Luck Vs. Experience

Howdy. I aborted a takeoff for the first time yesterday. I know. I’m still excited. The magneto check was good on run-up, but the Piper Arrow’s engine just didn’t sound right. Also, we weren’t getting the acceleration that I had expected on a cold day with two people and half tanks. The mechanic met us on the ramp. He had heard the burping engine and seen our aborted takeoff. Having just finished a 100 hour inspection on that plane, he prodded around the engine compartment wondering what he might have missed. He told me later that they had to replace multiple spark plugs. I still haven’t figured out how they got fouled between the inspection and our flight. It was a cold, dense, day; hardly a day where you would expect to foul plugs with the mixture too rich on the ground.


“Someone told me that you start flying with a bag full of luck and an empty bag for experience. The trick is to fill up the bag of experience before you run out of luck,” my student relayed as we walked away from the sick Arrow. He was glad to have experienced an actual aborted takeoff, he said. I was too.

I got some interesting news after working my penultimate desk shift today. It pertained to a newly purchased airplane that I ferried from Mobile, Alabama to Kansas City a couple days before Thanksgiving.

Prior to taking off on the ferry trip, the weather briefer informed me that large embedded thunderstorms made a direct route wildly inadvisable. However, if we proceeded north to St. Louis and then west to Kansas City, we could avoid the storms. The ceilings were in the 2000-3000 foot range over most of the route and the tops were super high (as judged by a bonanza pilot). The freezing level was up around 8000 though, so I figured the trip to be completely doable.

The vintage Bonanza had just come out of annual inspection and instrument certification. Before our departure, the mechanic who signed off on the annual inspection assured the new owner and me that he had no connection to the airplane’s previous owner and that everything looked very solid.

As we took off, I was reminded of why I (and so many others) put Bonanzas in a special category. This bird handled and performed like a dream as we picked our way through a line of precipitation north of Mobile. Once we were clear of the precip, we popped in and out of clouds until making a visual approach and landing near Columbus, Mississippi. At least this guy didn’t want to pee in a bottle.

Checking the weather in Columbus, our “north to St. Louis, then west to KC” plan was still the only option due to storms in Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and even southern Kansas. We might have been able to cut northwest through Missouri, but Saint Louis had an enticing bonus in that my sister lives there. If the storms in southern Kansas moved into KC, we could just camp out with her and still have a decent Thanksgiving dinner. Ceilings at Spirit of St. Louis airport were only 300 feet, but St. Louis Downtown was calling 1200 feet, so we blasted off again. As we tracked direct to St. Louis, watching the lightning off to our west, I noticed that I was having to reset the heading indicator pretty darn often. The vacuum gauge showed a slightly anemic 4.3 inches of Mercury (in. HG). Normally you want it in the 4.8-5.2 range. Everything was still working though.

As we neared St. Louis, we were in the clouds at 6000 feet. I checked the ATIS weather broadcasts for the area and SUS was still calling 300 feet. I leafed through the Missouri approach plates in search of an approach for the downtown airport. It was conspicuously missing. It occurred to me (way too late) that St. Louis is on the state line. The downtown airport fell on the wrong side and I didn’t have the Illinois approach charts. Lesson learned. I figured at that point that we would shoot the ILS at SUS and if we missed, we would ask for ATC to help us get into downtown.

I hand flew a beautiful ILS to minimums at SUS, if I may say so myself. Even the landing was a humdinger. I think my non-instrument-rated passenger thought I was some sort of voodoo doctor for finding the runway through those dark clouds. I really thought he was going to hug me. I was glad he didn’t.

After a lovely microwave dinner from the vending machine and a check of the radar which looked good, we hoisted ourselves back into the old V-Tail and headed west. The vacuum gauge still showed about 4.3 and the heading indicator still precessed at a rate which bore extra attention. The air across Missouri was smooth, though, and I hand flew the whole way, relishing the chance to practice.

Then, as soon as we received our initial descent from Kansas City approach control, the weather took a turn for the worse. It started raining and we experienced what I would call very heavy turbulence. It was all I could do to hold heading and altitude. The time between our handoff to airport advisory frequency and our reaching the final approach fix felt like an eternity. I wonder how being in the clouds in heavy turbulence compares to being on a boat at night in rough seas. About an hour after we landed, Kansas City experienced a strange phenomenon known as “Thunder Snow.”

So what did I find out about this airplane today? Well, for starters, the alternator belt on the airplane was not the right one. During the course of the flight it had flipped so that the flat side (instead of the curved side) was in the pulleys’ grooves. It bore signs of imminent failure. Also, as you have probably guessed, the vacuum system was completely screwed up; hoses attached incorrectly and others left off altogether. The mechanic explained to me that the regulator setting that he found on this plane would give a normal system something like 9 in. HG. It was working that hard to give me less than half of that. Individually, an electrical system or a vacuum system failure in the clouds presents a fairly dire emergency. The combination of the two would most likely be insurmountable.

The plane’s new owner has apparently sent letters to the previous owner, the incompetent, if allegedly unaffiliated mechanic, and the FAA. I’m sure a lawsuit will ensue. Yeehaw.

Thinking about the whole situation makes me extremely appreciative of the fact that I’ll soon be starting a position where I’ll be flying one airplane, the maintenance history of which I will be quite familiar. Flying a bunch of random airplanes all the time is exciting, but it requires more faith than I have anymore… I just made a big withdrawal from my bag o' luck.