Almost Snakebit

(One of the problems with posting blogs online is that the latest one shows up at the top of the page. That’s great from a chronological standpoint but not from a storytelling standpoint, so see my earlier post below for part 1 of this story.)

On Sunday, Connie and I drove down to see if we could pick up our airplane. Bill had called and said it was ready and to come down and go fly it. I had every intention of doing just that; yet, I traveled down there with a package of seat belts under my arm. The front seat belt buckles had cracked plastic tops and the belt webbing was aging under the influence of the sun, so I had bought some new seat belts from Schroth, a company in Germany that had satisfied the FAA’s TSO (Technical Standard Order) C114 and certified their seat belts for Grumman AA-1 and AA-5 aircraft. I wanted to install them while the airplane was at Bill’s in case I had a problem putting them in. You can understand why I might be suspicious that might happen.

The airplane was tied down behind Bill’s hangar, one of many at the north end of the airfield. It was a bright sunny day, a bit cool, with winds blowing down from the north at about twenty knots. I picked up my airplane’s keys from Bill again and Connie and I drove our white Montero Sport around to the airplane. Breaking out my small toolbox, I hauled it and the new belts over to the Cheetah, unlocked its fighter-type canopy, slid it back, and stepped into the backseat. The seatbelts were attached by large, metal screws, one behind each seat and one at its side, and the shoulder harnesses by bolts at about eye level and behind each seat.

Connie opened the package belonging to the pilot’s belts while I began removing the screws that held the old belts in. I could reach the screw holding in the the seat belt fairly easily if I had Connie rotate the seat forward, which she did without complaint. The part numbers were telling us which buckle went in on the pilot’s side, so I lined the “right” one up with its attach bracket, making sure its bushing was in place, and slid the screw into it while matching it all up with a stand-off the screw slid through. It took slender fingers to do all that, and I was glad I have them.

I got the buckle in fairly quickly. But as I held up the seat-belt/shoulder harness assembly, it didn’t look right. Connie had been protesting that something was wrong as she watched me, which pissed me off, so I turned the seat belt configuring over to her while I went after the other attach bolts and screws.

“This is the wrong belt,” she said, something that got me cursing right away. Godddam, I was up to my neck with things that weren’t right and tired of it. The last thing I wanted was to find out I’d been sent the wrong belt.

She played with both belts, trying them on like she was in a fashion show. A few minutes later she said, “This one goes on the pilot’s side.”

We held it up so it matched the attaching bolt holes, and I knew she was right. The manufacturer had either mislabeled the belts or “right hand” and “left hand” meant different things in Germany. I matched up the part numbers, making sure that the buckles and belts matched, and swapped sides. The pilot’s side belt went in like it was supposed to.

But on the co-pilot’s side I ran into a problem, not with the belts but with my airplane. The screw in its side that attached the belt turned and turned but didn’t seem to be coming out. I pried on it a bit with a screwdriver to see if I could pop it out in case it was hung up, but it didn’t budge. Cursing, I told Connie I had run into a problem and couldn’t get a screw out. I decided to leave it up to Bill rather than risk damaging something else.

“You’re not going to believe this,” I said, as I returned the keys to him again. “Another problem.”

When I told him about it, Bill thought that a nut plate the screw rotated into behind the frame might be busted loose.

“That’s not a big job,” he said. “We’ll get to it tomorrow.”

The next afternoon, Bill called, saying: “Your airplane is ready. Come fly it!”

Of course, I had to call him and ask what been wrong.

“Nothing,” he said, “other than the screw was hung up pretty good.”

I laughed.

“So, all I needed to do was to have pulled a little harder, right?”

“That’s about it.”

“Okay, well, I’ll be down this afternoon. Mr. Gardner has said he’d fly me down.”

One of the nice things about working with a bunch of pilots is I can occasionally get a ride somewhere when I need it. A majority of the folks in my group are pilots, and most of them fly general aviation aircraft. Jim Gardner is one of those, and he is a flight instructor to boot who owns a Cessna 120. I had asked Jim earlier if he could give me a lift down to get the airplane if it came up; Connie was busy working late and couldn’t take me down to get it. So we left work a little early, me earlier than Jim so I could drop by the house and pick up my camera.

I parked my car, a white 2004 Mitsubishi Montero Sport, behind the covered tie down my airplane lives in. A covered tie-down is like a carport for an airplane; it has a roof but is otherwise open on all sides. Grabbing my flight bag, I walked across the airport’s cement taxiways past the new metal hangars and over to the airport’s house trailer of a Terminal building. It was a nice day. Sunny and comfortable, not warm or cool. I sat on the Terminal’s wooden steps, looking across the airport at the metal hangar building I knew Jim’s airplane was in. After waiting ten minutes and not seeing his truck at the hangar, I grabbed my bag and walked down the airport ramp toward the south end of the taxiway/runway and toward his hangar. Yards away, the elephantine machines reconstructing the airport’s main runways lumbered past. I cut by them and through the grass that separated me from Jim’s hangar. As I got to my final approach, Jim’s little red Chevy pickup truck pulled up to the hangar door; and Jim got out and opened the hangar.

“Decided to go for a walk, did you?” he commented.

“The winds are out of the north,” I answered. “This way you didn’t have to taxi all the way up to the Terminal and back down again.”

His Cessna 120 is silver and red, a two-person high-wing airplane that drags its tail along the ground instead of hauling a nose-gear around like my Cheetah does. Jim pulled his truck into his hangar, angling it in underneath the airplane’s left wing. (Note: I spent a few years in the Navy and flying the Navy, so I tend to think of the left side as the “port” side and right as “starboard”. Navy aircrews are trained to think that way even in the air. I’ll try to remember to refer to things as “left” and “right”; but if I don’t, you’ll know why.) Cracking the cowling, he rotated the engine’s oilstick with a grunt, mumbling that since they put the new one in, it’s rather tight. Trying to be helpful, I turned and pushed on the hangar door behind me since it was still in front of the other wing, but the door didn’t budge. I checked the door’s tracks but saw nothing blocking them, so I walked to its rear where I found a metal latch locking it open. I pushed the latch out of the way and turned back to find Jim at the door pushing it.

He turned back toward his airplane, heading for the tail. I headed for the wing strut to help him push the airplane out but he was content to push it out himself onto the small taxiway in front of the place, turning the airplane’s nose to our left.

“I hate taxiing all the way round the hangar,” he said. “They know better than that.”

A grey Toyota pickup with a camper top on it sat to our right, parked in front of a closed hanger door and presenting a potential collision with a taxiing Cessna’s wing. A small ditch to the west of the north/south taxiway ensured you couldn’t taxi off on the grass to get around it.

“They’re not airplane people,” I said. “That hangar is being used as a car garage, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, some kind of race car.”

We opened the 120’s metal doors and I hauled up my bag full of flight gear to put it on the shelf behind the seats; but Jim stopped me by pulling the seats forward and exposing the baggage compartment behind them and below the shelf. His intercom sat up on the shelf, so I pitched my headset up there to connect its chords, turned, stepped up to the step on the airplane’s wing strut, and pushed myself up into the passenger seat. Jim climbed in. He handed me my headset, and we pulled the seat straps tight and closed the doors. With his floppy, laminated paper checklist in his lap, Jim flipped the switches that turned the airplane’s electrical system on, called “Clear Prop!”, and then pulled a handle at the top of his instrument panel. The engine’s starter kicked, the prop whirled, and the engine started with a satisfying little grumble. We moved down the little taxiway, Jim steering the little airplane with his feet, hands resting on the pilot’s yoke and the throttle.

“ I really don’t like taxiing down the south side like this,” he said. I didn’t ask him why as he circled around the end of the hangar and taxied north past it, between it and another hanger immediately east. I did feel a bit confined, and there is always the danger of someone pulling out of their hangar in front of you without looking, though you’d hope most pilots are more “head’s up” than that.

At the end of the hangar, we hit the east/west taxiway and turned west on it, taxiing past the now all but abandoned Nighthawk Sky Signs hangar. The company had run into hard times after one of their Ag-Cats lost power and landed in a schoolyard, its final perch on a fence. They were still rebuilding airplanes torn apart for inspection, so we only saw them now and again. We taxied on past our old runway, mostly covered with new concrete now but some parts of it still showing the bare earth it had been stripped down to. I commented to Jim that it didn’t look to me like they were going to make the projected February 10th completion date; he replied that they were at least two weeks behind. Damn! I hated to be anxious, but I was tired of not being able to fly at night. The taxiway “runway” works fine in the day and could be safely flown at night if your landing light was good, there was some kind of moon, and there wasn’t much crosswind. But your insurance would probably never pay off if anything untoward happened, so it wasn’t probably wasn’t worth it.

In any case, Jim’s nose was straight-ahead as he stared a hole in the sky while looking for downwind traffic. I pointed an airplane out on a distant base leg and almost ninety-degrees to us. Jim didn’t see it at first; but once he did, he wondered why we hadn’t heard anything over the radio. He checked the radio’s volume knob and turned it up. We heard the Cessna call “short final”.

The Cessna landed in front of us, slowed quickly, and turned off up near the gas pumps. Jim taxied his airplane up on the taxiway, left of centerline, and gave it the gas. As we sped forward, I felt the tail come up and Jim called we were departing over the radio. The airplane danced a bit in the unsteady crosswind, and then we were airborne, climbing away.

As we passed a thousand feet, Jim turned the airplane south and then gave the airplane to me so he could look at some airport construction he didn’t understand.

“Let’s go down at about fifteen hundred,” he instructed.

Jim had leveled us off and already adjusted the trim, so I used light pressures on the yoke to fish around for the altitude. It was a bright sunny day, not a cloud anywhere, with at least 20 knot winds out of the north, making our ride a little turbulent but not bad. The visibility was great. Though the city of Galveston was still over twenty miles away, we could still make it out. I pointed my nose at the spot on the horizon I thought the airport was.

The grey ribbon of Interstate 45 South snaked to our right across the green, water dotted flatlands. We flew past League City and Dickinson and slowly edged past the huge refineries that mark Texas City. I continued to fly until we approached Galveston Bay, and then I handed the airplane back to Jim so he could make the landing.

The homes of Tiki Island were flowing under our nose as Jim called the tower. A young, female controller cleared us for a left downwind entry to runway 35. Crossing the bay, we made the slight rightward jog that put the runway on our left, and Jim turned base and final as I watched a Canadair jet crawl along the taxiway toward runway 31. The jet was told to hold short as Jim flared the nose and settled us gently on runway 35’s surface.

“That’s a nice little runway you’ve got for us,” he said over the radio.

“We appreciate you using it,” the controller replied, acknowledging the symbiotic relationship between pilots and air traffic controllers that truly does exist, though it often seems forgotten.

Turning off on taxiway Delta, the Terminal in front of us, Jim reported clear of the runway and the tower asked him what his intentions were. We were taxiing to Texas Flight Line, he said, and the tower approved that but did not instruct him to switch to Ground. A moment later, as we turned onto Taxiway Alpha, the one long taxiway that curls around to both runways, Jim asked me if the tower had told him to switch to Ground and I answered “no”. The tower confirmed it when he called, telling him he could “remain this frequency”.

We taxied north toward two rows of metal hangars that are perpendicular to the taxiway, turning down toward the middle of the nearest set and squeezing in between them and the rows of helicopters belonging to Evergreen Aviation. Bill’s hangar is the third one from the west end and can also be distinguished by its large, open door and the fact that it always contains several airplanes in various stages of undress. Jim swung the Cessna around so its nose was facing back toward the taxiway and my door was facing the hangar.

“Let’s hop out,” he said, as he shut down the Cessna’s engine.

Pushing open the small, metal door, I carefully used the wing-mounted step to step down, turning to fetch my flight bag from behind our seats and unplugging my headset from the intercom. Bill’s red-headed college student helper watched us unload with a “what are you doing?” look. I didn’t see Bill at first because he was standing behind his golf cart and talking to another customer.

When he saw me, Bill headed straight for his workbench to fetch my airplane keys, thrown into a drawer they have that holds keys to every airplane in the United States or at least in Texas, or so it seems. After digging for a few moments, he found mine and handed them to me. I had thought it would have been easy since I had a little tag bearing the airplane’s N-number on it, but I noticed as he handed them to me that the little tag was all but torn off. It had been here too many times.

We chatted for a moment and he told me he had the final bills for the alternator and brake repair done, so I followed him out of the hangar around to the trailer that served as his office. The metal canister reminds me of one of those wheel-less boxcars you see loaded first on railcars and then on ships. In its darkness, he dug through its files, located the invoices, and handed them to me. Together, they came to just under $1300, right where I was expecting them to be. Neither of them carried a charge for finishing up my seat belt job. I think Bill wanted to just get me out of there.

Jim appeared from the other side of the hangar, asking if I was going out to my airplane. From the way he was asking the question, I surmised he wanted to leave. Knowing it would take me another ten to fifteen minutes to preflight my airplane and get settled in, I thanked him for the ride over and told him to take off if he felt he needed to. He said something about wanting to make sure he didn’t leave me stranded if I got snakebit again, but I assured him I would call Connie on my cell and get her to come after me if that happened.

Thanking Bill and promising to get the check in the mail the next morning, I walked from his office boxcar to my Cheetah which was tied won near a twin and a Bonanza missing some pieces. Stepping up on the Chettah’s wing, I unlocked the canopy and pitched my flightbag into the passenger seat. Walking around the airplane from left to right, I performed my standard preflight inspection. Deciding that she looked ready to go, I stepped back up on the wing on the pilot’s side of the airplane and then lowered myself carefully into its cockpit. Pulling my headset and the “push-to-talk” switch out of my flightbag, I hooked them up, put my checklist and the Houston Terminal Area VFR chart up on the windscreen, and then pulled the new seatbelt with its attached shoulder harness over my head and cinched them up.

I started my pre-start checklist: Exterior Preflight Complete. Seat Belts and Shoulder Harnesses adjusted and locked. Avionics and Electrical Equipment Off. Brakes Checked. Then, on to my Engine Start checklist: Primer- Two shots of primer which is done by pulling out on a bar marked “Primer” and pushing it in two times. Mixture-Rich. Carb Heat-Off. Master-On. I hear the instrument gyros begin to spin up. Flashing Beacon – ON to give others a warning I’m about to start. Fuel Pump –On until I see anything above .5 psi on the Fuel Pressure gauge, normally it’s up about 5 psi. Fuel Pump –Off.

“Clear Prop!” I cry.

Magnetos- Left. I push the “Starter” button and the engine spins and starts right up. Magnetos- Both. I check the engine’s oil pressure. It’s already in the green. Avionics and Radios-On. I turn every radio on the cockpit on and check my ammeter. It’s holding steady right on “0”, meaning that the alternator is keeping up with the load. I flip the switch controlling the audio to my #2 Comm radio to “Headset” and listen to a computerized voice call out the current Galveston weather, winds, and altimeter setting. I set the altimeter to the right setting and then double-check that it corresponds to the field elevation within a few feet. It does. The airplane is ready to taxi. I let her move forward about a foot and then hit the brakes to make sure they’re working. You can’t taxi a Grumman without them.

Normally, I do my engine runup and pre-takeoff checks out near the takeoff runway. But they were taking off on runway 35 today, and that meant taxiing to the far end of a rather large airfield. No sense in doing that if something was just going to break, so I taxied a few feet forward to the end of the ramp and spun the airplane around. There was nothing behind me but grass and bay, so I ran the engine up and did the rest of my pre-takeoff checks sitting right there. And heard and saw Jim take off using runway 35. I had hoped to fly back with him but knew I wouldn’t now. He would be too far ahead.

One of the last four steps in the takeoff checklist involved turning on my electrically-driven auxiliary fuel pump. I didn’t want to run the pump unnecessarily, so I decided to wait until I was at the hold short ready for takeoff before turning it on. “Fuel pump to go,” I told myself, completing all the other steps but its.

I taxied the airplane out from behind the hangars so me and my radios had a clear line of sight to the tower and called Galveston Ground for takeoff. A male voice on Ground told me to hold my position. He was letting a helicopter from one of the local companies “taxi” to its line, and a helicopter taxis by hovering just feet above the ground and moving slowly forward or back as its pilot wants, blowing to kingdom come everything anywhere close. So, I agreed. But then the helicopter made its way in and settled to the ground, and I sat there patiently waiting for Ground to let me go. But he didn’t. Just as I was thinking the guy forgot about me, the female controller who had landed Jim and me said, “Calling Ground, say again.” But so long had passed since I had called I wasn’t sure if she was talking to me. So, I waited to see if anyone else answered. They didn’t. I decided to start over.

“Galveston Ground, November Niner Eight Four Eight Uniform at the north hangars ready for taxi for takeoff VFR,” I said.

“November Niner Eight Four Eight Uniform, cleared to taxi to runway 35, altimeter three zero one zero,” Ground answered.

Acknowledging the call, I edged the airplane forward and we loped down the taxiway, me popping the right brake off and on to keep the left-drifting nose aligned with the yellow stripe centered on the taxiway. At the other end of the field, after looking first, I taxied across runway 31 toward the yellow stripes that marked the “hold short” lines of runway 35. Fuel pump ON. Check the trim, flaps, and canopy. Switch the radio the Galveston Tower Frequency, 120.57.

“Galveston Tower, November Niner Eight Four Eight Uniform, ready to takeoff runway 35.”

“November Niner Eight Four Eight Uniform, cleared for takeoff,” the male voice said, following me over here.

“Four Eight Uniform,” I replied, shoving the throttle forward.

The little Cheetah leaped forward, accelerating smoothly. At 60, I pulled back smoothly on the yoke, and she lifted smoothly off the ground. The winds were on the nose and from my right; I cocked the nose into the wind just enough to hold the runway centerline, and we climbed out into the blue skies over the bay. At a thousand feet, I turned off the auxiliary fuel pump, and the engine continued to purr, assurance that the engine driven fuel pump was still working, or it would have gotten very quiet, not counting the expletives from my Navy-trained lips.

I leveled off at about fifteen hundred feet, letting the airplane accelerate out to an airspeed of a little over 120 miles per hour. Crossing over the causeway bridge that connected Galveston to the mainland, I flew northbound but kept west of the British Petroleum plant near Texas City, just in case the damn plant blew up again. Heading toward a large field north of the plant, I climbed up to about two thousand feet and then leveled off again to perform steep turns (level, 60 degree angle of bank turns that require you to pull two G’s), takeoff stalls (nose way up in the air), landing stalls (flaps full down, power to idle, descending at landing speeds and then pull the nose up gently until she stalls), and slow flight (didn’t do as well as last time, actually got into a nibble of a stall there). Descending down to thirteen hundred feet, I headed north, up the jagged coastline of Galveston Bay, passed the humpback Kema bridge and its small bevy of restaurants, passed another petroleum plant, and then headed toward the black asphalt runway of La Porte airport on my left. Pulling into the pattern, I did two touch and go landings in a stiff crosswind. On the second, as I added power to takeoff again, the airplane leapt into the air, and though it was climbing out okay, it was a bit sluggish. I had added power before retracting the flaps from landing, and the airplane had sprung off the ground immediately. I had a fair rate of climb and good airspeed, so I raised them noting that you could climb out at least on a cool day with your flaps stuck full down in a Cheetah. How much runway it might take to get off the ground in such a configuration was another story.

Leaving the airport, I headed south again, looping counterclockwise around Ellington airfield’s airspace by flying down the middle of Clear Lake, just south of the NASA complex, and just south of the homes and businesses dotting NASA Road One. I could see my homebase airport ahead, a large, sparsely populated, flat expanse in the middle of trees and development. There was no one but me in the airport’s traffic pattern, so I flew across the field from east to west and into a downwind for runway 32R.

After landing, I taxied the airplane canopy-open back to our little covered tiedown, swung it around so I could push her tail-first into it, and shutdown. It was nice to have my little airplane back home again; and, thankfully, for the first time in a long time, I didn’t have anything new that needed fixing. God knows, I needed it to stay that way at least for a little while.