Air Safety – The Perils of Private Strips

A few days before the weekend, I telephoned our friends to ask them about the strip’s exact location, and I marked its position on my WAC chart. The elevation of the country here, I saw from my chart, was something around 3500 feet. I made a mental note of this, but as I had little or no experience of flying in an out of high elevation airfields, its real significance did not sink in.

“How long’s the strip?” I was content to ask.

“Not sure, exactly,” my host replied. “But you’ll have no trouble – it’s long enough to take a DC-3, and its well covered in good grass”.

My total flying experience at the time was approaching 200 hours, so with these sort of assurances, I had not a shadow of doubt about my ability to handle the flight. But perhaps I should point out at this stage that our hosts to be were not pilots and their first hand knowledge of aircraft operations was limited to what they had seen of occasional agricultural flying from their strip.

The aircraft we had booked for the trip was a Piper Cherokee 160. It was long past its first flush of youth, but its performance was reputed to be quite up to scratch. On the Friday, the day before we were due to leave, I contacted the flying school that owned it to make sure the cross country kit, including the Flight Manual and performance charts, would be aboard the aircraft. They would be, I was told.

Full of excited anticipation, we arrived at Bankstown early the following morning, preflighted the Cherokee and loaded the luggage. Then, with my pilot friend in the right hand seat and his wife and son in the back, we took off into mild and clear weather. An uneventful two hour flight in smooth air saw us landing at Armidale, where we telephoned our friends to tell them to look out for us in just over half an hour.

Taking off again, we reached the general area of our friends’ grazing property on time. But soon afterwards we were daunted to find we were unable to sight anything that remotely resembled out mental image of the airstrip they had described. As the terrain was moderately hilly, I have to say that a lot of my own attention had to be given to watching where we were going, as we searched for the strip amongst the hills.

Despite flying around the area again and again, all our looking proved to no avail. After about 20 minutes of fruitless effort, we finally gave up, deciding we had no option but to go back to Armidale.

This we did and telephoned out friends again. “We’ll come and get you,” they told us, obviously a bit down in the mouth.

drive back to the grazing property began.

“Why didn’t you land?” our hosts demanded to know as soon as we were on the road. “You flew right over us!” We explained our predicament and, after some argument, they reluctantly had to admit that, to someone unfamiliar with the strip’s position, it “might be difficult” to recognise from the air. The “strip” they now told us, was really only an elongated paddock; furthermore, they confessed, it had not been used for agricultural flying for some time! When we at last reached the property, they drove us straight to the strip to look it over. Only about 50 metres wide, with trees on either side, it sloped gently uphill. Beyond its higher end were dead trees up to five metres high. The grass surface our friends had described so enthusiastically over the telephone, turned out to be thick clover up to 15cms high, still wet from rain that had fallen the night before.

I didn’t like it at all. But our hosts and my copilot (who had rather less flying experience than I did – and no experience on Cherokees could see no reason why it should not be perfectly adequate. As there was a ride I could get back to Armidale early the next morning with one of the property’s employees, they all urged me to seize the opportunity to go and collect the Cherokee and fly it into the strip. Reluctantly, conscious that our hosts were not at all enthusiastic about the prospect of having to drive us all the way back to Armidale again before we left for home on Monday afternoon, I unwisely (and very much against my better judgement) said I would try it.

The weather the following morning was perfect – fine and cool with only light winds – and my half hour solo flight from Armidale to the property was delightful. It was only after I arrived over the strip, now easily identifiable with my copilot waiting on it in one of the property’s cars, that problems began to loom.

As I circled at circuit height prior to setting up an approach, the car began to drive downhill along the strip, in the same direction as the wind had been blowing when I took off from Armidale, so I assumed my copilot was indicating he wanted me to land into wind in this direction. Unknown to me, he as actually driving downwind! Nearing the threshold of the strip on my first attempt to land in this direction I was amazed at the aircraft’s speed over the ground. (In addition to the downwind component of course, the 3500ft elevation was adding about five knots to the indicated airspeed).

It rapidly became obvious that the aircraft would quickly eat up all the available run. By the time I had descended to a height of about 50ft, I was convinced there was no hope of stopping before going through the fence at the far end, and I applied full power to go around.

This time I was amazed (as well as frightened!) by the relative lack of power available at full throttle. For a few seconds, with the airspeed indicator glued on 60kt (111km/h), the aircraft seemed reluctant to climb at all, but gradually it accelerated and gained a safe height again.

On my second approach to land, even though I brought the speed back as far as I dared on short final, I was still well down the strip by the time the machine sank on to the ground. Then to my horror, as soon as I touched the brakes, the Cherokee began to skid on the wet clover-I thought I was going to finish up in the trees! In the event, the Cherokee slid to a stop with a little strip to spare, but the landing left me very shaken. From that moment on, I began to have serious doubts about my ability to fly the Cherokee out again. My alarm only increased a little later with the discovery that the Cherokee’s performance charts were not in the aircraft after all. What was I to do? My nagging concern completely overshadowed the holiday weekend. For the next two nights I hardly slept, worrying if I should swallow my pride, get a maintenance engineer out from Armidale to remove the wings, and have the Cherokee trucked back to the airport. But any mention of this possibility to my friends was greeted with cries of derision. “It’ll be no trouble,” they chorused, “She’ll do it easily. ” During the Sunday, to try and put my mind at rest, I decided to carry out some fast taxying tests to see how the aircraft would perform. There was almost no wind, so with two adult passengers aboard, I made full throttle runs in each direction. But 55kt (102km/h) was all I could achieve before it was necessary to pull off the power and brake to avoid hitting the fence. Yet still my friends urged me on. “Don’t worry,” these experts assured me, “She’ll get off all right. ” Starting the engine, we taxied up the strip to its farthermost end, checked the engine temperatures, carried out a careful run-up, and completed the cockpit checks.

This was it now! Holding the aircraft on the brakes, I opened the throttle to full power, released them, and away we went. Three quarters of the way down the strip, with flight rapidly becoming essential, we still had only 55kt (102km/h) on the airspeed indicator! I pulled back on the control wheel, she staggered into the air, sagged back on to the ground, then decided to fly. In a gentle climbing turn, with the stall warning light flashing, we cleared the trees by a few metres (much to close for comfort) and finally climbed away. Never was I so glad to be flying! From here on, the rest of the day was almost an anticlimax. At Armidale Airport we refuelled, collected our other two passengers and reloaded our luggage (when they had finally and home), and set off for Bankstown low key after all the drama.

Thinking it all over later, I decided I had learned some vital lessons that ought to be passed on for the benefit of others: • Never land at a privately owned airstrip unless you have completely satisfied yourself that it is adequate in every way and that it’s surface is in good condition.

Be sure that performance charts are aboard the aircraft you are flying and that you have consulted them to ensure there is an adequate safety margin for landing and takeoff.

I eventually compromised by deciding I would leave my copilot’s wife and child, together with all our luggage, behind at the property, pump out the fuel tanks to reduce the fuel load to the minimum necessary to fly back to Armidale, and generally lighten the aircraft as far as possible. Then my copilot and

Never accept aviation advice from non pilots- or even from I would fly it out at first light on Monday morning to take full pilots unfamiliar with the type of aircraft you are flying. advantage of the early morning density altitude. • Long wet clover provides a vastly different airfield surface from short, dry grass.

We awakened that morning to thick fog so that was that. But at about 10am it suddenly cleared, and with the ground temperature still only 15°C, I decided it was a matter of now or never. (We had to be back at work in Sydney on Tuesday morning).

• Be very conscious of density altitude at high airfield elevations – on a short strip, its effects can be unexpectedly frightening!