I love flying and I love ferry flying but I love ferry flying in the winter..um..less. This week it was time to move the Twin Otter we leased for the season back down to Texas. The owner asked me if I’d do him a favor and swap Otters for him by flying the Otter in Wisconsin to Skydive Orange in Virginia then flying the Otter that was there to Houston. My little adventure started out with a short eighteen mile flight from Skydive Twin Cities to the airport close to my home so I could get an early start the next morning. Before taking off I checked the weather and was told that apart from a few snow showers the conditions were VFR with four thousand foot ceilings and ten mile visibility. After takeoff I began to doubt the accuracy of the forecast I’d received because I appeared to be flying inside a well shaken snow globe and couldn’t see more than one mile. Now a smart lesser pilot would have promptly turned around and landed but I’m sort of a glass is half full kind of guy and being very familiar with the area and having a good GPS and instrument skills to fall back on I pressed on. It got kind of sporty for a few minutes but I managed to get the big lumbering beast to the correct airport.
Sunrise found me staring at the beautiful sight of Dehavilland Super Twin Otter sparkling on the ramp. Unfourtunatley it was sparkling because it was covered in lift killing frost. I knew I should’ve found a broom and a ladder and polished the frost on the wings smooth but I figured that working that high off the ground in slippery conditions was more dangerous than flying with frost on the wings, and anyway with just me in in the plane it should get off the ground just fine, frost or no frost, so I scraped the windscreen clean with my Master card and took off. Once I got in the air I immediatley began to regret my choice of foot wear. I’d know it would be cold, no heat in the Otter, and had bundled up in long underwear, ski gloves, hat and jacket but had elected to just wear tennis shoes with an extra pair of socks. I spent the rest of the four hour flight with all the extra clothes I’d brought along wraped around my feet to try and keep them from freezing solid.
When I got to Virginia the pilot of the next Otter I was to fly wasn’t there to brief me on that plane but the squawk list told me why this aircraft needed to go to back to Texas for some major maintenance. Left generator out, left torque gauge inop, left temp gauge 100 degrees off, one landing light out, all three tires bald with the cords showing and the list went on and on. Great. The sun was setting as I taxied for takeoff and I almost elected to abort and do the flight the next day because the first time you fly a strange plane shouldn’t be a night cross country, but I think I’ve already pointed out that I’m not all that smart. A half an hour into the flight the list of problems with the Otter got a little longer. With the sun finally disappearing on the horizon I turned on the cockpit lights only to find that about half of them didn’t work, including the altimeter light and most importantly the artificial horizon. I had a head lamp with me but the thought of flying for seven hours by flashlight didn’t really sound like that much fun. Now I don’t want you to think I was too scared to fly half way across the country in a plane with only one working generator and no instrument lights, no I landed two hours later and called it night because my low beer light was going off, not because I was scared. Gotta have your priorities straight.
