Don’t scare passengers
I was on a winter charter flight one time with this guy — let’s call him Jim V — who was one of the craziest guys I ever met, and that covers a lot of ground, both drunk and sober.
This guy, though, lived for crazy. On the ground; in the air; didn’t matter as long as what he was doing, or at least had planned for the day, had some sort of crazy element attached to it. In the process, that made him somewhat hilarious.
He worked for a company based in Brownsville. They booked charters with me for flights across the South and Mexico. One day, three or four company execs wanted to go to Midland, and they didn’t want to hassle with an airline flight and connections in Dallas, so they called my number.
Almost three hours flying time to get to Midland from Brownsville, which was our point of departure. The company had a guy up in Midland they were trying to recruit to come work in Brownsville.
There were two minor problems, actually, three: the weather wasn’t great; the guy’s wife was a nervous wreck about flying; and she had Jim V as one of her fellow passengers to talk her through the experience.
The weather was typical Texas winter weather when a cold front is moving through the state; ceiling about 1,000 feet and dark, gray clouds. There was also icing in the clouds, but a relatively smooth ride. It actually looked worse than it really was; but for a frightened passenger, any weather other than clear blue skies isn’t good. Taking off from Midland, I could tell she wasn’t thrilled to be in the plane but I tried to make her feel as comfortable as possible. My buddy, Jim V, wasn’t helping.
“You don’t have to worry about this flight,” he said to the woman as we were taxiing out to the Midland runway for takeoff.
“Really?” she said, sounding hopeful and somewhat relieved.
“Sure,” Jim said, always Mr. Helpful. “This may only be Gregg’s second flight. Something like that, but he’s got an airplane manual he reads up on so he knows how to do it. He won’t mess up. I promise.”
That made her feel better.
“He reads a manual?” she asked, sounding shocked. “Only his second flight?”
Normally, she might have understood that he was joking, but she was already suffering from high anxiety.
Jim brushes away her worry and tells her, “Maybe his third, but, yeah, he’s got a big thick manual up there in the cockpit he looks through, so he’ll know how to land in Brownsville, provided we make it there. Take off, land. He’s got all the checklists. Only way for him to get us home safely. Reads up on how to do it first. Gregg’s a stickler for detail. He makes sure he doesn’t forget anything.”
As if that wasn’t bad enough, the twin Cessna I was flying picked up ice in the clouds that day about halfway back to Brownsville. We’re flying the clouds. Socked in on all sides. The plane had two forms of de-ice equipment. There were heated elements along the leading edge of the propellers and there were inflatable rubber boots along the leading edge of the wings.
With the wings, you have to let the ice build up a little, then you hit a switch, and the rubber wrapped around the leading edge of the wing will inflate and break away the ice. That process doesn’t cause much noise, because as the ice breaks away, it gets swept back across the wing’s surface and disappears behind the tail.
The prop ice doesn’t work quite like that because the plane usually develops ice faster than can be predicted. (The meteorological conditions, as they’re called, in the clouds have to be just right for the ice to form.) If I was flying into areas of known icing, I’d turn on the prop de-icers before entering the area, but that wasn’t usually wasn’t the case. Ice is usually hard to predict, and so it comes upon the pilot suddenly, without a lot of warning. At night, the pilot really has to be on his/her toes.
If the plane has no de-icing equipment, the pilot needs to change altitude (usually lower to warmer weather) quickly to get out of the icing conditions (although climbing higher into colder weather is also an option). If the ice is allowed to build up, the wing’s air foil will be warped, and the plane made heavier, until it ultimately plummets from the sky. Bad course of action.
On that trip back from Midland, unfortunately for my very nervous female passenger, ice started to form on the wings. So I turned on the prop de-icers too. Unfortunately, when the ice starts to melt from the propellers, chunks of it get thrown against the plane’s fuselage and it makes a lot of racket inside the plane, as if some heavy object is pounding the side of the plane — whack, whack, boom, boom.
“It’s OK,” Jim reminds my nervous passenger. I can hear him talking in the back, even above all the racket.
“Gregg’s going to look it up in the flight manual, so he can figure out what to do about the ice. After all, this is his second, third flight, can’t remember exactly what he told me. There’ll be something inside that manual that tells him how to deal with that ice. Isn’t that right, Gregg?”
Whack, whack, boom, boom.
All the ice eventually melted, and the noise stopped, and it may have just been a coincidence, but that guy from Midland never did go to work for that company.