By Jack Neima, EAA Canadian Council, EAA 413636
It would be hard to imagine anyone who has been involved in aviation for any length of time has not accumulated a few valuable lessons along the way. Hopefully, by learning from the experiences of others, we can avoid some of the more painful and expensive lessons, but it seems that some need to be personally experienced to lock in.
In my experience, which is somehow inexplicably now over 50 years, I’ve had my share of the usual close calls — weather and fuel or equipment issues, etc. Our Bits and Pieces editor, Ian Brown, recently challenged us to share some of these experiences with our readers, and I initially thought my personal experiences wouldn’t add a lot or provide any unique or interesting insights. The more I thought about it, however, the more I realized there are at least a couple that have had a great impact on my approach to “committing aviation” and may help to reinforce some of your own well-earned lessons.
Bless Me, Father, for I Have Sinned
I obtained my private pilot license in 1973 when I was 17, and like most teenagers, I remember feeling confident in my recently acquired skills. My family had a lakeside cottage near Halifax, and my dad, a float rated private pilot, had several friends who would drop by to visit from time to time.
The ink on my license was still damp when a friend showed up one day with his Super Cub, and after some coffee and the usual hangar flying, he offered to take me up so I could show him what a hot pilot I had become. As we taxied out, him in the front and me in the back, he said, “I’ll do the takeoff — you can follow through lightly on the controls,” and away we went.
We no sooner broke water when he started into a tight, left-hand climbing turn that circled back over the cottage, and I clearly remember seeing the whites of Dad’s eyes as we passed overhead. The climbing turn continued through at least 360 degrees, and by the time we reached about 500 feet, he suggested I might want to level out.
You can guess what came next. I said, “What do you mean? You’re flying.” He snapped around to see my hands folded on my lap, and he grabbed the stick and shouted that he had control. We landed and taxied back to the dock, where my livid father was demanding to know what that stunt was all about. I think we all learned a valuable lesson that day.
A few years later, while a student flying Beech Musketeers at CFB Portage la Prairie, one of my instructor’s first lessons was the mandatory verbal challenge and response sequence that goes: “You have control,” followed by “I have control.” While essential in a tandem-seated aircraft, you might think it is less so in a side-by-side configuration, but I never had any problem adopting this firm practice and I’ve been a strict adherent ever since. We were extremely fortunate that day back in 1973 that the aircraft was perfectly trimmed, because otherwise the lesson could have been much more painfully learned.
And Then One Day
These days, I fly a 1939 Piper J-3 Cub on floats. It is equipped with the standard fuel tank in the nose and has an auxiliary 10-gallon tank in the right wing. When the wire float gauge in the nose tank sinks to the bottom, you turn a valve and fuel is gravity-fed from the wing tank to replenish the nose tank. It has been a reliable system that I’ve been using for the 20 years I’ve been flying the Cub. Pretty simple and usually foolproof as long as you remember to switch the valve to “off” so you don’t overflow the nose tank. Not a big problem though because if you do forget, you are reminded by a spray of fuel that covers the windshield. The extra tank stretches what would otherwise be a fairly short range. I used it frequently when I was on wheels in Manitoba, and it sure came in handy during my flight home to Nova Scotia after my retirement in 2011.
In recent years, my flights are usually short local hops, and I often leave the wing tank dry, as I have more fuel than I usually need in the nose. This is especially so lately since I now fly on floats from my shorefront hangar.
A couple of years ago, I was on a local flight on wheels from the Stanley Airport with my dad in the back seat. It was a great summer day, and when we were about 20 miles west of Stanley, I decided to turn on the wing tank as the wire on the nose tank was bottoming out. Nothing. I had a full wing tank, but for some reason it would not flow to the main tank. It had never happened to me before, and I had no idea if there was enough fuel in the main tank to get us back to Stanley.
What to do? It seemed like a precautionary landing would be a good idea and, as the Cub is pretty versatile, popping into a freshly mowed field was an easy solution. On the ground, I did a 180 and taxied back to the edge of the bumpy little field. I guess the jiggling broke what must have been an air lock in the line, because by the time we turned again the wire was rising — evidence that fuel was again flowing. In due course, we took off and had an uneventful flight back to Stanley. I wasn’t sure what, if any, lesson could be learned from that other than to be suspicious of the system.
Later that summer, I was sharing a beverage at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh with a friend who had recently retired as a 777 captain at Air Canada and who had extensive experience in the bush. I told him the story of my fuel “mishap” and his response landed with a thud. He said one of the most important lessons he learned over his years, and which is religiously practiced, is: Use your most inaccessible fuel first. Moving fuel between outboard and inboard tanks, from wing tanks to belly tanks, etc. is common practice in commercial operations, but it’s not something I’ve given much thought to over the years. But I do now, and I’ll never let that happen to me again. Lesson learned!