My Love Affair with Flying … Firsts

This is one of my “firsts” flying Lady Tango (our Cessna Cardinal.)

I’ve learned that flying, at least for me right now, is a series of “firsts.” My first “discovery” flight. My first solo. My first cross country solo. They’ve all been memorable and enjoyable experiences. Not all “firsts” are though, like today I’m writing about another first: my first inflight emergency.

Now, it wasn’t one I declared with ATC. But it was an attention grabber just the same. It was a mechanical problem with the plane and was of such a nature that had we not fixed it, we most likely couldn’t have made it to an airport before the problem got worse. So, in my book while it may not have been a “real” emergency, it was still something we had to fix without landing the plane as we were a long distance from any airport.

Enough of the dramatics. Here’s my story.

I fly out of PVU, Provo Municipal Airport. Right now with nearby Spanish Fork (SPK) having restricted operations (no touch and go’s) the pattern at Provo is pretty busy. More than once, I’ve seen three GA airplanes waiting to take off while there are four or more planes in the pattern. It’s a fairly common occurrence for the tower to tell approaching aircraft to wait five minutes while they clear out the pattern or the air space.

For someone who needs to practice approaches and landings, that limits what I can get out of a lesson. Such was the case this day. While we were west of the airport, well out of the Delta airspace, my instructor and I noticed some fields which were very long and very narrow — for fields. But they made great substitutes for runways. Obviously I couldn’t land on them, but I could shoot approaches. It also helped that they are remote enough I can legally fly below 500' AGL over them.

Some of the fields that are my ersatz runways

So we shot some approaches. Rather than land, I used the approaches as opportunities to practice go around procedures. The first two approaches were uneventful. Things went sideways on the third one.

As before, I closed the carb heat and applied full power to arrest the decent and then set the flaps to half, per the manual for a go around. The airplane stopped descending, but this time it didn’t accelerate and barely climbed. It just kind of slogged through the air. I checked the power settings and mixture. Those were good and checked the flap lever… it was in the right place, but the airplane just wasn’t accelerating. Then I glanced at the flaps. They were still fully extended — not what I was expecting. The Cardinal has nice large flaps. Which is great for landing, but right now they were a literal drag on the plane which kept us from climbing out and accelerating.

I glanced at my instructor and told him what was going on, or not going on. He checked the throttle and mixture settings to double check what I’d put in. They looked good to him, so he reached under the panel to see if he could tell if the flap control rigging was the culprit. He fiddled for a few moments then said, he couldn’t tell if anything was not as it should be.

It was then that I looked at my airspeed indicator. What I saw alarmed me and confirmed what I was experiencing.

My airspeed indicator with the “blue tape.”

Side note here: a YouTube channel guy I’ve watched talks about not going slower than the minimum maneuvering speed of an airplane. He recommends puting a thin strip of blue tape on your airspeed indicator to mark Vso 1.4, that’s clean (flaps up) stall speed 1.4. In my case that’s 74 miles per hour. (Yes my airspeed indicator is in miles per hour.) So, I have that piece of blue tape there as a quick reference visual cue to tell me if the plane is going to fly or not.

So, I glanced at the airspeed indicator. The needle was hiding behind, but not below the blue tape. It was a momentary relief because I knew as long as we didn’t go any slower, the plane would stay in the air. Then I looked at the cylinder head temperature guage and saw the engine was getting hot. When it rains it pours, right?

We were gaining altitude slowly, for by now we were maybe a couple hundred feet up, but we weren’t accelerating. We were in an unsustainable situation. I pushed the mixture to full rich to help cool the engine, but it wasn’t enough. We discussed our options. There were plenty of roads we could land on if the engine got too hot. Our first choice was to get back to Provo, but we knew even if we could manage the temps, it was going to be a LONG flight home until we resolved the problem.

Then I had the thought… the circuit breakers! “Check the breakers,” I said. He looked. Sure enough the flap circuit breaker had popped. He reset it and the flaps dutifully retracted to half and the airplane immediately responded. I got to Vy speed and started to climb, but by then the cylinder head temperature was about 420 degrees. I needed to cool them off. So I leveled out, even though we were still around 500' AGL. I pulled in the flaps to “take off” position and felt the plane accelerate more. I raised the flaps when we were over 90 miles per hour. Then I leveled off, pulled the power back a bit and let the engine cool.

After that, the flight was fairly uneventful, though I let my instructor do a flaps-up landing at Provo. On later examination, my A&P noticed the flap control was not correctly rigged. Re-rigging it and judicious use of lubricant solved the problem. The flaps have worked without a problem ever since.

As I thought about the experience, a few things stand out. One was the blue tape. It made my cross checks of the instruments very easy. I knew as long as the indicator got no lower, the plane was not going to fall out of the sky. That allowed me a few extra brain cycles to work the problem. The other was to check the circuit breakers first. We never did call ATC. Mainly because we felt the plane was probably flyable, but it was right on the edge of its performance envelope. The other was we were behind a mountain and couldn’t call directly for help if we wanted. By the time we got around the mountain, we’d solved the problem.

So that’s my “first” emergency. I’d love it if it were my last, but I doubt that will be the case. It’s not going to stop me from flying. :D