Up, Up, and Away

I hope I don't wait until I'm on my deathbed (one word or two?) before I gain clarity.

Wouldn't it be awful to wait until then and think, "Oh, that's what that meant." "I should have taken advantage of that opportunity instead of worrying about whatever it was I was worrying about." How many times have we heard that before people check out, they say they only regret the things they didn't do.

Well, I'm pretty much of a risk taker. Flying in a little single-engine plane for many years...three trips back to Ohio and a couple to Oklahoma...qualifies me, I think. There was the time on one of those Ohio trips, we were over 29 Palms after flying around clouds most of the day (before my pilot was instrument rated and couldn't bore holes in clouds)...we had been climbing and wanted to level off at around 7,000 ft. That's when we discovered there was a problem. It's like stepping on the accelerator of your car and passing someone at 75 mph and then letting off the pedal, only it wouldn't let up. It's like it stuck down. Well, it could be just as serious in a car...maybe more so with traffic. Thankfully, we hardly see any planes up there except when we near an airport.

However, we were flying over mountains...and looking down, there was no place to land safely.
That's when we radioed Palm Springs and told them we had an emergency. I was sure they would give us some sage advice. Only, "How many aboard?" Excuse me...he may have said, "How many bodies aboard." That's how I read it.

In any event, my good pilot used his head and figured out that he could turn off one of the magnetos (there are two) and it would let up enough to get the reading off "red line," so the engine wouldn't overheat and quit. That was the fear. It's the opposite of what most pilots are trained to do. You're trained to handle an "engine out." Not a wide-open engine. It doesn't happen. Well, now we know it can...and did. The worst part was having to dive (literally...since we couldn't slow it down as one usually does to descend for landing). It felt like my head was coming off. When we had the runway lined up, I was told to push back my seat as far as it would go...we had to shut off the engine completely in order to slow it down enough to stop at the end of the runway, which meant if there was any wind gust, we would not be able to adjust.

Palm Springs was chosen as our landing site because we figured if the jets could land there, the runway would be long enough to handle the speed of our little Cessna. As it turned out, that was the calmest day I've ever seen in the desert.

Truthfully, the air traffic controllers at the Palm Springs airport were most gracious. After we radioed the emergency, they cleared the airways for us. Didn't that make us feel important...and there was even a fire truck to greet us.

Well, I took the liberty of saying, "we" throughout, but the credit all goes to Dave Black. Whatever you do, if you are going to fly in a little plane, pick a good pilot.
Oh yes, I think I deserve a little credit, because I found out in an emergency, I just shut up and let the pilot figure out how we were going to get out of this. I do remember thinking as my birthday was near, "Oh well, I guess turning 32 isn't any big deal." Thank God, I found out it even gets better.