An old flying story

A good friend of mine suggested that I post this tale of my earlier flying days. It could be entitled "What not to do with a plane" and it shows the truth of the saying that "there are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots."


Several years back, when the ink was still damp on my first pilot's license, some friends of mine were having a big Labor Day week-end party and camp-over. As it was a few hundred miles from where I was at, I took a couple of other friends and rented a plane from my local FBO and we flew up to the gathering. There was a small airport just a few miles from the party so we were all set.

We got up there and discovered that I didn't have the host's phone number with me to call and ask for a pick-up at the airport. So as we overflew the hosts' house and yard and saw everyone else already gathering around the barbecue pit, I got one of my patented "sounds like a good idea at the time" brainstorms. I decided to buzz the picnic a few times to get everyone's attention. Surely once I had their attention someone would think to come pick us up at the airport.

Now this friend lived way out in the country, so it wasn't like I was going to annoy anyone else. My first low pass over his spread just above the trees got everyone looking up all right, and my second even lower pass had people clapping and waving. That's when I decided to take it just a bit too far.

My friend's place was atop a hill, and just across the road from his house, the terrain dropped off into a large valley. I decided that I could climb up a bit as I came around and then dive right over his house at shingle-stripping level and use the valley to pull out. I figured it would look sharp and give the people in the yard something to talk about.

So I climbed as I came around, and my front seat passenger was rolling video as I nosed over and slammed the throttle home for full power. Flying low and slow is dangerous, so it figures that low and fast is ok. I had that plane lined up and set to cross his roof as low as I dared and the airspeed indicator was getting close to the "Never Exceed" speed, when suddenly at the last second realized that I was a bit lower than I had meant to be. And that's also when I saw the tall, thin TV antenna on my friend's roof that I hadn't noticed before.

"SWEET JESUS--GRAB SOMETHING!!" I yelled to my passengers as I pulled back on the yoke to raise the nose and rolled the plane to the right in a desperate attempt to avoid taking the antenna in the prop.

"BANG!" The impact jarred the aircraft. I knew I'd hit but didn't know where or how bad. I leveled the wings and climbed out, grabbing some altitude to give me time to assess any damage to the plane. My passengers were white as ghosts, and they weren't any happier when I told the front seat pasenger to open the door and look out at the right side wheel. "WHAT?!" he asked, incredulous.
"We're going to have to land this thing in a few minutes and I need to know if we still have a tire over there," I explained. "It's going to get real interesting if we don't."

He checked, and reported a good tire. I had one on my side too, so with a prayer for the nose wheel that we couldn't see, I put us in the pattern for the local uncontrolled field. "Cross your fingers," I told them as I lined up on final. But the plane settled in perfectly and rolled down the centerline without any issues. Apparently the landing gear was fine. I taxiied to a stop in the transient parking area and got out to check the plane over. After careful inspection, I found a noticable fresh dent on the right side wheel strut and a couple of slight scrapes farther back towards the tail on the bottom. As I finished checking, a caravan of cars from the picnic appeared as everyone there had piled into cars to come see the daredevil and his craft up close.

Everyone was laughing and hooting, and the host was laughing hardest of all. I had thought that he at least would be a tad upset, but as it turned out, the antenna was to an old subscription-only broadcast network that was long out of business and his wife had been nagging him for two years to get it off the roof. Well he'd put her off time and time again, but I'd removed it completely in about two seconds. According to witnesses in the yard, the antenna was broken off the roof at it's base and launched about 70 feet, landing right out near the road just a short distance from where the trash service would be picking it up. Even my passengers finally loosened up and decided that it had all been good fun after all. I think the only one that realized how close we'd come to eating dirt was me and I didn't have the heart to tell them.

Of course when we got back to my friend's house, we found out that his wife was not amused. In fact she was downright pissed. But then she never did have a very good sense of humor.

And if the rental people ever saw the dent in the plane, they never asked me about it.

But that stunt still marked the end of my low-flight days for a long, long time to come.