A "War" Story From Long Ago

 At Downtown RV Park, Red Bay, Alabama...

Since we are in a bit of a waiting period here in Red Bay, I thought it would be a good time to re-publish the monthly column I write for my hometown (Nacogdoches, Texas) advertising paper, Around The Town. Recent columns I've written have described the operation of flights in smaller airplanes carrying U. S. Mail across the U. S. at night. This was about a five-year experiment by the U.S.P.S. some 50 years ago and, in the area of east Texas where I grew up, I became the lone pilot performing those flights for most of the program's duration. It doesn't seem like that long ago, of course, but few of the citizens knew about them back then--and especially now that a half-century has passed. There will be one more column on the subject after this one, and I hope you find these little lagniappes  interesting.

Flying the Mail—It Wasn’t all Roses

 

It was a winter night, and a thick cloud cover lay over most of eastern Texas. I couldn’t reach the top of the clouds to find clear sky, and the cloud bases were only a few hundred feet from the ground. So, it was one of those nights--flying by instruments for the entire trip after leaving Dallas. I was barely able to make a successful NDB (a now-primitive Non-Directional Beacon) approach into Palestine and, after unloading, I was off again, back into the clouds seconds after raising the landing gear after takeoff. After leveling at a low cruising altitude, and the big Pratt and Whitney radial engines were humming smoothly, I noticed a wisp of smoke seeping out from behind the instrument panel in front of me. After a few minutes, the smoke became thicker, and the attitude deviation indicator (a pilot’s primary flight situation instrument because it mimics the position of the airplane if there were no clouds) in front of me slowly began to skew, indicating the airplane was beginning to bank when I had not moved the controls. I glanced over to the right side of the panel to compare this with the copilot’s ADI, which showed the airplane to be in normal, straight-and-level flight. I knew I had a problem, but I didn’t know if it was limited to the ADI. Now, an on-board fire is the last thing a pilot wants in an airplane, so I began tripping circuit breakers to any electrical instrument on the left side of the panel, and the smoke soon stopped. (I can’t remember what was found to be the problem—probably the ADI itself.)

Fortunately, almost everything critical on an airplane is duplicated in case of failure. Had there not been a duplicate set of operative instruments on the right side of the panel, I would have been a goner. Why? Because without some kind of visual reference to an airplane’s attitude (position in the air), there is nothing to counteract the brain’s false sensations of what the airplane is doing. There are several sensory elements, located mostly in the ear canal, that always sense false cues about the position of the airplane if a pilot’s outside vision is lost. Almost every change in the airplane’s position—even its acceleration or deceleration—sends false signals that eventually and inevitably end in loss of control of the airplane if there is no countering visual reference. The technical name for this is spatial disorientation. It is for that reason that special training and a special certificate is required for pilots to fly solely by reference to instruments.  I can still hear the instructors’ admonitions when I was obtaining an instrument rating: “Trust the instruments, trust the instruments, no matter what your brain is telling you.”

There have been a number of fatal airplane accidents attributed to spatial disorientation, some involving the loss of famous people, such as Buddy Holly in 1959, Patsy Cline in 1963 and John F. Kennedy, Jr. in 1999, among others.

Since my side of the instrument panel was disabled, I was left with the copilot’s instruments to fly the airplane, except I was in the wrong seat. (By the way, there is no requirement for a copilot on the Beech 18 and there was none on board that night.) I quickly unbuckled and moved over to the right seat, where I could fly more effectively what I knew would be another instrument approach with low clouds at the Lufkin airport. The only problem was a little feeling of awkwardness in operating the aircraft from the right seat. I had never flown the Beech 18 from the copilot’s seat and, while I wasn’t concerned about it, things certainly felt different. All the controls were now operated by opposite hands from usual. The airplane had no autopilot, so I just had to ignore the different perspective and keep flying.  

Since you’re reading this, I obviously arrived safely after the approach into Lufkin, awkward as it was, but it was a bit tense that night—just so you won’t get the idea that everything always went smoothly for a mail pilot.

Today’s pilots are probably shaking their heads at the primitive nature of the aircraft instrumentation we were using 50 years ago. Today’s avionics are, by comparison, stunning in their technology, capability and redundancy.  

I have one more mail-flying “war story” to tell you next month, then we’ll move on to something else.

The photo below is that of a Beech 18 instrument panel. The ADI is the round blue instrument just above the yoke (steering wheel for non-pilots). See how it mimics the airplane relative to the ground and sky?

 Thank you, Lord, for this wonderful life; please forgive me if I don't appreciate it as I should every day.

We don't stop playing because we get old; we get old because we stop playing. 

 ---George Bernard Shaw

"I get up every morning, and I just don't let the old man in." ---Clint Eastwood