‘Just what we do’

First, I called my brother Harry, an airline pilot who flies out of Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), and told him I was considering buying a propeller located at the Compton Airport about an hour’s drive away. It turned out that he was flying to LAX the next day (from Auckland, New Zealand) and would take a detour to check out the prop on his drive home.

The next day he called and said he was at Compton, the prop looked great, and its logbook was complete. I transferred the funds to the seller, and Harry loaded the prop into his pickup truck and drove home to Santa Paula. The prop was wrapped in plastic, not boxed, so shipping it to the East Coast would require some packing.

But I had another idea. A corporate pilot who flies a Maryland-based Cessna Citation happened to be going to the Hawthorne Airport (HHR) in a couple of days and had room to transport the prop in the jet’s cargo bay. The prop just needed to get to Hawthorne for pickup.

Harry was flying with a friend in a Cessna 185 Skywagon and volunteered to drop the prop at Hawthorne the day before the jet arrived. He brought the prop to Hawthorne and left it with a note for the Citation pilot.

My elaborate plan fell apart the next day, however, when bad weather and the Citation’s changing schedule eliminated the airplane’s California stop. Now, the prop was stranded at the line shack of a busy FBO and needed rescue.

I called AOPA colleague Alicia Herron who lives in Torrance, California, and told her about my stranded prop. She kindly drove to Hawthorne the next day, put the prop in her F-150 pickup, and, as a memorable aside, happened to meet pilot/actor/aviation advocate Harrison Ford in the FBO lobby.

Herron took the prop home with her while I plotted the next step—finding a prop box and shipping it to Maryland. But Harry had a better idea.

A flying friend, Ryder Adams, happened to be at Torrance Airport (TOA) with his Beech Baron, and he could fly the prop to his home in Arizona. I’d be in Arizona the following week for the AOPA Fly-In at the Buckeye Air Fair and could meet my propeller there.

Herron turned the prop over to Adams, and Adams transported it to his hangar in Payson, Arizona. About 10 days later, I ferried the AOPA fuel demo Baron to Buckeye and retrieved the prop in Payson with a big assist from Adams’ wife, Chris. Ryder was out of town, so she helped me load the metal constant-speed propeller through the Baron’s baggage door, and then I continued on to Buckeye.

After the fly-in, I planned to fly the Baron home to Frederick, Maryland, but there was a last-minute detour. The Baron and I were sent to Ada, Oklahoma, for five days to gather performance data on unleaded G100UL aviation fuel from Ada-based GAMI. (The Baron uses unleaded fuel in its left engine and avgas in the right engine, and a digital engine monitor records temperatures, pressures, and settings constantly.)

The Baron and I flew more than 30 hours that week at Ada (with the propeller lashed down in back) before the flights concluded. Then the Baron and I flew the final six hours home to Maryland. In all, the propeller had covered about 5,000 nautical miles by air.

Once on the ground at AOPA headquarters in Frederick, Maryland, aviation mechanic extraordinaire Carlo Cilliers (aka “the airplane whisperer”) put the prop in his Toyota pickup and took it to the hangar my RV–4 shares with his award-winning Mustang II and Hatz Classic creations.

It took overnight stays in two apartments, two hangars, an FBO, and an airport office, drives in three pickup trucks, and flights in two Barons, as well as special handling by brother Harry, Alicia Herron, Ryder and Chris Adams, and Carlo Cilliers, to get the prop where it belongs.

I finally got a chance to thank Adams for his assistance when I met him in person at the AOPA Fly-In at Buckeye, and he was nonchalant.

“Helping each other out is just what we do in the aviation community,” he said. “It’s a big part of what makes all this so worthwhile.”

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