THIS IS a great day! It is high summer, balmy…. and best of all – I have just flown an aerobatic display! Me! My first ever aerobatic display before a public audience! I’m a display pilot!
Okay, so “public audience” is perhaps a rather liberal description. But it’s an airfield Open Day and there is a small crowd assembled – or at least, those who are not splashing about in the clubhouse swimming pool – and I’ve actually flown a teeth-gritted display! My first! Great day! Okay, I have landed the Chipmunk with a dead radio. Almost normal in the mid- 1970s, but I have a feeling that this one is dead because it has partially come out of its rack. I taxi back to the hangar and swiftly grab a few tools out of the little bag in the front cockpit. Re-rack the radio, jump into the rear cockpit – the instructor’s cockpit – and taxi back to the flightline, where I’ve promised to do some joy-rides. This is my day!
And my first passenger…. is a vision calculated to delight any aspiring young display pilot, part of whose motivation is inevitably going to be two-and-a-half feet south of his head.
She is wearing a wet bikini over which she has pulled a tight T-shirt, and gives me a 1 000-watt smile as she climbs in. We take off. We fly. I teach her the rudiments and follow her on the stick with thoughts of – oh, never mind. I take back control and show her a loop and then a slow roll….
At which point six tools fly out of the little bag in the front cockpit which I have forgotten to zip up. Sadly, they all clout Miss Wet T-Shirt on the head in passing – nothing devastating, but I can tell by the look on the back of her neck that it isn’t quite what she had in mind. It isn’t quite what I had in mind either,come to that.
Even shortly afterwards I cannot really explain my subsequent actions. It comes into my head that I must recover these tools, so I roll the Chipmunk inverted again and push gently so that they clatter up into the canopy and slide backwards towards me.
The engine of course dies at this point, having no inverted fuel system, but no matter, we will not be long. I reach up and grab the first two spanners…. And now what? I have the stick in my right hand and two spanners in my left. If I try to put them into a flying-suit pocket they will instantly fly out again before I can zip it up. For a moment I dither – and then it comes to me that the back of Miss TShirt’s head is now registering a quite significant degree of disquiet at being stuck with some maniac in an upside-down Chipmunk with a wind-milling propeller and starting to judder discreetly in the beginnings of an inverted stall.
I roll erect, juggle the throttle so that the Gypsy re-awakens with as little fuss as possible, and return us to our point of origin. Miss W T climbs out and vomits rather less than discreetly on the grass. The 1 000-watt smile is most notably absent.
I spend the next hour moiling around the Chipmunk’s cockpits, eventually emerging sweaty, oily and chastened but clutching every last spanner and screwdriver. Needless to say, I have this day learned an important lesson. A lesson repeated and repeated On this day it is not given to me to know that over the next three decades I will relearn that same lesson again and again – that aerobatic aircraft and loose articles do NOT mix. Or, indeed, that ANY aircraft and loose articles do not mix.
It is not given to me to know that five years hence I will stall-turn a Rothmans Pitts at low level during a display in the Arabian Gulf, go to pull out – and make the interesting discovery that the stick won’t come back. That I will then push like hell – there not being a whole lot of alternative – miss the waterfront by not very much, and thence climb up inverted, heart drumming in fortissimo, to a considerable height before rolling erect to investigate.
I am not to know I will then be faced with the classic dilemma of a control jam. With the stick back against the jam I can maintain level flight – but only at approximately twice normal landing speed. I have options. I can roll inverted again, shed the speed – and then snatch back hard in an attempt to break or bend whatever is the obstruction.
This solution has its attractions, but also two rather major downsides – one, that I have no way of knowing if it is an obstruction and not some kind of partial control linkage failure; and two, whether I will break the obstruction…. or the elevator connection.
In the latter case the only recourse will be to abandon the aircraft. Which is a not a wholly good idea since I am not wearing a parachute. The slowest I can fly the thing level is 140 mph. If you have not had occasion to
land a Pitts Special at 140 mph, I can attest that the experience (a) grabs your attention quite some, and (b) uses up a very, very great deal of runway plus all of the adrenalin you might happen to have about your person.
After all subsides it takes an engineer with a pair of long-nosed pliers less than a minute to prize out the – now bent – Dirham coin which has unerringly found its way into the elevator torque-tube. Later, in a hotel bar which for some reason is commencing to rotate slightly, I can distinctly feel the oncoming of certain paranoia about loose articles. Today was NOT funny. Nor were certain other days.
There was the day I had an almost exact repetition of the Dubai incident in a different Pitts at the Farnborough Air Show – miraculously, without the Flying Control Committee even noticing the frantic pushout.
And the day we found – of all things – a panel-beater’s dolly rattling around the rear fuselage of a Stampe and doing the woodwork not a lot of good. And the day well over a decade ago when a good old mate died in a ball of fire at a major air show. The AAIB report said the controls weren’t jammed – but I personally suspect that the chain of events was possibly triggered by a kneeboard coming adrift. It wouldn’t jam the controls – but it could have jammed his hand.
Obviously I don’t know. Neither does the AAIB. The trouble with loose-article accidents is that the evidence tends to be lost in the wreckage if the aircraft has attempted to reach Australia by the direct route through the middle of the planet. I often wonder how many “unexplained” crashes might actually have been down to loose articles. We cannot know.
So pardon my paranoia. And note I never carry a kneeboard. Good engineers share this paranoia. They have a sort of mental running tag of all the tools they take into a cockpit. You take in six – you must take out six. If you take out five – go back and search. No matter what. In most aerobatic aeroplanes it is a fact of life that most loose articles end up down the back of the fuselage. The reason is simple physics. Pull up into the vertical and any foreign object will mostly tumble down to the back.
Stall-turn, pull or push over – and you are now heading down, but out-accelerating gravity. So the object will still stay at the back. Mostly.
For this reason all serious aerobatic aircraft have a removable transparent panel under the tail so you can look in and admire the collection of booty so accumulated. Indeed, some follow the crop-dusters’ tradition of not even having a transparent panel, but simply leaving a small triangle open at the back so that loose articles mostly simply fall out. You will notice there are a number of “mostlys” about this.
Sadly, “mostly” is definitely not the same as “always”. Mostly pens, crucifixes, spanners, packets of condoms, will end up down the back – but not always. Similarly I am in two minds about open panels at the back. Yes, you have a reasonable chance of chucking out debris – but if you know you’ve dropped something and can’t find it, then the temptation is to assume it’s gone out the back…. while it may actually still be lurking with menaces in some other crevice or cranny.
Hence the paranoia – which extends to never even sitting in an aerobatic cockpit on the ground with coins, keys, or anything else in an un-zipped trouser pocket. You, if you are a non-aerobatic pilot, might smile indulgently at an ageing pelican’s eccentricity, since in the normal course of life you are getting in and out of cockpits all the time without any such elaborate precautions, and it ain’t done you no harm yet.
I, on the other hand, look with horror at many GA cockpits, which appear to be repositories for all manner of loose articles from pens to computers, maps to control locks, fuel-testers to casual baggage. All unsecured. Have you not heard of severe turbulence? Have you never looked to see where an innocent Bic might worm its way down past the rudder pedals and into Dragon territory? Me, I’ll live with my paranoia., noting that I’m still around. You have a look at the aeroplanes you normally fly…..
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