The reset button

I arrived at the Frederick airport on a cool morning. The weather was marginal. The AWOS was reporting the clouds broken at about 3,500 feet. Normally, I would have just scrapped the flight and come back another day. But the ceilings were forecast to improve, and I needed to get the airplane over to Hagerstown and get this work done. So, I decided to do the preflight and see if the clouds improved. Get-there-itis, strike one.

The first thing I always do in the preflight inspection is check for bird nests in the engine compartment. Anyone with an airplane parked on the ramp at Frederick knows the pain that dealing with the birds can be. In the springtime, it seems it takes mere minutes for them to start building their nests. Today was no different. I removed the top of the cowling and cleaned out the nest. While the top was off, I checked the oil and sampled fuel from the strainer since things are easier to get to. Then I started to put the cowling back on. While I was putting the cowling back on, the phone rang, and I took the call. Enter the distraction. And what a big one it would prove to be. Strike two.

After the call, I grabbed my gear from the car, unlocked the airplane, grabbed the checklist, and started my normal preflight inspection. Everything went great on the preflight. The only problem was that the clouds still looked bad. I had an uneasy feeling about flying over the mountains to the west. I decided to do something that, years ago, I had promised myself I would never do. I would take off and fly a lap in the pattern and use that to assess the cloud situation. Strike three.

Three strikes. I should stop now and plan for another day, especially given that I was already planning to break a promise I had made to myself years ago. I knew deep down I didn’t like the conditions. But I didn’t stop.

By this time, the AWOS was reporting the ceiling at about 4,000 feet. So, I hopped in the airplane and called ground control for my taxi clearance. As I was taxiing, a local flight school airplane took off for a VFR lesson to the west. I thought: This is promising for the clouds, but I was still very uneasy.

Taxi was normal. Runup was normal. I was cleared for takeoff. As I began my takeoff roll, I heard a radio call from the flight lesson that had departed just before me. They reported to the tower that cloud bases were at 3,000 feet. I immediately chopped the throttle and aborted takeoff. Tower asked the reason for the aborted takeoff and if I needed any assistance. I told them no assistance was required and that the abort was prompted by the last radio call, so I’d just like to go back to parking.

As I taxied back to the ramp, I had this big sense of relief, like I had just dodged a bullet. I didn’t realize how right I was. I pulled into my parking space and shut down. When I got out of the airplane, that’s when I saw it: loose quarter-turn fasteners that hold the top of the cowling down. As I inspected them, all but the four corners were loose. When I became distracted by the phone call, I returned to preflight instead of where I left off, and I had failed to properly secure my cowling.

My plan was to get into the pattern and check out the weather. What would have happened had that instructor made her radio call just 30 seconds later, or not at all? Would those four fasteners have held? Maybe, maybe not. I am certainly glad that I did not find out for sure that day.

While I was putting the cowling back on, the phone rang, and I took the call. Enter the distraction.

We often hear about how accidents are usually a chain of events that continue to pile up until the inevitable happens. In my chain, the distraction may seem unrelated to the rest of the links. But looking back, I was so focused on the weather, and I put myself under so much pressure to complete the flight. Had there been no phone call, I likely would not have made the same mistake. Sometimes the difference between a tragic accident and living to fly another day is a bit of luck that triggers the one good decision and breaks the chain. I was lucky, but luck is not a strategy. As aviators, we cannot afford to rely on it.

When it comes to distractions before we take off, there is a way we can prevent them from becoming a link in the chain. If we get distracted, we can press the reset button. Press it as soon as we recognize the distraction. When we are on the ground, we have all the time in the world to do things right. Restart the checklist. Revisit what we were just doing, even if we thought we were done. Our lives and the lives of our passengers depend on it.

Jason Pape is a CFI based in Frederick, Maryland. He has been flying for 20 years and owns a Cessna 172.