Real Pilot Story: Lost Elevator

and i remember i heard and i think i felt a little pop as soon as the pop happened the airplane attitude pitched down that's not what i wanted to do so you pull back on the yoke a little bit but the attitude of the airplane didn't change and at that point i knew i was going to be landing somewhere [Music] you see uh soles and fuel remain i don't know how much fuel i got but i thought i got increased one or two quarts [Music] you had two choices to give up or fight for your life told them i loved them and i put the nose of the plane down into the canyon [Music] rob olson dry an airplane mechanic splits his time between homer and bettles alaska which is off the road system meaning rob relies on his piloting skills and his piper pacer to get him from point a to point b like we in the lower 48 use a car for reliable transportation and for fun i got my pilot's license because there's so much of alaska that's untouchable unless you have an airplane uh for instance there's a place i love to go outside a home earth that's a three or four hour boat ride and i can be there in 25 minutes so i can get places quicker i can go to places that other people can't or don't have the time to go to and allows me a little more freedom for adventure i've probably 50 or 60 hours non-alaska time and yeah the rest is all alaska i came up here and just started flying a lot i think i put 125 hours on the first summer that i was here in a matter of four or five months but as rob knows not every flight goes according to plan so it was july 4th last year just over a year ago and the idea was i was gonna fly from metals to north of fairbanks down to homer visit my friends and my wife for a long weekend and to enjoy fourth of july i was also planning a hunt at the moment with a good friend of mine that lives here in sterling oddly enough so i started flying fairly early in the day from battles and was lightly loaded i didn't have much with me and i made it most of the way through my journey i'd say four-fifths or so of the journey and i landed at a private airstrip here in sterling to visit my friend that i was going hunting with and exchanged some stuff and things for the hunt that we were planning and when i took off i leveled out at about a thousand feet or so it was a beautiful bluebird day and fourth of july everybody's out and having barbecues and stuff so i made a turn and started heading south and was looking at all everybody on their porches and you know wagging my wings at the kids and people floating on the river and it was just it was your perfect alaskan day of line i remember i had pulled the throttle back and i was probably cruising at 80 or 85 miles an hour fairly slow i wasn't working it real hard my rpms were fairly low and i had it trimmed out for cruise flight and i remember i heard and i think i felt a little pop [Music] of course immediately the mechanic in me was trying to figure out what that was first thing i thought was maybe an inspection panel and so of course you look at your wings on both sides and don't see anything there but i noticed that as soon as the pop happened the airplane attitude pitched down just a little bit so of course as a pilot would that's not what i wanted to do so you pull back on the yoke a little bit but the attitude of the airplane didn't change and that's when i said okay well there's there's a problem here we got an issue and it seemed to be that i had uh aileron seemed to be that i had rudder because if you don't have rudder and a pacer you know it rather quickly but the elevator authority wasn't there now what was causing the elevator to have its lack of authority i didn't know and i remember i looked over my shoulder and you can see just barely the tip of the the elevator and i pulled back on the yoke and the elevator moved just like it should to me that's a good indication that all my cables are good mechanic in me again running through the checklist of what it could be but i was still pitched down a little bit i was still losing altitude and at that point i knew i was going to be landing somewhere when you're at a thousand feet you don't have a whole bunch of time to think you don't have a whole bunch of time to react and these pacers aren't known for their glide ratio so when it started descending it was a clock and it was running out [Music] and i looked in front of me into the left and i saw a big marshy field well if i land there i'm gonna flip upside down and then i'm gonna have to get a helicopter and they're gonna have to helicopter me out that doesn't sound like a good idea and i said well i've landed on gravel bars before and there's a river right in front of me that crosses me maybe i'll land there so i look down and i see a bunch of boats in the river and there's really no gravel bars to be had there's power lines there's trees there's houses and there's rafters so that's probably not a good idea either and i looked off 90 degrees to my right and i saw a residential road one lane each way and it was pretty curvy but i saw the trees in front of it saw some trees at the end of it and it kind of turned out of sight and i estimated it to be eight nine hundred feet if i used all of the curves and was able to put down where i wanted to and used it all and that's plenty for what i need for my skills and what this airplane's capable of and i'd been flying a lot that summer so i was very proficient with the airplane and again i was light so everything was in my favor so i started to make that right turn and i made a mayday call on 121.5 as well as a comment frequency it wasn't even something i thought about it just just instinctually happened and that's thanks to my private pilot training on emergency procedures i'm sure it wasn't textbook i said something along the lines of mayday made a made a white and blue pacer number 3604 alpha going down south of soldotna airport near the river and i had an inreach and i always keep my enrich on my person instead of connected to the airplane because if you're alive and need to push the button it's best if it's on you and i remember thinking back okay should i push the sos button on this and i said well there's people right here so i'm not going to push the sos button and i was wearing a flight helmet and i had shoulder harnesses on and i tightened up my shoulder harness and i made my turn and i knew that i needed to get down at the beginning of my runway the residential road because if i floated at all i was going to run out run out of runway but the problem was i had tall spruce trees in front of me and in the back country and anywhere else you've got a multitude of skills that you can use you've got a couple of different tricks up your sleeve if you will and one of my favorite is just forward slip and then even it out and flare land but i knew i had some sort of control issue so i didn't feel comfortable that i could forward slip and be able to straighten it out and make the landing so instead of forward slipping i said well i've got good brakes on this thing and if i have to nose it over or if i have to put in the ditch to not run into a car i can i'll pull the mixture to get the props stopped so i don't damage the engine which looking back wasn't the right move but hindsight's 20 20. because at the time i still assumed that i was doing an emergency landing and i felt that i had the skills to be able to do so however i'd never practiced that before which was my my downfall so looking back no it was completely the wrong move there was it didn't help me at all so i said well i'll pull the mixture and i'll get right over the trees and i'll nose down and then i'll aggressively flare back to bleed the speed and then i can touch down i have big tires even if it's a harder landing the big tires will absorb a lot of the impact and will be able to get stopped what i didn't realize is i had air flow on the bottom of the tail giving me down elevator but i didn't have air flow over the top of the elevator to give me up elevator so instead of descending at a constant rate that i couldn't change i exacerbated it by pushing down and made it a steeper angle of descent and then didn't have any way to be able to do that extreme flare that i wanted to reduce the descent and touchdown and if i had two miles of runway in front of me no problem i could have made that work but i had you know seven or eight hundred feet and uh i came in hard and i kept it square and i had it uh centered and i drove it all the way to the crash site as they say i remember the main tires hitting and feeling the absorption of the the big tires i had 29 inch bush tires that honestly is probably the best safety piece that i had on it surprisingly enough but i remember they absorbed impact and then almost instantly the belly belly of the airplane was on the ground and there was a loud sliding crunching cheese grater sound and the left wing tip touched a fairly small spruce tree on the side at slow maybe 15 miles an hour and it was just enough that it pitched the airplane around and this guy mid-20s it's fourth of july and he's got his american flag board shorts on and he's got a beer in his hand opens the door to his house to seeing me sliding sideways up to his front door and i remember he like stopped and he kind of looked around like is this is this happening how many beers did i have and he he came out and he's like you okay and i kind of yelled at him through the airplane i'm like yeah i'm fine i'm fine no problem i stepped away from the airplane and it's one of those that you look at yourself and you say okay i'm not bleeding everything seems to be working and you look at the airplane and your heart just sinks and i'm like okay this is gonna change everything [Music] what i later on learned after after i was at the crash site and looking at the airplane is that the fabric above the windshield right at the top of your head pretty much had come loose and had ballooned up and it came up maybe two inches and that was enough with the short bodied pacer that it disrupts the airflow over the top of the airplane and then disrupts the airflow over the top of the elevator giving you a lack of elevator authority in the upward position this is an issue on other fabric-covered airplanes as well you can have that in a cub or you know a citabria or whatever else as well but from what i've read and what i understand is the tail is further back from the fuselage quite a bit more than the pacer therefore you've got more time for that air to get laminar over the tail and you have better elevator authority but the pacer being stubby and short you get all that turbulent air over the top of the fuselage and there's really no hope for it it's a known issue but i don't know that it's known enough no i know that it's not known enough it needs to be understood a little bit better there is an ad that is out there that relates with it and the ad reads something like if you have cotton or linen fabrics you have to add a metal strip that's two inches wide probably and goes the length of the windshield and it helps hold that fabric down most pacers have that or if you have a skylight it's null and void anyways however when i bought my airplane and was going through a p school i was reading up on the log books in my airplane while i was reading up or learning up on fars and log books in school and i remember reading that a.d and it specifically says cotton or linen fabrics if you have any of the other stits or poly fiber or whatnot the 80 doesn't apply so i looked through my log books and showed them to some instructors and sure enough i've got legacy fabric it was recovered a multitude of times all in the 70s and 80s and whatnot so i don't have cotton or linen that 80 doesn't apply a couple of things that a person could do that i think would make the outcome better would be adding throttle to get the nose to pitch up another thing that you could likely do is add a little bit of flaps i did not have flaps in i was going faster than i wanted to and i should have had flaps but things were happening so fast i did as much as i could do and flaps weren't one of them and then you've got trim you've got elevator trim in the pacer and it's worth a shot messing with the elevator trim to see if you can get it to trim out as soon as i was able to slow down and understand what had happened i started thinking about what it was that allowed me to walk away from it and i differentiate that into two different categories i guess three but skills and the knowledge base that you have to be able to get you through whatever emergency it is then you've got the equipment and the the airplane itself as a safety mechanism and then you've got luck the skill set that i had built up was i probably have more landings on gravel strips and gravel bars on the river than i do on pavement and the the skill set of being able to look out your window and see a place that isn't an airstrip and say yeah i can land there that's probably the biggest thing in my head that allowed me to do it and then secondly it was proficiency of my airplane i knew how to make it do what i needed it to do and i made it happen and if you're not proficient with it doesn't matter if you're in a 300 000 carbon cub if you don't know how to fly it's not going to be any good the second thing that i truly believe helped me walk away from this accident in my specific case was my 29 inch alaska bush wheels i came in pretty hard and pretty steep and the pacer isn't known to have a whole bunch of suspension travel but i was lightly loaded didn't have a whole ton of fuel i probably had half tanks and i had seven pounds of pressure in my 29-inch bushwheels and that seven pounds of pressure in the bush wheels absorbed a lot of the impact and then the bungees did their thing and then the seat and the springs from 1953 did their thing and then the metal of the gear legs and the fuselage and stuff started giving way and then the frame of the pacer saved the rest and luckily by that point there wasn't a whole ton of energy left um so it was the it was the bush wheels and the pacer itself that allowed me to go fishing the next day uh the third thing here i got lucky enough that there was a road there was a seemingly golden paved lane for me to land on i felt like this story needs sharing because if it can save one person from having even a minor mishap it's worth it i firmly believe that knowledge needs to be shared so if i can get people to start looking at the top of their windshield at that fabric every time they fuel the airplane every time they pre-flight every time they land somewhere and look for changes look for the metal strip coming up if you've got it look for the fabric coming up if you don't buy the metal strip if you don't put in a skylight um if i can get more attention to be made to that area of the of the airplane we could potentially keep it from causing damage or death or injury to somebody and on top of that hopefully people if they hear or feel that pop like i did they can handle it in a way even better than i did so if i can increase the knowledge base of pilots and owners and mechanics everywhere it just makes the the whole thing safer and that's what we're all about so the airplane's getting rebuilt pretty substantially however it's still a factory pacer fuselage for the most part i added some strengthening into it because i use it pretty hard but it's not a stretched pacer like some experimentals and a couple certified off the wings are for the most part all factory they're squared off and it gives me a little more surface area but it's a fairly common thing still a pacer wing the engine is still an o320 it was before and we'll stay that now with no modifications really to it the modifications that i have put on it or that i am putting on it otherwise are pretty substantial it's getting a left side door that's a seaplane door so you can get in and out of it easier and you don't have to crawl over somebody the right side door is becoming a seaplane door again for same reasons it's getting float fittings so then i can utilize those seaplanes doors and i've got eddie trimmer's stc so it's a modified super cub gear which is stronger and gives me a little more width than a few other things putting super cub p18 tail feathers on it which i'm really excited about [Music] the pacer from the nose on if there is like an animated picture of an airplane that's wrecked and it's looking sad it's exactly what that looked like because the wings were like all drooped and the tires were up and it's just like it just has this instant mechanical frowny face like it's wrecked and it knows it's wrecked and you know it's wrecked you

Channel: Air Safety Institute

Views: 143,896

Keywords: institute, aopa, aviation, pilot, fly, flying, flight, plane, airplane, airport, air, safety, asi, air safety, training, aircraft, owners, pilots, alaska, rob, olsen, drye, soldotna, bush, bushwheels, piper, pacer, elevator, rebuild, mechanic, a and p, airframe, powerplant, kurt, sensenbrenner, real, story, ad, airworthiness, directive, canvas, failure, aerodynamic, airflow, fabric, cub, supercub, crash, accident, totaled, pixas, rory, wt, documentary, film, short, faa, ntsb, homer, bettles, bushpilot

Id: d28ObLQqrY8

Length: 18min 43sec (1123 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 25 2022