplane started to roll down an incline. He jumped into the airplane through the aft cargo door and attempted to climb into the pilot’s seat to no avail. He pulled the fuel to cutoff, and the airplane impacted the trees.”

Other precautions had not done the job. The NTSB account also noted that the pilot “reported that he had set the parking brake before starting the airplane but either failed to set it completely or bumped it when he exited the pilot’s seat to disconnect the GPU.” It determined the accident’s probable cause as “the pilot’s failure to properly set the parking brake before exiting an operating airplane, which resulted in a runaway airplane and subsequent impact with trees.”

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