Air Safety

It was company policy when carrying executives to fly our Lockheed with a crew of two, and on this occasion, we had taken the managing director and a couple of his staff to a western NSW town to discuss a future company project. The widespread cloud and rain was clearing when we arrived late in the morning, but we made an approach on the ‘homer’ (read NDB today) because the practice was a good thing.

The only other aircraft on the aerodrome was a newish de Havilland Beaver. Its pilot wandered over as we shut down and turned out to be one I knew from club days at Parafield. As soon as we had seen our VIP passengers into their waiting hire car, I introduced him to the skipper.

Geoff, now flying for an ag operator,told us he was taking their Beaver back to de Havilland’s at Bankstown for modifications. He’d been caught out by weather the previous afternoon and been forced to overnight. With conditions still marginal over the Divide, he wasn’t expecting to get away before tomorrow morning.

My captain was a man not given to needless labour,much preferring the golf course whenever this was possible (his golf buggy was an essential item of crew baggage on trips away). Over lunch at the country pub where we were staying, he made it clear my job for the afternoon was to see to the refuelling and generally tidy up the aircraft for our return flight. Geoff, at the table with us,said he hadn’t anything to do,so he’d come out to give me a hand.

At this stage I had about 50 hours on the Lockheed,most of it as second pilot, but with enough in the left hand seat under supervision to be reasonably safe (or so the skipper thought!). As a concession, and provided the weather continued to clear, the skipper added that I could do a few circuits on my own before I came back into town. Geoff, he suggested,might go along as copilot to operate the undercarriage and flaps, and keep an eye on the power settings to see I didn’t overboost- after all, the Lockheed had the same engines as the Beaver, so he’d feel quite at home. The refuelling agent turned out to be Jack, the burly, laconic DCA groundsman: his eyes gleamed when we mentioned doing some local flying and he put the hard word on us to come along. I saw no reason why not,so we decided we’d do the flying first and the refuelling afterwards.

All went well, and with Geoff gingering me along, I put in an hour of highly satisfying circuits,Jack all the while enjoying him self in the managing director’s armchair back in the cabin. With only an hour and a half’s fuel in the tanks and almost no payload, the Lockheed’s performance was lively to say the least. Moreover, this was the first time I had flown it without an august personage breathing down my neck: it all worked wonders for my self-confidence.

Somehow during the refuelling operation, the subject of night flying cropped up. The local weather had cleared up beautifully why not a few night circuits,Jack suggested? He’d put the lights on for us and top us up again with fuel when we were finished. I put the proposal to the skipper over dinner,pointing out what a great opportunity it was to get in some concentrated night practice without the constraints of Essendon tower, or having to go all the way up to Mangalore.

He frowned. Yes, there was certainly something to be said for the idea: it was a pity he wasn’t free that night- he’d agreed to make up a foursome for a round of bridge at the golf club.

Geoff came to the rescue. “I’ll go with him again if you like. He’ll be right- handles her as if he’d been doing it for years. ”

After a little persuasion, the skipper agreed. I don’t really think he cared much what we did, as long as we didn’t bend his aeroplane or interfere with his golf club arrangements.

Jack was there as promised and switched on the flare path for us. No, he wouldn’t come with us this time; DCA regs required him to be in attendance when night flying was in progress: he couldn’t do that if he was in the aeroplane. He’d watch,he said.

Away we went, but this time, being full of fuel, the Lockheed wasn’t nearly as lively. Again the circuits went well, my confidence soon knowing no bounds. (It even became a teeny bit boring after a while, and that’s where the rot set in).

Turning downwind again after a number of circuits, Geoff pointed to the feathering buttons and asked about the machine’s asymmetric performance. This particular Lockheed12, (unlike the others at that time), was fitted with hydramatic fully feathering propellers.

“She’s not bad,” I answered. “Look, I’ll show you. ” And with that I went through the throttle mixture feather drill and shut down the port engine. Going back to 75 per cent power on the starboard engine, I wound on rudder trim and continued round the circuit with no difficulty, unfeathering and restarting the port engine as we neared the downwind leg again.

We had lowered the undercarriage again and were doing the prelanding checks when I had a further brainwave. <‘Let’s feather the other one now and we’ll try an asymmetric landing,” I said. And promptly did. “You’d better give me the first stage of flap,” I told Geoff as he gazed out his side window at the now stationary starboard propeller.

Watching the flare path out my side as we continued downwind, I didn’t immediately notice we were losing height. But one glance at the altimeter was enough to have me to push the port power levers back to 75 per cent.

To my alarm, it didn’t seem to help much. I went to climb power . . . then to full power on the live engine, but still to little avail. To make matters worse the speed was washing off as well; we were going down at a disconcerting rate and I began to doubt if we would make the strip. Bracing myself against the seat as I held on full left rudder in a futile attempt to keep straight, I tried to think nothing like this had happened before – what had gone wrong?

In a last panic stricken attempt to retrieve the situation, I decided to restart the starboard engine. For some reason it wouldn’t seem to come out of a feather. I went on trying . . .

By this stage, despite full left rudder, we had turned almost at right angles away from the aerodrome. Ahead of us it was pitch black and with the altimeter unwinding faster than ever, a crash seemed inevitable. As I mentally offered up a desperate prayer, I looked out the side window and saw distant trees silhouetted against the faint glare of the town’s lights – if anything they seemed to be above us!

My copilot spoke up, his voice rather odd. “I think we’re going in,” he said.

The words were hardly out of his mouth when ‘in’ we went.

‘On’ would probably be a better word. The wheels thumped on to the invisible ground with a jaw breaking shock, then we were airborne again on what seemed an interminable bounce. Somehow I had the presence of mind to find the landing light switch; its beam as it lit up the ground showed no obstructions. I closed the port throttle and we came down for the second time, then for the third and fourth, each of the thumps progressively less violent. We finally stayed down, and I braked to a fearful, ragged stop.

Somewhat to my surprise (I don’t know what I expected), the port engine was still running. I shut it down and we sat on in shocked silence, hardly daring to believe we were alive.

After we had pulled ourselves together and climbed out, we found we had come down in one of the cleared cattle pastures, interspersed by occasional fences and stands of mulga trees, that surround the aerodrome. I went back and got the cockpit torch: as far as I could make out, the Lockheed, built like a battleship, was unscathed.

Presently we saw vehicle lights coming, and in a few minutes, guided by our navigation lights, Jack drew up in his yellow DCA truck. “Oright?” he asked. A man of few words, he made his own cursory inspection of the aircraft. “Yous were lucky,” he said.

It wasn’t until early next morning when he took us back to the site on his tractor (Geoff and I had slipped out before breakfast on the pretext of topping up the fuel again), that I saw what Jack meant.

The wheel marks of our first bounce were in the adjoining paddock – only feet from a line of substantial mulga scrub along its boundary fence! Thanks to the full power on our live engine, we had bounced clean over the scrub and touched down for the second time in the next paddock where there was plenty of room for a landing run.

Looking the Lockheed over as I relived our moments of terror, it finally dawned on me what had happened:

• The undercarriage had been lowered before I feathered the engine; I had completely forgotten it in my desperate attempts to maintain height.

• The Lockheed’s great ‘barn door’ flaps were fully down, not set at the ten degree position I had called for. Preoccupied with watching the engine feather, Geoff had missed moving the flap knob back to the neutral position when the flaps reached ten degrees, thus allowing them to continue extending.

• The starboard propeller was partially unfeathered. It had not had time to do so fully because I had left the decision too late. But it had been the last straw for the poor old Lockheed, already struggling on one engine with a full load of fuel, full flap and an extended undercarriage.

On reflection Idecided it was also lucky I had forgotten to raise the undercarriage. If we had not hit on those big soft, bouncy doughnut tyres, my aviation career (and perhaps Geoff’s too!) would probably have ended there and than.

Jack, a farm hand before he was an airport groundsman, soon had stout ropes attached to the undercarriage legs, and with myself in the cockpit to work the brakes, began the tow back to the airfield. It wasn’t far and it didn’t take long. With bushman’s enterprise, he had let down a couple of panels of fencing and hauled us through without ceremony. By nine o’clock the Lockheed was back on the tarmac, mud-encrusted but intact.

I borrowed the equipment shed’s hose, washed the aircraft down thoroughly, and we refuelled it again.

I doubt if I’d make a very good criminal; early in the afternoon when the skipper and I came back to the airfield to prepare for our departure, I was horrified to see the hose where I’d left it on the tarmac below the fuselage. Heart-in-mouth, I wondered if he’d notice. He did. ”. A. h, I see you’ve washed her down,” he said approvingly. “That’s good – need to keep up appearances in our sort of work. ”

I’ve long since lost track of my Beaver pilot friend. But if he should happen to read this story, he might smile to learn the great fright we shared together has never been forgotten.