Air Safety

How could that be you ask? Well, let me detail an incident that I was involved in recently.

It was a Sunday and I was at a Victorian country airfield just north of the Kilmore Gap.

Yesterday I had been dropping skydivers onto the nearby parachute drop zone. The mid winter stratus clouds had settled to the north and south of the airfield giving us a clear area in which to operate. It had been a good day and we managed to fly nine sorties.

Today was different, however. There was widespread early morning fog and even after 9. 00 am I couldn’t see to the end of the airstrip. A phone call to the Moorabbin Airport Flight Service Unit revealed that the fog would persist until late morning and then rise into low cloud that would hang around until half way through the afternoon. To top it all off there would also be rain showers associated with an approaching front. As it turned out the weather man was 100% correct.

My trusty Cessna 180 remained tied down on the hardstand. I spent time reading ‘Nothing by Chance’, a paperback by aviation writer Richard Bach and trading small talk with my skydiving friends as we all came to the conclusion that jumping was going to be off for today.

Up until now we had been the only people at the airfield, a barren place save for the shed that we were using as an operations shack. A vee-tail Beech Bonanza single-engine aircraft was parked further down the hardstand.

This Bonanza had caught my eye when I arrived on the Saturday for although it was an older model than the two or three of the type that I had flown it had a really modern paint job and could have passed for being only a few years old.

Suddenly a vehicle approached. A utility containing two men dressed in dark clothes drove towards our group at the last minute and turned to park behind the Bonanza. One man got out of the ute and took a couple of canvas bags across to the aircraft. He was wearing one of those· army style giggle hats and after stowing the bags he looked up at the sky. As he got back into the ute he said to the other man that he would wait until the approaching shower had passed before departing. He didn’t so much as say hello to our group.

The shower passed and Giggle Hat walked over to the Beech, opened the fuel caps and checked the fuel levels. I was surprised. The weather was not VFR and the conditions at the strip were below what was required for an IFR departure. It was the sort of weather that even grounded birds. There was cloud covering most of the low hill on the other side of the airfield and the visibility was barely to the end of the strip but presumably, this fellow held an instrument rating and was going to depart into the murk and go in a hurry to somewhere where the weather was much better.

I stood under the wing of the 180 and pulled the hood of my parka over my head as yet another shower approached. At the Bonanza, Giggle Hat also saw the shower and scrambled into the aircraft.

Mick, one of the parachutists, called out from the shed to see if I wanted a cup of coffee. I gave him a thumbs-up yes sign and moved off towards him. As I did so I glanced back at the Bonanza and froze still in my tracks as the rain started to pour down on me.

In the aircraft, the pilot was about to start the engine and taxi out onto the airstrip. He had a radio headset on and the cockpit door was closed. I could see the sash of the seat belt was holding him in place as he adjusted instruments on the instrument panel. He was all ready to go except for one thing – the cover was still on the airspeed pitot tube! If the aircraft took off into the IFR conditions then at the field, the pilot wouldn’t know if the airspeed on the Bonanza, a high-performance aircraft, was 25 or 250 knots. The low cloud base and reduced visibility would have almost certainly prevented a safe return to the airfield.

I moved towards the aircraft. The pilot saw me and I put out both hands in a stop signal. I didn’t run but I didn’t take my time. I walked around the front of the port wing of the Bonanza and picked the black vinyl cover off the pitot tube. As I passed it through the open storm window to the expressionless pilot I said, “I think you forgot something”. He took the cover and looked back at me but said nothing. I guess he was also thinking about what had been about to happen.

A few minutes later the Bonanza’s engine started up and the aircraft took off into the cloud and rain. It was late in the afternoon before the weather improved enough for me to be able to fly the Cessna 180 south to its t)ome base. Time enough to think about what might or might not have happened and all due to a pre-flight inspection that was cut short by a desire to get out of the weather.

Did I save someone’s life that day? I guess I will never know.

One thing I do know, however, is that a comfortable seat out of the weather is not worth a rushed incomplete pre-flight inspection.

The items that can get missed could mean the ‘difference between living and dying.