“That was unexpected,” Roy said.
“What? That I didn’t pay attention and almost killed us?”
“No, that we lost altitude like that. We need to head back.”
The engine sputtered, and the plane started to vibrate. That didn’t feel right. I started to tense up and white-knuckle the yoke.
“That’s not good,” Roy, now officially renamed Captain Obvious, said.
“Should I go faster to get us back sooner?” I asked.
“No. Keep climbing like I told you. The more altitude we have, the longer and farther we can glide, and time will be our friend if we lose the engine and need to glide in,” Roy said.
Now that he said it, I could see his logic. More time and more altitude increased our options, the same as in football.
“Hey, Roy, should there be mist coming out from under the instrument panel?
“Crap! We’re getting either smoke or fuel vapor through the firewall. I have the controls,” Roy said as he put his hands on his yoke to fly the airplane.
“You have the controls!”
He banked the aircraft into a turn.
“It smells like gas, not exhaust,” I said.
“What does that tell us?”
“I’d say we have a fuel leak, but we still have power. So long as the engine’s running, we want to use it, right?” I asked.
“Fuel leaks don’t necessarily mean fires. Here, it’s a judgment call. The engine’s running, and this mist is not indicative of a fire, so my professional judgment is that we keep using it.”
“If we had a fire, we’d have to shut down the engine, wouldn’t we?”
“Yes, that’s right. At least you’ve been reading the emergency procedures,” Roy said.
We continued to climb, but suddenly, the engine sputtered and died, and there was a puff of smoke.
“Okay,
He got onto the radio, and when he said, “declaring an emergency,” it suddenly became real. The only reason I wasn’t wondering if there were parachutes was he had said it as if he were discussing the box scores for a ball game. He was one cool customer.
I was confused when Roy began to lose altitude and turned us away from the airport. “I’m going to attempt to land on that road,” Roy told me. “Radio it in, so they know where we are. We can’t reach the airport in a glide from this point, so I’m looking for the safest alternative.”
I called air traffic control to tell them that we had lost power and planned to land on a county road. I wasn’t quite as calm as Roy had been.
Roy made it all look easy as he landed us. When we came to a stop, the front of the airplane billowed smoke. Roy and I hurried to unbuckle ourselves and get out of the aircraft as fast as possible. There was a small fire extinguisher under the seat that Roy grabbed as he jumped out. Then he popped the access panel in the engine cowling. There weren’t any flames. It looked like a fuel line had come loose, and there was smoke rising from a puddle of aviation gas on top of the engine.
“I’ll kill him,” Roy said, showing emotion for the first time.
“Who?” I asked.
“I hired my wife’s brother as a mechanic. He was supposed to check all the planes yesterday.”
That would do it.
◊◊◊
Unbeknownst to us, there was panic at the flight school. Cassidy and Brook had beaten us back to the airport from their lessons, and Roy’s wife had run out to tell them we’d declared an emergency. They’d gathered in the office so they could listen to air traffic control. When I said we were going to try to land the plane, Cassidy hit her emergency button on her phone because they could hear the fear in my voice. That sent an alert to almost everyone I knew.
Fritz confirmed it was a real emergency and notified my parents. My mom was in the middle of showing a farm down the road. Guess who was surprised when their mother showed up with a carload of clients at our smoking plane parked in the middle of the country? That would be me.
In the background, you could hear sirens as they rushed to where they expected we’d crashed. Mom all but put the car into a power slide as she slammed on the brakes to stop. Her clients would remember to wear their seat belts after that display of driving. I vowed not to take her to any more driving classes if that was the result.
“I’d go hide, if I were you,” I told Roy, and hurried to my mom’s car to open her door.
“Oh, thank God!” she said as she got out and about choked the life out of me with the bear hug she put me in.
“I’m fine,” I said, and then jumped right into damage control. “Roy was with me the whole time and knew exactly what to do. The airplane just had a mechanical failure, and we had to land it. No big deal.”
Welp, I was wrong about it not being a big deal. We soon had local, county, and state police, and fire and rescue all on the scene. Based on experience, this would quickly turn into a circus when the press got wind of the errant landing. I’m not proud of what I did next.
