Month: January 2014

The longer I worked on that hose the worse I felt. It took forever to do the math required to estimate my arrival time at the next position reporting location. And when I made the position report to Gander ocean control I noticed I was slurring my words. When I’d finally transferred enough fuel to make it to Shannon I was just about done in.

From the beginning of my ordeal I had been praying that the weather in Ireland had improved from when I had taken off. The forecast had called for dense fog until late morning the next day. I could have called Shannon control earlier that night but I’d been afraid that if I heard bad news I might just give up. I just didn’t know if I had the stamina to keep up what I was doing all the way to Paris. So it was with great trepidation that I radioed Shannon for a weather update.

“Shannon control, Shannon control, foxtrot, Golf, India, Foxtrot, Mike.”

“Go ahead Fox Mike, read you five by five.”

“Yes sir could you give me the current conditions at Shannon please?”

“Roger, stand by.”

The short wait was unbearable.

“Please, please, please be good!” I said, hoping for the best.

“Current conditions at Shannon, sky obscured, fog, runway visual range fifty meters. The airport is closed at this time.”

My head sank into my chest as I listened to the controller confirm my worst fears. The large area of fog that was forecast was not only still covering the coast of Ireland but was worse than they predicted.

“Roger Shannon, are conditions any better further east? Like in the London area?”

“Negative Fox Mike, the conditions don’t improve until you cross the channel. Le’ Bourget is currently five hundred overcast with one mile visibility and light rain showers.”

“God,” I thought, “I don’t know if I can do this for another four hours.” But my options were few. I could declare an emergency and ATC would be forced to allow me to attempt a landing at Shannon. My thumb hovered over the push to talk button. It would be so easy, just push down on the button and declare an emergency.

“Do it!” the little devil on my shoulder said, “Just declare an emergency and this will all be over in just a few minutes. You’ve got enough fuel so you wouldn’t even have to blow into the damn hose ever again!” God it was tempting. I was so tired and with the airport and a possible end to my flight only forty five minutes away I was sorely tempted to give it a try. But attempting a landing in zero visibility conditions was something that the big airlines don’t even do. For me to try it in my current state would be suicide. Resigned to my fate I thanked Shannon for the update and continued on into the night.

The last three hours to Paris were the worst. With the ferry tanks getting close to empty the transfer rate was down to a point that barely kept up with the demands of the engine and I was forced to blow into the hose almost continuously. I was getting so tired that I knew why they used sleep deprivation as a form of torture. I was also flying through the multiple airspaces that surround London and Paris. It never failed that when I was in the middle of blowing into the hose, ATC (air traffic control) would call and I would have to stop what I was doing, tape up the hose and answer them. At least it was late at night and there wasn’t that much traffic in the sky to deal with.

As I crossed the English Channel I encountered intermittent heavy rain showers but my fatigued numbed brain hardly noticed. The end was in sight but I was starting to get concerned about my ability to fly an instrument approach because even simple tasks like reading the map were starting to become difficult.

The trip was almost over but the most challenging part was still ahead of me, a night approach in the rain with low clouds over the airport. I just hoped I would remember to put the landing gear down. When I finally had the wing tanks full enough to make it to Paris with a little reserve I capped the pressure line for what I hoped was the last time and got ready for the approach.

Paris ATC cleared me to descend out of fifteen thousand feet and as I passed ten thousand the thicker air started to clear my head like I was coming out of a dream. I realized that I should have dropped down and started flying at a lower altitude as soon as I didn’t need the strong tailwinds to make Paris anymore. The lower altitude would have made pressurizing the tank a lot easier and would’ve helped me think more clearly.

Starting the approach to Le Bourget I felt better and better as the increased oxygen and adrenalin of the approach cleared my head. The ceilings were reported to be at four hundred feet and the runway lights appeared out of the gloom right on schedule.

Twelve hours fifty minutes and over two thousand five hundred miles after leaving Newfoundland the wheels of the Bonanza thumped down at Le Bourget airport. Following ground control’s directions I taxied to the ramp, stopped the plane and pulled the mixture knob to shut the engine down. As the gyros spun down and silence descended on the cockpit I looked out at the deserted rain soaked ramp and realized I was utterly spent. My whole body ached, my chest hurt, my throat was sore and dry and I still had a hell of a headache. The events of the long night seemed like a hazy dream that I was having trouble remembering.

I climbed out of the Bonanza like an old man, swung my backpack over my shoulder, grabbed my flight bag and headed to the only lit doorway in the terminal. As I walked across the deserted ramp I wondered where everybody was. After all I had been through that night I half expected there to be a cheering crowd eager to see the pilot who just pulled off one of the greatest feats in aviation history. Lindberg got a huge crowd when he landed and all he had to do was sit there all night, I had to work. Instead all I found was a sleepy customs agent who stamped my passport and went back to smoking his cigarette and watching his portable TV without saying a word. He didn’t seem impressed at all.

A friend over at BeeachTalk sent me this link to an article about Dangerous Flights he found in AvWeb.  It ends up saying what we in the skydiving business have been saying for years.  There is no such thing as bad publicity.  Whenever there is a skydiving accident the phone rings off the wall with people who want to jump.

Surfing the untracked wilderness of modern cable television, my scroll-around sometimes lands on something interesting. Lately, it’s been a show called Dangerous Flights, another of the Discovery Channel’s reality series. These sorts of programs are called reality TV and if reality were scripted, they’d be accurately named. Otherwise, like a patient drifting in and out of a coma, the reality appears more often than I’d expect and often sharply focused.

Here’s the set-up. The series tells the story…oh, shoot, I’ll take this directly from the show’s Web site: “Dangerous Flights is the real deal: a high-testosterone action adventure series on the edge of aviation’s final frontier, starring the daring mavericks who risk their lives in the high-danger, no-holds-barred, high-stress business of aircraft delivery.” I gotta hand it to the copy writer on that one, that’s straight from the 1940s radio drama of insurance investigator Johnny Dollar, “the man with the action-packed expense account.” And the final frontier is flying a 210 from Maine to France? Funny, I’d of thought those guys in Mojave blasting people into space were a little more final frontiery. But I digress.

The basic narrative involves a start-up organization of ferry pilots delivering GA aircraft around the world for various clients. As is the fashion in TV, each episode—and we’re now just starting season two—usually details two deliveries on a parallel plot track. What would otherwise be a dull plot line is sexed up with some lead-in problem—a Cessna 210 with major fuel leaks, a Cirrus SR22 co-crewed by a graybeard pilot who’s never seen a G1000, a geriatric Cheyenne with dysfunctional avionics, a jet with avionics problems.

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Sitting there holding the two ends of the hose I looked at the tank and wondered just how much pressure would be required to move the fuel. “The air space in the tank was not very big due to all the fuel still in the there.” I thought to myself, “If I can blow up an air mattress with lung power why not the ferry tank?”

Not really expecting success, but willing to grasp at any straw, I put the end of the black rubber hose in my mouth and tried a few experimental puffs. A number of deep breaths later the back pressure in the hose began to increase, a positive sign that encouraged me to blow with keep blowing.

I worked as long as I could, then slapped my hand over the end of the hose to seal it and waited to see if my labors would produce any results. Less than a minute later the bubble on the sight gage slowly moved past the mark I had made on the side of the tank.

“YES! It works, All Right!” I yelled, pumping my fist in excitement. My mad scientist experiment was success! I was able to pressurize the sixty gallon steel tank by lung power alone.

I was feeling pretty full of myself for being so damn smart as I watched the fuel level drop. After the fuel level dropped about an inch and a half it stopped going down. A few calculations and some sloppy guess work later I estimated I’d spent ten minutes to move less than five gallons of gas to the wing tanks.

Grabbing the manual for the Bonanza I went to the performance charts and saw that at my current power settings, five gallons would keep me in the air for nineteen minutes.

“Ok, let’s see, if I have eight hours and thirty five minutes left to go,” I said looking at the GPS and grabbing my calculator, “and moving five gallons gives me nineteen minutes of flight time….” My fingers banged away on the numbers as I tried to figure out how many times I would have to blow into the ferry tank to make it to Paris. “Nineteen times sixty is…no that’s not right. Must be nineteen divided by sixty…ok point three one hours. Divided by eight point three five…No, wait.” I was confused, “Why was I having such a hard time doing a simple flight time vs. fuel burn calculation? I do these all the time.” After a few failed attempts I finally concluded that I would need to pressurize the tank at least twenty seven times to reach Paris. It sounded like a lot but it was doable.

I was also hoping that the weather in Shannon Ireland would be better than forecast. They were calling for dense fog at the airport but if I could somehow land there all my troubles would be over. But even Ireland was still hours away. Resigned to the fact that it was going to be a long night either way, I took my hand off the end of the hose and got to work.

The rest of the night became a marathon session of hyperventilation and 100 octane gasoline fumes. As the fuel level dropped it became harder and harder to pressurize the growing air space in the ferry tanks and the longer I worked the worse I felt. Normally I could fly at fifteen thousand feet for hours without becoming hypoxic due to lack of oxygen. I found that if I sat still and didn’t exert myself I could fly as high as eighteen thousand feet with little effect. What I was doing in the cockpit that night was the exact opposite of taking it easy. Forcing my breath into the hose again and again started to make my head swim and I found that I was starting to have trouble focusing on the engine instruments and GPS that I needed to monitor. I sat there holding the hose in my mouth with my eyes closed, breathing in through my nose and exhaling into the hose, over and over. The dry high altitude air started drying out my nostrils and made my throat burn.

After the second hour of exhausting work and I found myself nodding off when I capped the hose with some duct tape, waiting for the fuel to transfer. I was used to fighting sleep on ferry trips, especially the eastbound ones. Leaving the hotel well before sunrise every morning and flying all day was bad enough, but flying east you always lost a few hours due to the time change. No matter how early you started each morning you always ended up getting to the hotel late each night. This combination of factors led you to become sleep deprived on long trips and made staying awake a daily battle but that night in the Bonanza was the worst.

As the hours wore on staying awake became like a form of torture. I tried all my old tricks; shadow boxing, drumming on the dash and singing along to the music I was listening to, pinching my inner thigh, anything I could think of to get me a few minutes and a few miles further along. But it was a losing battle and despite the blinding headache I’d developed the seductive call of sleep led me to close my eyes for what I told myself would only be a minute.

“Just a quick cat nap to recharge the batteries.” I promised myself.

Five minutes later I jerked awake, alarmed that I had allowed myself to sleep for so long. If I’d slept long enough to run the wing tanks dry I doubted I could transfer enough fuel in time to start the engine again before I ran out of altitude and crashed into the ocean.

After another grueling session on the black rubber hose I decided to try eating something to hopefully keep my energy up. I broke into my goody bag and ate some Cheese Wiz on Ritz crackers, my standard snack while ferry flying, and downed a can of soda. The food and caffeine picked me up a little but I wasn’t optimistic about it helping for long. The fuel gauges on the wing tanks were bouncing on empty as I picked up the rubber hose again and got back to work.

OK, just to keep everyone confused I’ve decided to post the entire chapter of my book entitled Pressure.  What I posted yesterday was a, hopefully, exciting teaser/prolog to get the reader interested enough to keep reading.  Chapter one covers how I got into ferry flying in the first place and Pressure takes place somewhere in the middle of the book.  Everybody sufficiently  confused now?  Good.

                                                                                           PRESSURE

 

“An adventure is misery and discomfort, relived in the safety of reminiscence.” Marco Polo

Millions of stars glittered coldly in the pitch black sky while a solid layer of clouds slid beneath my wings. I was sitting in the cockpit of a brand new Beechcraft Bonanza high above the Atlantic ocean, retracing the same path Charles Lindbergh made from North America to Paris 65 years before.

I glanced at the new handheld GPS duct taped to the glare shield and smiled. It registered that I was racing eastbound above the cold dark waters of the Atlantic at 210 knots and would arrive in Paris ahead of schedule. Having a GPS to navigate with was only one of the advantages I had over “Lucky Lindy” that night but probably the most important one. Without it I would be forced to use dead reckoning, a name that never sits well with me, as I made the trek across the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean.

Sitting in a soft leather seat, another important advantage over the stiff wicker basket of a chair used in the Spirit of St. Louis, I felt a kinship to that pioneer of solo ocean flying. The technology in the 1994 Beechcraft F-33 Bonanza was light years ahead of what the Ryan Aeronautical Company used when it built Lindbergh’s plane in 1927. The Bonanza had a more reliable and efficient engine, a more aerodynamic airframe with retractable landing gear, cabin heat, and state of the art avionics. It even had that new plane smell.

The altimeter in the instrument panel read fifteen thousand feet where an unusually strong tail wind was allowing me to skip the normal fuel stop in the Azores and fly straight to Paris. Cutting a full day off my trip to deliver the Bonanza to its new owner put me in a good mood, getting to spend the time I saved enjoying the city of lights before catching my flight back to the States didn’t hurt either.

The stress and apprehension of taking off from St. Johns, Newfoundland on another solo trans-Atlantic flight had worn off hours before. Once aloft with the engine running smoothly and no weather demons to contend with, I settled into the pilot’s seat like it was a familiar old easy chair, comfortable but alert.

Four hours into the flight the dropping fuel gauges of the wing tanks said it was time to transfer some fuel from the ninety gallon ferry tank that had been installed in the cabin to give the Bonanza the extra range needed to cross the Atlantic. I turned the valve on the bottom of the steel tank mounted behind my seat and waited for an indication on the clear plastic fuel gage that the much needed fuel was indeed flowing.

A few minutes later I was rewarded by seeing the fuel level drop below the full mark. Satisfied that the engine’s life blood was indeed moving from the ferry tank out to the wings I went back to the book I was reading. My intention was to shut the valve off after the wing tanks were just over half full to avoid overfilling them.

When I checked the progress ten minutes later I was perplexed to see that the wing tanks had made only a modest gain. This got my attention because although I hadn’t really timed the transfer rate when I had tested the fuel system over land, I was sure that it had gone much faster than that. Hoping it was my imagination I took out a pencil, marked the fuel level on the steel ferry tank and sat back to see how fast it went down. It didn’t take long for the devastating reality to hit me…..The fuel wasn’t moving. The news hit me like a thunderbolt because the fuel remaining in the wing tanks was not nearly enough to complete the trip, or to get me back to Canada. I was screwed.

Denial was the first emotion to poke its head into the cockpit, “I must have not opened the valve all the way”….nope, the valve was as far as it would go and moved back and forth easily. I double checked the aircraft’s fuel selector and found that it was indeed where it should be to allow the fuel to transfer.

Amazingly I didn’t allow panic to join the party, but the seed had been planted and it took all the self-control I could muster to keep it from growing.

“Ok Kerry, stay calm. Think, what’s the problem and what’s the solution?”

I took a deep breath, sat back and tried to work out what might be wrong with the fuel system. I pictured the fuel system in my mind, trying to think where the problem might lie.

“The fuel level of the ferry tank wasn’t going down so it’s not a leak.” I said to myself. I looked down at the outflow valve located at the bottom of the big metal tank.

“Their might be something blocking the valve hole inside the ferry tank.” I thought about the possibility for a few seconds. “Maybe I can shake it loose.”

I turned back around in my seat, buckled my seatbelt and secured any loose items in the cockpit. I grabbed the yoke, flipped off the auto pilot then proceeded to put Bonanza thru a series of aggressive maneuvers trying to dislodge anything that might be blocking the fuel from flowing out of the ferry tank. Random items I hadn’t been able reach and secure floated around the cockpit in zero gravity as I nosed the Bonanza over again and again. When I finished my impromptu aerobatic routine I twisted around in my seat and stared hopefully at the plastic fuel gauge but the fuel level remained stubbornly fixed.

Disappointed that just shaking the plane up and down hadn’t fixed the problem it was time to start taking things apart to try and find an answer. I un-screwed the rubber filler cap on top of the ferry tank to make sure there was enough outside air pressure to force the fuel into the wing tanks, and….bingo, I’d found the problem. Or at least, “a” problem. With the cap off I should’ve been rewarded with a blast of cold Atlantic air and gasoline fumes. Instead I was greeted by the merest ghost of a breeze, not even enough to blow out a candle, if I had been foolish enough to have an open flame in a cockpit now filled with one high octane fumes.

The ferry tank was designed to be pressurized by ram air routed from a L shaped fitting mounted on the belly of the aircraft through a half inch rubber hose into the top of the metal tank. Normally the L tube is mounted to the aircraft by drilling a hole in the belly, sticking the fitting through it and screwing it in place. After delivering the plane I would just remove the L tube and stick a small metal plug into the hole we’d drilled in the belly, no one ever even noticed it was there. But the L tube wasn’t mounted like that on the Bonanza. Before I left on the trip my boss, Pete Demos, had shown me the difference.

“Take a look at this McCauley,” Pete said kneeling down on the hanger floor and pointing under the Bonanza, “we loosened the screws on an access panel, stuck the L tube through it sideways and taped it in place.”

I squatted down on my heels, looked under the plane and saw the L tube sticking out of the belly at an angle and what looked a half a roll of silver duct tape holding it in place. “Why in the world did you do it like that?” I asked, not liking what I’d seen at all.

“Do you know how much this plane is worth? I’m sure as hell not gonna drill a hole in the belly of a four hundred and eighty thousand dollar airplane.”

“Ok fine, but don’t you think you could find a better way to mount the tube?”

“Don’t worry McCauley, it’s not going anywhere. Feel it, it’s solid. Just make sure you check it out when you get to St. Johns.”

I grabbed the tube and tried to move it back and forth. It seemed ok but not nearly as secure as it normally was. Apparently I was right to be concerned because there I was over the middle of the Atlantic with my ferry tank system not working.

I grabbed a wrench out of the tool kit I always flew with, but never expected to use, and unscrewed a coupling in the ram air supply hose. The high-pressure jet of cold air, essential for the system to work, was AWOL. Nothing, not breath of air was coming out of the hose. The duct tape holding the L tube in place had failed, disabling the ferry system.

A quick re-calculation of the fuel remaining in the wing tanks confirmed what I already knew, there wasn’t enough gas to turn around and make it back to St. Johns or to stretch my fuel and make it to Ireland. I really needed that gas

I spent a few minutes kicking myself for being such a moron. If I’d checked the ferry tank after the first two hours I would have had enough fuel still in the wing tanks to get me back to St. Johns. But I’d been using the ferry system for two days before reaching the ocean and had gotten complacent.

“Stop beating yourself dumb ass,” I thought, “you’ll have plenty of time for that when you’re in the raft.”

I sat there holding the silent rubber hose, my eyes glazed over in thought as the challenge glared at me. How to pressurize the ferry tank and force the fuel into the wing tanks where it could be used. Then from the dark recesses of my mind I remembered a conversation with an old ferry pilot I had met in Iceland.

“If you’re ram air tube ever ice’s over and you need to move some fuel here’s what you can do. Descend to sea level, open the ferry tank to equalize the pressure and re-seal the tank.” the pilot said. “Then you climb back up to a higher altitude, where the air pressure is lower, and open the valve. The high pressure air trapped in the tank will force some of the fuel out of the ferry tank.”

“How much fuel will transfer?” I asked.

“I’m not really sure. I’ve never really had to do it myself, but I imagine you should be able to move five or six gallons each time you go up and down.”

“That sounds like a lot of work.”

“I suppose, but so is trying to get into your life raft wearing a survival suit.”

The procedure sounded like it would work in theory but I could see a few problems in my situation. Number one; I had flight planned to make the crossing by riding the strong west tailwind that was above twelve thousand feet. By repeatedly descending to sea level and climbing back up again I wouldn’t be in the strong tailwinds enough to make it to land, maybe. Number two; Just the act of climbing and descending multiple times was going to eat up a ton of fuel that I would need even if I could get it all moved, which I doubted. And number three; Dropping down through fifteen thousand feet of clouds and darkness, without a current altimeter setting, before hopefully pulling up in time to avoid crashing into the cold black ocean was, in a word, scary. So I needed to think of another way of pressurizing the ferry tank.

So dear reader, you might have been wondering, “Where the heck has Kerry been?”  Well the answer is, busy.  A few years ago I started writing a memoir about my adventures as an international ferry pilot.  I hit it hard, as new authors are want to do, with tons of energy and drive to get my story down on paper.  I actually did pretty good at first, cranking out fourteen chapters that covered most of the stories that I thought would make good reading.  Then things stalled.  The book sat on my laptop untouched for months on end mocking me, “Come on Kerry when are you going to edit me? When are you going to finish me and try to get published?” This winter i couldn’t take it any more so I buckled down and got back to work on the book and much to my surprise mostly  finished it.  I say mostly because even though it’s “done” I’m still going over and over it, cutting and polishing it.  I’m also trying to decide just how technical to make it.  Pilots who read flying books love the details but non-pilots might get bored reading about how every switch in the cockpit is configured so it’s a tough balancing act.  I’m done enough to start looking for agents to help me get published and have had a few positive replies, so fingers crossed.  Anyway I’m going to try and find time to blog again and one of the things I’m going to do is to post short sections of my book for you all to check out and hopefully like and comment on.  So without further ado  here is the short prologue/teaser I’m thinking of starting the book with.

                                                                                                                       Never Routine

I never know when a ferry flight might go wrong. With so many things that could possibly go wrong, I knew better than to get too comfortable, too relaxed. But it’s hard to not let your guard down after hours and hours of open ocean.  But that’s what happened on the night of November 12th, 1993 in the cockpit of a brand new Beechcraft Bonanza high over the Atlantic ocean.  Over the previous three days the plane and its extra fuel tanks had performed flawlessly and if everything continued that way I’d be in Paris and done with the trip in eight hours.

I was always nervous leaving the safety of land and heading out over the ocean in a single engine plane. But stress and apprehension of taking off from St. Johns, Newfoundland on another solo trans-Atlantic flight had worn off hours before. Once aloft with the engine running smoothly and no weather demons to contend with, I settled into the pilot’s seat like it was a familiar old easy chair, comfortable but alert.

Four hours in to the flight the dropping fuel gauges of the wing tanks said it was time to transfer some fuel from the ninety gallon ferry tank that had been installed in the cabin to give the Bonanza the extra range needed to cross the Atlantic. I opened the valve on the bottom of the steel tank mounted behind my seat and went back to the book I was reading.  My intentions was to shut the valve off after the wing tanks were just over half full to avoid overfilling them.

When I checked the progress ten minutes later I was perplexed to see that the wing tanks had made only a modest gain. This got my attention because although I hadn’t really timed the transfer rate when I had tested the fuel system over land, I was sure that it had gone much faster than that. Hoping it was my imagination I took out a pencil, marked the fuel level on the steel ferry tank and sat back to see how fast it went down. It didn’t take long for the devastating reality to hit me…..The fuel wasn’t moving. The news hit me like a thunderbolt. There wasn’t enough fuel remaining in the wing tanks to make it to Paris or to get me back to Canada. I was screwed.