AOPA Pilot Magazine - May 2021 - 22

FLYING LIFE

Not just 'those pilots'

BY NATALIE BINGHAM HOOVER

An emergency hits close to home

NATALIE BINGHAM
HOOVER is a
CFI, CFII, and
multiengine
instructor with
more than 3,000
hours of dual given.

22 | AOPA PILOT May 2021

WHEN YOU HEAR SCARY STORIES about aviation emergencies, how do you continue to climb into your
airplane day after day knowing there's a real possibility that something like an engine failure or electrical
fire could happen to you? My coping mechanism has
often been to tell myself I'm safe because I would never
make the same mistakes as those pilots. This method
works just fine until the bad thing happens to a friend,
a person I respect as a consummate professional aviator. In short, it could have happened to anyone. It could
have happened to...me.
But for you readers who don't know Katie George
like I do, you might be able to go on pretending you
are immune. So you know that she's a real person, and
not some faceless pilot, let me describe her. She has
wavy blond hair and blue eyes. She reads psychological thrillers on the airport couch on rainy days. She
loves mint chocolate chip ice cream and grew up with
a pet guinea pig named Fluffy. She has an easy laugh
that you can hear all the way down the hall, and has
never met a stranger. If you knew her, you'd want to
be her friend.
Let me tell you what happened to your new friend,
Katie: As a flight instructor, she observed her student
do a preflight on a Cessna 152, before they took off for a
local lesson to the practice area. On run-up, all indications were normal, but because it was cold and humid,
she and her student discussed the possibility of carburetor ice and did a takeoff emergency briefing. On the
climbout, they noticed a slight drop in rpm.
" You still have the throttle all the way in, right? "
Katie confirmed with her student.
Within seconds, the rpm dropped further, and
Katie took control of the airplane. At 500 feet agl and
with zero time for hesitation or troubleshooting, Katie
made a 180-degree turn and informed tower she was
landing. By the time she was facing the runway again,
the propeller had completely stopped. She heard the
stall horn intermittently, but felt secure enough in
their gliding capability that she continued to stretch
it, landing without injury or damage about 1,000 feet
down the runway. Maintenance towed the airplane
in, while Katie said mankind's most authentic prayer
(God, thank you for letting me live) and decided to take
the rest of the day off.
The next morning, without yet knowing why that
engine had failed, Katie forced herself to get back in

the air with another student in a different airplane. I
saw her in the runup pad and marveled at her courage,
which is most definitely, as Nelson Mandela said, not
the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.
What caused the engine to fail? After the incident,
the mechanic pulled multiple sump cups of water out
of the strainer drain. But they sumped the fuel before
the flight! The rational part of me that demands fairness and explanations cannot let that detail go. My
friend was standing right there, making sure a thorough preflight was conducted. She did everything the
way she was supposed to. Katie will never know if her
student's sump cup had a water bubble in it that they
missed, or if the sump cup was completely full of water
and therefore no separation of water and fuel would
have been visible, or if the water that made it into the
engine never actually made it into the sump cup, but
had settled in another spot in the wing.
Here are the things I'm taking away from our
friend's story. When I sump the fuel now, I get out
from under the shade of the wing and hold that thing
up in the light against the white paint of the fuselage. Sometimes it doesn't look all that blue, so you
can also do a smell test to confirm that a strong fuel
smell is present. You can also sump small amounts
from several sumps into one cup, so that if one sump
is all water, hopefully another spot will have all fuel
and you will get a clearly visible separation of good
stuff from bad stuff. However, as numerous studies
have shown, you can take all these precautions and
still end up with enough water in the tank to cause
engine trouble. In no activity can risk ever be minimized to nil.
Even though it was zero fun to lose an engine on
climbout, the story ends well, in part, because a competent pilot was at the controls. Katie did a verbal
pre-takeoff brief so when that engine quit producing
power, she knew exactly what to do without hesitation. She relied on her training and her experience in
the airplane and managed to get herself and her student safely on the ground. Many, many pilots have not
been so fortunate. And perhaps the biggest takeaway
of all is that Katie got back in the air the very next
day. Flying frequently demands much of us: skill and
proficiency and sometimes extraordinary amounts of
courage.
AOPA
myaviation101.com

http://www.myaviation101.com

AOPA Pilot Magazine - May 2021

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