Air Safety

But finally I was rewarded when the chief pilot of a charter company said he might be able to give me some casual work. So for a few weeks I flew an Aero Commander to various airports around Victoria, picking up priority freight.

Told that maintaining schedules was paramount to the success of the business, I was quietly urged to speed up my cockpit checks, taxi faster, cut corners in the circuit, and generally “forget airline habits” (whatever that meant!).

One evening, because of a delay in loading, I arrived into Essendon ten minutes late, and despite my explanation, was castigated by a newly promoted 27 year old senior pilot. My job was on the line, and being desperate to hold it until something better came along, I began to cut corners like a “real” GA pilotbut with natural reservations.

I am a bit on the short side and was not physically comfortable in the Aero Commander – its cockpit layout favours six footers; so I bought myself a Baron endorsement, as we had one of the type online. I liked the Baron very much.

My trips now required me to fly from Essendon to Bairnsdale in the morning, stay in a motel all day, then after loading my freight, fly a short hop to West Sale – more freight – then finally back to Essendon with a night landing.

On this particular day, the Baron I was flying was one which the company had cross-chartered. There were no snags in its Maintenance Release (there wouldn’t be, would there, I thought cynically), and the morning flight to Bairnsdale was normal with the aircraft apparently fully serviceable. I refuelled, chocked the Baron and put in the control locks, and went off to the motel for the day. As I hadn’t flown this particular Baron before, I spent some time reading through its Flight Manual. When I saw it was privately owned and who owned it, I vaguely recalled someone mentioning that the owner had experienced expensive troubles with repeated failure of the alternator warning lights. However, as the current Maintenance Release contained no reference to any such problem, I gave the matter no further thought.

At 7pm I returned to the aircraft to await the freight. It arrived and was hurriedly loaded, I secured the cargo nets, and took off for west Sale, landing there right on schedule just before dark.

To my dismay, the freight van here was ten minutes late arriving, thanks to a flat tyre, and I began to sweat about the future of my job. Some bulky but light cartons were finally forced into the Baron, but despite much pulling and cursing, I was unable to lock down the freight nets again. I finally decided I would have to get going – and fast – so I just left the nets draped over as much of the freight as possible, did a Battle of Britain scramble, and set course for Essendon. As a safety precaution, the nets were completely useless- and I knew it! Some 25 minutes later, now at 45 DME Essendon and in night IMC, I noticed the instrument panel lights becoming dim. Being in cloud, and feeling weary as well as tense at the thought of receiving another rocket for being late, I adjusted my glasses and put the problem down to imagination – and age!

Soon afterwards the ADF needle began to wander aimlessly, and the VOR flag became intermittent. The instrument lighting was getting worse, and I suspected an electrical problem in the offing. This was puzzling, because both alternator warning lights were still extinguished and both load meters showed an ever so slight charge rate.

At 35 DME Essendon, the DME itself gave up the ghost – leaving me in cloud at night with no radio aids! Fortunately, just a few moments previously, I had glimpsed the glow of Melbourne’s lights in the distance ahead before going back into solid IMC.

I called up Melbourne Control and advised them that I might lose VHF contact due to an electrical malfunction. The controller enquired: ”Are your operations normal?” and at that moment everything went completely dark. Happily for me, I had my small torch in my pocket, so I continued to fly with one hand, using the torchlight to see the instrument panel. I checked what circuit breakers I could, but all were OK. I aimed for the glow in the clouds as I got nearer to Melbourne, attempting to keep out of cloud as much as possible. Occasional glimpses of ground lights indicated a lot of low scud, base between 700 and 1,500 feet, and the rest of the cloud seemed to be about five eighths cover. I finally spotted Essendon’s runway lights below me, but they quickly disappeared in a patch of cloud.

At least I knew where I was now, so it was simply a case of flying the aircraft with one hand and trying not to drop the torch which I was holding with the other. I calculated I could spiral down carefully below the main cloud base, and selected the landing gear lever to ‘down’. But of course nothing happened – the gear is electrically operated, and I had no electrics!

As I digested this little problem, I suddenly found myself in a 60 degree bank – my torch beam had wandered off the artificial horizon as my concentration lapsed. I was thankful that I was experienced in night IMC flying – “black hole” approaches into small Pacific island runways had kept my cross reference up to scratch.

I groped in the dark to find the emergency gear handle. In the Baron it is situated in a damnably difficult position just aft of the pilot’s seat. To my consternation, I now discovered that because I had failed to tie the freight down, some of the packages had worked themselves forward over the handle assembly. Now I really was in strife. I needed three hands – one to fly, another to aim the torch at the artificial horizon, and one to shift the boxes!

Circling with only partial visual contact (unaware I was straying near the ILS to Runway 27 at Tullamarine – and that ATC were watching me like a hawk on radar as two 747s were inbound), I finally succeeded in shifting the freight back out of the way, and reached blindly again for the emergency gear handle. The handle operated freely for only four or five rotations, then gummed up. I knew it required 50 turns to wind the undercarriage down, so what was wrong now? Again I found myself overbanking, as I tried to look down and back at the emergency handle in the torchlight.

I decided I’d better confirm exactly which way the damned handle should wind- clockwise or anti-clockwise – it seemed to be jamming in both directions. Fortunately fuel endurance wasn’t a problem, so provided I didn’t flatten the torch battery or lose control in cloud, I should be able to sort out the landing gear problem.

Reaching across the cockpit, I scrabbled in the dark for the Flight Manual and put it on my lap. Now have you ever tried simultaneously flying an aircraft at night with one hand, watching the instruments, and trying to read the manual’s emergency index? All the while waving a torch between the instruments and the book on your knee? The book slides off your knee because you have to keep your legs apart to retain your feet on the rudder pedals. Wearing glasses is no help either!

Anyway, between much wing waggling and semi-visual navigation, I eventually found the right page and proceeded to read the small print – and I can tell you, for a man of 50 plus in that situation, it was very small print indeed!

Proceeding in strict accordance with the instructions, I managed some 20-odd very difficult further turns of the handle. But after that it just jammed solid. I had lost a lot of skin from my right knuckles – thanks to the handle, pieces of plastic, and sundry bits of fuselage all being in close proximity to each other – and was cursing with great bitterness the gentleman from my Pacific airline who lost me such a pleasant job and was thus responsible for the situation I now found myself in.

Forcing myself to stay calm, I faced the awful possibility that a wheels-up landing might be the only way out. I was angry with myself now for being such an idiot. Not tying down the freight was a clear breach of regulations; and worse still, it was very poor airmanship. I vowed that never again would I be pressured into potentially dangerous situations by fears of job security.

All this drama over Melbourne had taken about 20 minutes. Now, as an afterthought, I turned on the aircraft’s master switch again. (I had previously turned it off to conserve whatever power might have remained). The VHF selector glowed green, and I quickly dialled the transponder to 7700 and transmitted that I was unable to lower the gear. No sooner had I done so than everything went dead again and I was back to square one.

Have you an air safety story to tell? Particularly one with a lesson that might save other pilots from making a similar error of judgement? If you have, write to Macarthur Job, Australian Aviation, PO Box 3105, Weston Creek, ACT 2611. Contributors to this series are assured their anonymity will be fully respected!

At this stage I was orbiting Essendon, which I could see 2,000 feet below me, and was fairly confident I could stay close in, despite frequent cloud penetration. I did not want to descend further until I was ready for an approach, because I needed altitude for my attempts to lower the gear.

I had a few more goes at trying to free the now completely jammed gear handle, but finally gave up in disgust; I was getting tired and very irritable, and my flying was becoming sloppy. I decided I would have to belly land within the next ten minutes- I was worried that the torch battery would go flat and I needed that torch badly.

The idea of the wheels-up landing did not worry me too much in itself; but the thought of being crucified by the (then) Department for not tying down the freight weighed heavily. I had enjoyed a reasonably trouble-free career as an airline pilot – but I’d certainly stuffed it now in GA!

After a couple of minutes of thinking through the proposed belly landing technique, I switched on the battery for one final call to Essendon to warn them I was coming in – ready or not. Again, a faint glimmer of green on the VHF.

Then, for a reason I cannot explain, I suddenly had an idea. Pushing in the main landing gear circuit breaker (pulled as part of the emergency lowering drill), I reselected “down” on the main gear switch. Within a couple of seconds I heard a reassuring thump below – it was like music to my ears. At the same instant the green “undercarriage down” lamps glowed momentarily – then there was total darkness again as I flew into another thick patch of cloud.

It was good enough – I had seen the greens before the battery finally died. Using my one handed torch technique, I descended in and out of low cloud into the circuit, and got myself onto final. I had no flaps or landing lights – and no certainty that all three wheels were locked down- but the touchdown worked out OK. Heaving a great sigh of relief, I taxied to the terminal.

The waiting van driver grumbled about my late arrival, unloaded the freight quickly, and drove off. I put the aircraft to bed, installed the control locks, and wrote in the Maintenance Release: “Total electrical failure, also emergency gear handle jammed in operation”. The few remaining staff on duty were not the slightest bit interested in my problem, so I got on my motorbike and rode home.

After a kiss and “Did you have a nice day, dear?” from my ever loving spouse, I telephoned Melbourne ATC and apologised for disorganising their flow control, then rang the duty Departmental Air Safety Investigator to explain things. Next morning I filled in the mandatory 225, (omitting to mention the freight was not tied down!), and gave it to my chief pilot for on-forwarding to the Air Safety people. (For some reason, they never received it).

Then I returned to the aircraft with the maintenance engineer who had found my “snag” in the Maintenance Release. He could find nothing wrong with the Baron’s electrics, but he did find a circuit breaker popped, one that was part of the alternator control system. Although I believed I had checked all the circuit breakers when the electrical system failed, the particular one on this aircraft was situated out of sight under the left side instrument panel, with no label to identify it.

I wondered why the invisible circuit breaker had popped – and why no alternator warning lights? The latter was easily answered – there were no bulbs in the alternator lamp module, only the transparent red covers! The earlier repeated problems with the warning lights had proved too expensive for the owner, so he had simply removed the alternator warning lamp bulbs and replaced the red covers. No entry having been made in the Maintenance Release to this effect.

So what about the circuit breaker? In the Beech Baron, the aileron and elevator control lock consists of a large metal pin which fits into matching holes drilled in the axis of the master control column. Attached to this pin by a length of retaining wire is a metal bar designed to be placed between the rudder pedals, so forming the rudder lock. On this particular Baron, the wire was very taut with the locks in place, and it took a lot of fiddling under the instrument panel to fit the rudder lock properly. When so fitted, the retaining wire ran very close to the hidden alternator control circuit breaker. Apparently, when I removed the control locks at Bairnsdale, the wire jagged the collar of the circuit breaker, pulling it out.

Unwittingly, I then flew for two sectors, including engine starts and night flying on battery only. With the absence of warning lights appearing to indicate all was not well, I did not monitor the load meters closely. And when the battery finally gave up the ghost at 35 DME Essendon, the load meters showed a slightly positive needle position only because it was their electrical zero. Murphy’s Law!

I lost my job with that company. But three months later that same Baron still had no alternator warning lights, no decal to indicate the whereabouts of the hidden circuit breaker, and the wire of the control lock mechanism was still too short – it still passed within a cat’s whisker of the circuit breaker.

Oh yes- I almost forgot to add that the reason for the jamming of the emergency gear handle was damage to the mechanism, in all probability caused by heavy freight resting on the assembly . . .

The safety lesson of this sorry tale? Don’t allow commercial or personal pressures to influence your professional airmanship decisions- in other words, don’t cut corners. And at night always carry a fully charged torch- preferably two!