This My Story is not really my story. I had a cameo appearance in the incident, but it has remained burned in my brain ever since it happened. Perhaps I remember it most because it was the day I was to sit the test for my Unrestricted Private Pilots License (equivalent of the PPL today).
I had done all my navs from a tiny ALA east of Melbourne (now closed) operated as a satellite by a Moorabbin-based school. Every Saturday morning they would ferry their little Cherokee from Moorabbin down to the ALA.
That morning in 1990 I was awaiting the Cherokee, somewhat nervous and jittery; I found it difficult to hold a coffee cup without painting my shoes with coffee. But it didn’t come. Instead I got a phone call: Moorabbin was socked in with fog and it wasn’t forecast to lift for a couple of hours.
That didn’t help the butterflies, but what could I do?
Without an aeroplane, the ALA was very quiet that morning. The ops room had two or three students standing around with not even an instructor (he would come with the plane). We practised with our whiz wheels, talked aeroplanes, thumbed through tatty old copies of Australian Flying and drank more coffee. I did a lot of pacing.
Then, something of interest.
A plane engine was heard coming up from the south. It sounded big, as the engine note was deeper than that which our little Cherokee gave out. The machine landed and with a lot of roaring taxied up to the ops room. I had no idea what it was, but at the time my experience was limited to C150s, Cherokee 140s and C172s. The beast was, the dismounting pilot informed me, a Beech Bonanza, and it was off to Flinders Island for the weekend.
Cue the passengers. A car load of blokes rolled into the car park, complete with all the accoutrements of a boys’ weekend away: eskies, fishing rods, tents, bags, several slabs of beer and half a side of beef. As I watched all this kit being piled into a pyramid beside the aircraft, I remarked with the expert knowledge of 70 hours flying time, “those Bonanzas carry a lot of stuff”.
And so the pilot began loading. Bags between the seats, passengers in the back, slabs on knees, fishing rods along the centre, tents on the floor … no worries! The pilot supervised everything going into the rear cabin through the big double doors, and was satisfied with what he saw, until … .
I watched with some bemusement as the nosewheel slowly lifted off the grass. The Bonanza rocked backward and the tail hit the ground with a thunk. There sat a gracious aeroplane in a very undignified position: bum first in the dirt.
Being a pilot of minimal experience, it would have been bad form for me to have laughed out loud, so I went into the ops room and did it. After I settled down and went back out, my amusement turned to real worry. The plane was still on its tail and the pilot was shovelling more stuff into the rear cabin.
“They do this all the time,” he said. “Once me and my other passenger are in the front, it will be back in balance.”
Just to be sure, he asked me if I would hold the nose down whilst he rearranged some of the load. I obliged. All this was making me forget my nerves over the impending UPPL test. When all were on board and all doors armed and cross-checked, he gave me the signal to release the nose.
I did, and watched the point of the prop spinner drift upward past my eyes as the big Beech assumed the position: bum first in the dirt again. Everybody out!
Thoroughly defeated, the pilot came up with a solution: fly some of the kit down to Tooradin and give it to the charter operator down there. They did a run to Flinders Island regularly and would probably have room for the side of beef and one or two slabs. Off to Tooradin he went. We students plied the waiting pax with coffee.
Half an hour or so later, there was still no sign of our Cherokee, but the Bonanza returned having triumphantly disposed of a large portion of the bags. The cattle climbed back into the wagon.
And you know she did it again. This time the pilot was mortified when he realised he hadn’t off-loaded enough of the kit to solve the problem. No point taking more down to Tooradin; that plane would have gone by now.
I was reassigned to nose-holding duties whilst a lot of rearranging and seat swapping (heaviest bloke to the front, please!) went on. I felt for the poor bloke in the right front. He had so much kit on his lap that I could barely see his forehead through the windscreen.
With everyone again belted in, the pilot gave me an apprehensive signal to release the nose.
The spinner rose about an inch, then stopped. I looked through the prop blades at the pilot and shook my head. I didn’t know much about flying – even less about Bonanzas – but I did know that there wouldn’t be enough weight on the nosewheel to give any level of steering command.
To my surprise the pilot was grinning back at me and giving me the thumbs-up! That’ll do … we’re away!
Shows how much I know, I thought. This bloke is clearly well advanced in aviation skills and knowledge and is better equipped than me to make a “go” decision. I walked back to the ops room as the engine exploded into life. I will never forget the faces of the other students. This can’t be good, but he’s pilot-in-command!
There was no taxiway, so the Flinders-bound plane back-tracked the gravel and grass runway. One of the other students remarked that when they turned, the main wheels were sliding across the grass. Clearly the pilot was steering on differential braking alone. Another student wondered if he’d done a P-chart for take-off.
They got airborne, but there was not a whole lot of the runway left, and the goat that was tethered at the edge of the ALA went absolutely troppo when they flew over the fence so low. We watched them climb out, willing the Bonanza to stay in the air. Possibly we were being a bit over-dramatic.
They had turned crosswind when one of my companions said: “Do they usually leave the undercart down for so long?” They were on mid-downwind before we saw the wheels coming up.
I never heard anything of that Bonanza again. To this day I presume they made it safely to Flinders Island. Every now and then I wonder what was going on in the cockpit on climb out.
I’m just glad I wasn’t up there with them.
Epilogue
Our Cherokee never made it to the ALA that day. Instead I got a phone call to get myself to Moorabbin by car. By the time I got there the fog had cleared and I passed my UPPL test. That night, over the customary celebratory beer, I recounted the Bonanza story to the CFI.
As CFIs tend to, he didn’t tell me a thing, but instead asked me what I thought.
Firstly, I thought that a properly loaded aeroplane, regardless of the design, would not rock back and sit on its tail under any circumstances. To me this said that the pilot hadn’t been anywhere near a weight and balance chart recently. Secondly, I figured that the pilot wasn’t as experienced with the model as I had originally thought.
“Add one more,” the CFI said. “The fact that the wheels stayed down tells you that the pilot was too busy trying to control the plane on take-off that he forgot them. He probably had very little rate of climb and the stall warning was probably blaring in his ear. He had greater problems to deal with. And it would have gotten worse on the way to Flinders because as a Bonanza burns fuel the centre-of-gravity moves further aft.”
Now, in 2009, my time-on-type in Bonanzas exceeds the total flying time I had on that day in 1990, but I’ve never rotated off a runway without checking my weight-and-balance first. In hindsight, I owe that pilot a debt of gratitude: he and his passengers took all the risks, but it was me who learnt the lesson.