Real Pilot Story: Pressure Over The Atlantic

you're getting a brand new plane with that brand new airplane smell and everything's going great it's easy to be complacent thinking man this is pretty nice then all of a sudden some stuff starts going wrong and then you realize you know what i'm way out over the ocean in a single-engine airplane and no one can help me it's all me and uh now i can kind of see what lindbergh was up against 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 traffic control that 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] hi my name is carrie mccauley i'm an international fairy pilot i've been doing it for over 30 years i've got over 9 000 hours and made over 100 ocean crossings [Music] in the summer of 1994 my boss had a an f-33 bonanza that needed to be ferried from wichita kansas the beechcraft factory all the way to paris france ocean crossing you want as much reserve as possible obviously hour reserve is ideal because if you run into unexpected headwinds or fog over the azores i mean when you're shooting for the islands out in the middle of the atlantic if they're fogged in there's nowhere else to go you're not going to be able to make africa or europe so you might have to circle for hours waiting for the weather to clear or try to shoot an approach below minimums you know when you're going out to the over the ocean gas is literally your lifeboat so on this particular airplane seeing it was brand new my boss decided to not do what we typically do for the fairy tank normally what we do is we would drill a hole about a half inch in the bottom of the airplane take a j tube stick it out it was easy to fasten that very securely with washers and nuts to the bottom of the airplane that way it would keep the j-tube aligned with the with the airplane and get good solid rammer to pressurize the fairy tank so what he opted to do was there was a four inch across access panel in the bottom of the airplane and he stuck the j tube in kind of sideways and then screwed it up underneath there so it was kind of pointing in the way and use a healthy dose of duct tape to keep it in place and reminded me to check it a couple of times to make sure that was working which should have been a red flag so typically once you get the weather packet you go back to the uh the planning table and sit down for an hour and figure out your whole course you get latitude longitude points that you're supposed to hit on your crossing and you get out the classic e6b flight calculator and figure out your your wind drift your ground speed or water speed in this case and how long it's going to take you do your fuel burn calculations and see number one do you have enough fuel to make this trip with the adequate reserve the route i was planning was saint paul to bangor maine could make that in one jump with the fairy tank then go to saint john's the plan was from st john's then go down to santa maria the azores and then up to paris when i got to st john's and got a weather briefing i found that we had really strong tailwinds across the atlantic and figured you know if i can make this in one jump i'll save a whole day and i can use it extra day to hang out in paris and because why wouldn't you and if i wanted to take advantage of them i'd kind of have to leave right away because the next day they'd probably be gone i don't normally like to take off right away without a good night's sleep especially on a really long 12 to 14 hour flight but being able to cut a whole day off my trip was very appealing so basically i fueled up and took off so one of the most important things when you're ferry flying is fuel management obviously if you run out of gas you're in trouble so you're always doing fuel calculation fuel burn calculations how much gas have i used what do i have left where can i get with the gas i have remaining so on the bonanza the way it worked was the fairy tanks fed the wing tanks so you can't open the ferry tank too early or you'll overflow the wing tanks and dump fuel out and you kind of need that fuel so i would usually run the wing tanks down quite a ways for two reasons number one that way when i open the ferry tank i didn't have to be quite as diligent and number two the more that the more fuel you burn out of the wing tanks leaving fuel in the ferry tank the plane would get more and more f cg or center of gravity and a plane that has a more fcg goes faster and i like a plane that goes faster so on the trip from saint paul to bangor and then bangor to st john's i experimented with the ferry tank did some calculations how long it would take to to drain down the wing tanks enough to allow ferry fuel from the ferry tank into the wing tanks turned out to be about four hours four hours would drain down the wing tanks pretty well so on my crossing to uh paris i hit the four hour mark looked at the wing tank gauges they were down pretty low and i open the fairy tank now it's a pretty slow process so pretty much i just opened it up and went back to the book i was reading and checked again you know a few minutes later to see how things were going and they weren't i looked the wing the the gauge on the ferry tank and it hadn't moved it's a it's a sight gauge you can see the level of the fuel and it was at the top when i started because i had a full fairy tank and after about 10 or 15 minutes it should have gone down a bit and it hadn't and that really got my attention my first reaction was i must have done something wrong i reached down checked that i had the right valve on checked any other valves there really weren't any on this particular plane and i was momentarily confused like what did i do wrong that should have worked it's been working for the last two days and i waited and watched a couple more minutes and it still wasn't moving and that really got my attention because i was way past the point of no return i did not have enough gas to get back on just what was remaining in the wing tanks i couldn't turn around to go to canada especially because i was fighting i would be fighting a massive headwind there's no chance and i definitely didn't have enough gas to get even to the british isles but definitely not to paris i was uh understandably upset [Music] stop beating yourself up dumbass you'll have plenty of time for that in the raft if you can't figure this out one of the things that i really loved about fairy flying is that it gave me tons of opportunities to overcome challenges such as this this was the biggest one by far to that point in my flying career but i'd had lots of weather challenges fuel challenges maintenance challenges i didn't think all was lost right right away my first thing was okay i've got a problem how do i fix it okay carrie stay calm think what's the problem what's the solution so the first thing i did was turn the turn the valve back and forth a few times i wonder maybe there was something plugging the valve the hole that went from the ferry tank to the hose that went out to the wing tanks um there's really no way to reach down in there or see anything so i figured maybe i'd try to shake it loose so i secured everything in the cabin as best i could and put the plane through a series of roller coaster moves as it were a lot of zero-g stuff shook the plane up and down back and forth trying to dislodge what maybe something was covering that hole that didn't work unsuccessful so then it was time to start analyzing the whole fairy system now we had that hose that comes from the bottom of the plane goes up and mounts into the top of the tank and that pressurized the tank so the simplest way to see if that was working was just to take the top of the fairy tank and open that up and see what was happening i unscrewed that and i should have been greeted by a big blast of north atlantic air coming through there you know direct from the outside but there was no air so that's when i knew that the fairy tank pressurization system that line from the outside wasn't working i know i had to figure figure something out i needed to pressurize that tank now one of the things i've been told early on in my career was if that was to happen was what you could do was open the ferry tank dive down to sea level then close the ferry tank and basically what you're doing is you're putting that sea level air pressure in the tank then you climb back up to altitude and just like a bag of chips will expand if you climbed altitude the air pressure that's trapped in the ferry tank will force the fuel back out and you'll be able to use it and i initially thought about doing that but i realized that that wasn't really a practical solution because i had a good solid eight and a half hours to go and i had no idea how much one trip from altitude to sea level and then back up again how much fuel that was going to move and the other problem i had is even if i didn't have a fair tank problem i needed to stay up to take advantage of that really strong tailwind to make it across to france and if i kept going up and down all night long that wasn't going to work i sat there and i was looking at it and holding that tube in my hand and looking at the tank there's supposed to be air coming out of this tube going into that tank how can i pressurize this tank and i stared at it for a while and thought about it and i wanted well if i can't get outside air into this hose to pressurize the tank maybe i can do it myself maybe i can blow into the hose like i'm filling up an air mattress when i first thought of it i said that's not gonna work this that's crazy but you know i was kind of running out of ideas kind of getting desperate so i started blowing it really didn't take very long for the pressure to build up because the fairy tank was almost full so there really wasn't a big air space to fill up so it only took a couple of minutes before i really couldn't blow any harder as soon as i was done i stuck my hand over the end of the hose and waited to see what happened and it wasn't more than a couple minutes i realized that the ferry tank fuel level went down a little bit it was like yes it works sweet something you know at least i there was a there's a glimmer of hope you know it's possible to to move this fuel by just blowing into the tank i think i let some escape through my hand so i got out some the trusty duct tape that i always fly with gotta have duct tape and got to work and i started doing a couple more times figuring out you know best method how much i could do and cap it off with duct tape i started doing some calculations trying to guestimate how much fuel i was moving each time i pressurized the tank and i figured it was about five gallons or so so i wonder like so how's this gonna work how much how long am i gonna have to do this how much gas do i have left i got out my calculator and start banging away on it trying to figure stuff out okay let's see if i have eight hours and 35 minutes left to go and moving five gallons gives me 19 minutes of flight time 19 times 60 is no that's not right must be 19 divided by 60. okay 0.31 hours divided by 8.35 no wait and it took me forever to figure it out and normally i'm pretty good at field calculations but i realized i was really struggling because i just wasn't quite quite there hyperventilating blown into a hose the cabin's filled with gas fumes getting a little goofy so yeah doing complicated fuel calculations took a while but i guesstimated that five gallons would like keep me in the air for about 19 minutes i had eight and a half hours to go i was gonna have to blow into that tank almost 30 times to get to ireland at least so i realized i had my work cut out for me basically at that point i just sat down and uh started the long night of blowing into that hose now one of my big fears was falling asleep because if i fell asleep and the wing tanks ran dry the aircraft is going to start coming down now i'm sure that would wake me up but i realized if if i ran the wing tanks dry and the engine stopped could i get enough could i start blowing into that hose fast enough to push enough gas from the ferry tank to the wing tanks and then from the wing tanks to the engine to get going and get the engine going again before i hit the water so that was a major concern now my one possible saving grace was maybe the weather was going to be good in ireland you know maybe i didn't have to go all the way to france maybe i could knock 400 miles off my trip and hit the first point of land i could so as i got closer i contacted shannon oceanic control and asked him for a weather update for a possible landing in ireland box golf india fox mike current conditions sheldon airport sky obscured fog runway of his range 50 meters airport is closed at this time when i got closer to ireland and called to see if i could possibly land there i really had my hopes up i mean it was just torture blowing into that hose and trying to stay awake i didn't think i could do it all the way to france and when they gave me the news that the airports in ireland were closed it was devastating i didn't know if i was going to make it it was almost almost a death sentence i just i didn't think i could make it so i kind of ran through the pros and cons and what are my options you know i can declare an emergency and go for it or i can keep going and try to make it to france at that point in my fair flying career i was very current on instruments i had been flying every week for the last four years i'd been doing a lot i was about as current as you're going to get on instruments but i realized in the state i was in to try to shoot an approach to below minimums into a completely closed airport with zero visibility in an airplane definitely not designed for something like that or equipped for it would be suicide the whole southern tip of the uk was completely socked in all the airports were closed so i had no uh no relief i had to keep blowing into that hose there was a very real danger of me getting to a point where i couldn't move the fuel with lung power alone anymore because as the fuel in the fairy tank got lower and lower the air space that i had to fill up with my my lungs got larger and larger so it took longer and longer to build up pressure in that tank to move any gas so being over land or at least within reach of land made me feel a little bit better but only a little bit because land isn't smooth there's hills and mountains and all kinds of stuff to hit and at night in the fog probably a pretty pretty good chance i wouldn't survive a an impact with the ground now if i was over the water water is relatively level so if i kept it at minimal controllable air speed flaps all the way down i'd probably survive impact with water even if i couldn't see it so i don't know really wasn't a whole lot of comfort knowing i was over the mountains of ireland i think the last four hours was the worst because i built up hope for landing in ireland and that had been taken away from me and then i knew i just had to suck it up and keep going to france and as the time wore on it just got worse and worse and worse and you know the cumulative effect of blowing in that tank just became hell but i kind of became almost robotic in my emotions just i don't think for for a long time i didn't take that hose out of my mouth i just in through my nose out through my mouth so back when i was ferry flying i had a really good high altitude tolerance i mean i was a skydiving a lot at the time so i worked at high altitudes ferry flying a lot at that point i wasn't your normal ga pilot i mean i did that all the time but on this flight it kind of got the best of me so not long after i left the coast of ireland behind and started crossing the english channel got in contact with paris i considered telling him that i had a problem with my my fuel system and declare an emergency or at least priority landing but i decided against it because it was it was late at night there wasn't a lot of traffic i wasn't gonna they hadn't issued me a hold or anything eventually they had me start descending and as i got lower my head started clearing a little bit because i'm in lower altitude and better oxygen and i realized i probably could have done that a little while earlier once i kind of once i kind of had france made i should have descended right away but i wasn't thinking clear enough to realize that if i descended earlier i think clear so paris control got me set up for an approach it was a reasonably low approach but nothing crazy you know low visibility low clouds heavy rain at that point i didn't care i just wanted to get on the ground so 12 hours and 50 some minutes after leaving st john's i touched down the label j airport and my long night was over the next day i came and took a look at the airplane to de-tank it and looked under the plane to see what had gone wrong and what had happened was the j-tube that had been duct-taped and held in place by that access panel had shifted it hadn't shifted much probably moved just about 20 or 30 degrees off because it had a fair amount of duct tape i had a good half a roll duct tape holding it in place so which is why i agreed to it in the first place you know because duct tape works wonders but we probably should have used a whole roll this time when i got back to saint paul i talked to the mechanic and the owner and told him what happened and said probably in the future we should stick with the tried and true method of drilling a hole in the bottom of the airplane and if the if prospective owners don't like that i guess they can take the plane across the ocean themselves one of the major takeaways i took from this incident was always double check your systems my big mistake that night was not testing the ferry system before i hit the point of no return but i got a little bit complacent i've been ferry flying for four years getting a little cocky i was young i've been using the ferry system for two days and it worked perfectly and actually even before i left you know i i went down under the airplane and checked the security of the j-tube and it was it seemed fine so i really had no reason to suspect that it would malfunction but that's not really a good attitude to have you should always double check so when i chose to go direct to paris instead of going down to the azores i was making a calculated risk a big risk but a calculated one luckily the wins the law forecasts that they give us are very accurate you know we can really rely on those but it was it was a risk i mean i needed that tailwind to make it across i needed nothing to go wrong to make it across and you know maybe it wasn't just the safest option but when your fairy pilot you can't always take the safest option i mean there's no safest option when you're crossing the ocean in a single engine airplane you know there's just it's dangerous if one little piece in that engine decides to break you're in the water and there's no amount of preparation no no amount of flight planning no amount of extra gas in the tank that's going to keep you out of the water if that plane breaks one of the things that fairy flying taught me about flying in general is always have a back door and never give up over the united states it's real easy there's an airport every 10 miles they're everywhere there's tons and tons of options you know something goes wrong fly into bad weather turn around go do someplace else land figure it out but we're you know out over the middle of the north atlantic and something happens sometimes you don't have a back door i was presented with a problem that didn't really seem to have a solution and i easily could have rolled over and died you know if i'd have just said oh my god my ferry system isn't working i'm going in the water i easily could have done that but you always have to keep swinging even if there's no hope keep trying you might get lucky so a lot of people think that flying a brand new aircraft over the ocean is definitely the way to go it's brand new what can possibly go wrong i have the exact opposite opinion and experience i like a plane that's got at least two 300 hours on because that way all the stuff that was done wrong in the factory has already broken and been fixed and the stuff that's gonna wear out and break hasn't quite worn out and broke yet so playing with a couple hundred hours on it great brand new airplane always makes me nervous

Channel: Air Safety Institute

Views: 196,892

Rating: 4.9253674 out of 5

Keywords: institute, aopa, aviation, pilot, fly, flying, flight, plane, airplane, airport, air, safety, asi, air safety, training, aircraft, owners, pilots, real, story, documentary, Kerry, McCauley, ferry, auxiliary, fuel, tank, issue, ram, tube, bonanza, f33, a36, beechcraft, paris, france, ocean, crossing, north, atlantic, emergency, declare, study, educate, learn, cocky, ireland, shannon, atc, killian, sensenbrenner, fitzgerald, vince, collins, taylor, witt, taylor witt, reenactment, recreation, sony, fs7, discovery, channel, dangerous, flights, tv, reality

Id: rt2TGjuwv_s

Length: 23min 53sec (1433 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 04 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/scrubhiker]

AOPA put out this video recently. Transoceanic ferry pilot of a brand new Bonanza realizes that the ram air that is supposed to pressurize his auxiliary fuel tank isn't functioning for some reason, so after some deliberation he settles on the next best plan, which is blowing into the fuel tank for hours in the dark over the North Atlantic. "I composed myself and then settled in for a long night of blowing into that tube." He avoids falling asleep or passing out from hypoxia, but just barely. Fascinating from both a war-story and a risk-management perspective.

[u/Cropgun]

The things one will do to not die is always impressive

[u/PP4life]

I just listened to a podcast this morning of Kerry being interviewed and they talked about this exact incident.

[u/badlytested]

I'm sure there is a reason he couldn't have stuck the hose he was blowing into out the window. Maybe that aircraft didn't have an operable window he could reach?

Anyways, entertaining video and cool story!

[u/skytoucher85]

Wouldn’t the ferry tank keep on feeding due to siphoning once it filled the lines? I’m not familiar with how it feeds but the fuel level in the tanks is lower than the ferry tank. Gravity would keep it flowing once there’s no air in the lines and he wouldn’t have to have kept pressurizing it.

[u/TwoZigZags45]

So he takes a single engine, single pilot plane across the Atlantic on next to zero rest, which is a chore in a two engine dual pilot jet. He decides to rely on the tailwind to push him across. He has a reserve tank with a single point of failure, that he doesn’t pre-flight. And he plans no ETPs for his route of flight, leaving him no viable alternates. Next he’s going to tell me the plane isn’t IFR equipped. Unpopular opinion... this ISNT A GOOD STORY. This is how you get yourself killed. Swiss cheese model, kids. Stop the chain after the first, or in this case fifth bad decision. He’s way too lucky

[u/dyslexic_of_borg]

I read his book a few weeks ago and really enjoyed it. Quite a bunch of interesting stories in it.

[u/time_adc]

Couple of questions:

• His abort point / alternate was presumably Ireland. He got surprised by the extensive and remarkable bad weather. Why didn't he check the TAFs prior to departing?

• If he was suffering so badly, why did he go all the way to La Bourget? His route of flight passed near numerous airports with instrument approaches in northern France.

[u/illimitable1]

Stupid question, but don't most tanks work via gravity/siphon? What's the bit about pressurizing?