AOPA Pilot Magazine - March 2011 - 80

The 182 slammed into a fence and flipped over—into a lot packed with portable toilets.
Wrestling a Warrior Any pilot with more than 500 hours has logged one of those. Mine happened in the late 1990s, after I promised my friend Peter that I’d take him and his new girlfriend up for a flightseeing tour down and up the very same Hudson River. They were both really eager to do it, and on the appointed day—actually the same date that Sullenberger ditched a decade later—they picked me up in her car and drove us to Lincoln Park, New Jersey. Conditions weren’t right, though. It was crystal clear, but with a strong, gusty wind. No one at Lincoln Park was flying, and every molecule in my body told me to cancel. So, naturally, we crawled inside an almost-new Piper Warrior and took off, flying low and fighting clear-air turbulence all the way to the George Washington Bridge, circling the Statue of Liberty, and back to the bridge and then to Lincoln Park. No doubt as a result of my exemplary piloting skill, neither of them noticed how much of a struggle the Warrior was throwing at me. On final I lined up on the runway, which is narrow and has a displaced threshold because of the 75-foot-tall trees lining the south end. Creeping in, fighting the wind, with full flaps, we were halfway clear of the trees and at the proper altitude. Then the wind…just died. The Piper dropped, and
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I could hear the gear ripping branches off the treetops. Peter and his woman heard it, too. We all heard the branches scraping the runway when the gear hit the ground and while I taxied back to the FBO. We pulled up to the tie-down spot, and while I tied the airplane down, I checked for damage and pulled branches from the main gear. They wanted to take photos. In the photos, they look smiling and happy, and I look nervous and sweaty, like I’d just hit some trees or something. Later, she told Peter, “Promise me you’ll never fly with him again.” He mentioned that to me that a few years afterward, following their breakup. I also told a flight instructor about it. “What the hell were you doing, flying with full flaps in turbulence like that?” he said, loudly. Finding humor Although it certainly stuck in my brain, admittedly the incident wasn’t all that exciting, not when compared to what happened to another pilot recently. He took off from Thun Field, which lies southeast of Tacoma, Washington, in a Cessna 182. At an altitude of about 150 feet the Cessna’s engine died, and the pilot did his level best to swing back around and land on the runway. That low, he couldn’t make it. The 182 slammed

into a fence and flipped over—into a lot packed with portable toilets. They cushioned the impact, and the pilot was able to crawl out and walk away. And lucky for him—if anything about crashing your airplane can be considered lucky—all the toilets were empty. Yet that story pales in comparison to the case of die-hard Green Bay Packers fan, freelance photographer, and pilot Frank Emmert. It’s a tradition for Packer fans to wear wedge-shaped cheese hats to Packers games; only the hats are made from foam, not cheese. Noncheesehead-hat-wearing fans complain that they block their view of the game, and have called for banning hats. Not Emmert, even if they blocked his view. In 1995, following a game with the Cleveland Browns, Emmert was flying right seat in a single-engine Cessna with fellow fan Baron Bryan at the controls. The Cessna began picking up ice and sinking. Bryan tried to make it to the nearest airport, Stevens Point Municipal, but the airplane couldn’t. Emmert, who had his cheesehead hat on his lap—he’d been napping and used it as a pillow—put it on just before the airplane went in. So here’s an airplane about to crash, and one of the pilots is wearing a cheesehead hat. While the cheeseheadhatless Bryan suffered facial lacerations, Emmert’s cheesehead hat hit the panel and cushioned his head. He hurt his ankle and couldn’t exactly walk away, but the cheesehead hat did prevent him from suffering major injuries. After that, Emmert wouldn’t part with it. “I cleaned it up, so it’s not that bad,” he later explained. “I’ll even put it in my checklist. ‘Cheese—check.’” He ended up doing a nationally broadcast spot for the NFL, and appeared on The Tonight Show riding a motorized cheesehead cart. Ironically, three months before the crash, he had been hired to take publicity shots for Foamation, a company that makes cheesehead hats. Not so funny Sometimes the only road ahead happens to be a body of water. A former colleague, Amy Laboda, says she saw a Cessna 206 at Air & Sea Recovery, based on Florida’s Gulf Coast, that the pilot had ditched near the shore. It skidded to a halt on a sandbar about two feet below the surface, as the pilot intended. Otherwise, it was a perfect landing; he didn’t even get wet. But the airplane sat there six weeks before the recovery guys could take it out by barge, and by that time it was beyond help.

80 • MARCH 2011

AOPA Pilot Magazine - March 2011

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