Out in the practice area one day teaching power-off stalls, the Skyhawk we were flying suffered a problem with her carburetor, where the throttle could not retard the engine below 2000 RPM. It was jammed; I could advance it, but it would not retard. Ending the lesson then and there, I flew us immediately back to Manassas. Since such RPM creates far too much power and speed to land an airplane, along the way I had to devise another strategy.

Without encumbering my story with unnecessary detail, using pitch to reduce airspeed so I could deploy flaps, after several high-speed landing attempts, I slipped her over the trees, rocketing across the farmer’s pasture, across the creek, then low over the runway centerline. I had already assigned to my student task of pulling firmly on the throttle to keep the rpm as low as possible.

Then, I pulled the mixture; the engine sputtered and quit. We floated some distance, then touched down. While the flight was concluded safely, the landing successful, both of us walking away from the experience chatting about it, the stress of the unknown, my student’s fear, in other words, led him to cancel his training forever.

One of the morals of the story was for that experience to impress upon this young man, upon all folks in his uncertain state of mind, that this is not a game or a hobby, this is real. As I explained to him, his survival will hinge upon developing the skill, calm, and the focus to be able one day to manage a crisis. He apparently felt that challenge to his personality a price too high to be paid for his personal growth.

Well, we know what happened to him. What my readers don’t know yet is what happened to the airplane, the other side of the equation. Where we left her at day’s end was in the maintenance hangar into which she had been escorted after I’d nursed her back to the home field.

The mechanics set to work on her straight away. Off came her cowling, with attention paid immediately to the carburetor and related lines, cables, and fittings. By this time, work day over, I left for home.

Bright and early the next morning as I walked from my pickup truck into the office, I looked across the ramp only to find the bird back on our flight line, returned to service. Of course, the questions I asked the chief mechanic were first, what they had found wrong with her, and second, why she had been returned to service so quickly.

His unsettling response was, “We couldn’t find anything wrong, so we approved her for flight.”

My jaw dropped, eyes widened, an understandable reaction considering the experience I’d had wrestling this airplane to the ground only the day before. “Well, I didn’t make up the problem”, I said. “Something is wrong with that airplane, and it’s going to happen again to someone, hopefully not to a student on his solo.”

“I believe you”, he said, “I trust you, but we looked her over thoroughly and couldn’t find anything wrong.”

So, we all went back to work, although I publicly declared my steadfast refusal to fly that airplane again until the issue was resolved. The girls at dispatch knew better than to assign me to her again, making sure they gave me my usual airplane, the Skyhawk I always requested.

One morning several days later, I arrived at the school only to learn that this same problematic Skyhawk was now grounded down at Culpepper airport. The instructor flying her, one of my colleagues, was in the practice area with his student the afternoon before. The engine, instead of the throttle being stuck open the way it had been with me, this time simply dropped back to idle. The throttle would slide in and out, but it had no effect upon rpm, as though something up front had either broken or come loose. He made a safe, dead-stick landing at Culpepper airport directly below him, then telephoned our school for an air taxi pickup.

There the Skyhawk remained for about a week until the new carburetor arrived. Then, the maintenance team flew down to install it. She worked fine after that.

Before moving on, let us explore the general attitude following her inspection after my problem flight. “We could not find anything wrong with her,” seemed a palliative for everyone else in the school. I was dumbfounded by the cavalier attitude. An event as dramatic, immediate, potentially life-threatening as mine does not happen in a vacuum. It is a red flag that there is an issue more organic, something lurking deeper within the carburetor.

Now, I did not hang around to oversee their inspection, I only heard about it. However, if it happened to me, it can happen to someone else. In fact, it did happen to someone else. Thank goodness it was not a student; even a private pilot would have found himself in over his head, but rather to a flight instructor instead.

While a sudden event like this still is a surprise to anyone, at least a flight instructor is trained to expect that things of this nature can happen. Since few emergencies are alike and not every eventuality in aviation can be planned for, much less rehearsed, what we train for is to devise solutions.

Many years ago, my parents owned an old Volvo station wagon. For a reason known only to some creative, still-unknown vandal himself, he decided to remove the gas cap and pour sand into the gas tank. As my father approached the car to drive, he noticed sand around the filler cap. He telephoned the police, then the insurance company.

The car was towed to the dealer where the gas lines and fuel pump were replaced, carburetors rebuilt, the gas tank cleaned. When it was ready, my father picked up the car and drove happily out of the garage, then down the road. He made it about four blocks before the engine coughed and sputtered to a stop, whereupon he coasted safely into a parking lot. Naturally, he was livid, a state of mind fairly obvious to the dealer over the telephone. The service department immediately towed the car back to the shop and made right, loaning my father a company car until his was repaired.

The point of this vignette is that, while annoying, even inconvenient, a car improperly repaired, then stalling out on the roadway, usually does not become a matter of life and death. In aviation, just as in the operating room, the last words we want to hear are, “Ooops, I made a boo boo.”

For two years I had been complaining about the intermittent problem with the flaps on another of our Skyhawks, the airplane well known among my colleagues as my personal favorite. Finally, in the pattern one day with a student, the flaps refused once again to deploy. Irritated, I took over control of the airplane and landed her safely, and into the maintenance hangar she was escorted. I immediately announced to dispatch my reason for grounding her.

Walking through the hangar about an hour later, one of the mechanics, incidentally the only one of the several in our employ besides the chief mechanic who was licensed, stopped me to show that by jostling a tangled bundle of wires now dangling helplessly from an inspection access panel beneath the right wing, he could make the flaps work. Satisfied with both his discovery and having proudly shown me he could make the flaps work again, he began shoving the wires back into the hole.

Astonished, I said, “What are you doing?”

“I’m putting it back together; it’s working now,” he said innocently, absently.

“Wait a minute,” I said, “If you can jostle a bundle of wires and make the flaps work, that means there is a much deeper issue here that needs to be addressed, if only a loose connection. This will happen again. I don’t want to watch you make the flaps work here in the hangar. I want the problem fixed so that it’s not an issue for me again in the air.”

My speech seemed to be an epiphany for this young mechanic; well, one can only hope. Apparently, he had not considered the likelihood of his “repair,” his gentle caress, his nudge of the wires, not really being enough to resolve the issue. Having addressed the symptom thus was enough to satisfy him. Attacking the source of the problem took both a stern lecture and aggressive prodding by me, the pilot, one whose job description does not include maintenance on the flaps.

The pilot just wants the flaps to work when he needs them to work. If I were not mechanically inclined myself, with a keen eye and attention to detail, as well as having a modicum of common sense, this young fella would have succeeded in shoving that helpless bundle of wires back into the wing, sealed the inspection plate, then returned the airplane to service.

I immediately mentioned that A&P’s behavior and my conversation with him to my boss. My stern lecture quickly got around the office. Within minutes, the airplane suddenly benefitted from all of the mechanics descending upon her at once to figure out the problem.

About two hours later, one of the other more responsible, not-quite A&P’s tracked me down and showed me the flap motor he had just finished pulling from the wing. The motor was fine, but the plastic electrical buss attached to it was broken in several places, allowing the pieces to move in and out of contact, which would explain the intermittent operation of the flaps.

I looked at him standing there holding this dirty, broken flap motor, listening to his explanation. Then I said to him with a serious expression, in my usual sarcastic tone, because we both delighted in giving each other a hard time, “So, is it fixed yet?”

“No”, he said, chuckling, “we have to order the part; it’ll take about a week.”

“Fine”, I said in that same cold tone, “Call me when it’s fixed. Don’t talk to me before then.”

As he turned, striding back to his maintenance cave, I said, being sure to have the final word in the matter, “Why is it that I have to complain about something around here for no fewer than two years before it gets fixed?” He just smiled sheepishly, walking through the doorway and down the hall.

Another of our Skyhawks suffered damage to her empennage years before I knew her. Otherwise, she was an all-around good ship and flew well. Still, in all the years I flew her I was frustrated by her poor rudder authority. I complained bitterly about it every time I had the misfortune to fly her. For some reason apparently above my paygrade, the mischievous aviation gods thought it amusing to see to it that I was assigned this airplane on those unlucky days when we had a stiff, gusty crosswind at Manassas.

Trying to teach crosswind landing technique in an airplane with poor rudder authority amounts to more theory than actual practice, “Well, Joe, if the rudder were working properly, the landing would look more like my explanation rather than what the airplane is actually doing right now.”

Finally, after that magical two years of virtually continual complaints, the chief flight instructor was out flying her with his student. Walking back across the ramp, he stopped before me, asking with a straight face, “Why did you never tell anyone that the rudder in 66717 was for s**t.”

I said incredulously, “What are you talking about? I’ve been complaining about poor rudder authority in that airplane for the last two years.”

“Yes,” he said smiling, “but you never said it was ‘for s**t.’”

“Ah, I see, so I didn’t use the vernacular.” I said, “I will remember that tip the next time I have a maintenance issue. This must have been my problem all along; I didn’t report the squawk using the appropriate language.”

In the past, other mechanics said that they had attempted to resolve the problem, but could not, so we would just have to live with it. This time, since the chief flight instructor/chief mechanic/school president filed the complaint, the mechanics descended upon her with a determination that resolved the problem.

It turns out that the solution was as simple as adjusting the stop screws either side of the rudder to increase its travel. Presto. So, why was this adjustment not accomplished all those other times she was in the shop, the other times I complained, the times the demand for crosswind landing technique in the face of an impending storm at Manassas might have ended up sending us more safely instead to another field?

This short story seems a little different from my others. It’s geared for pilots, yes, but with an emphasis on those things over which pilots may appear to have little control: maintenance. However, this area of operations hitherto known only to someone with tools in his hands and grease on his face is where we pilots must learn to take an active role.

The understanding the public has regarding aviation usually focuses upon the stupidity or foolishness or pride of the pilot because he is the most conspicuous element of the system. The layman generally does not read accident reports nor does he understand nor harbor enough interest in aviation to want to know what happens or does not happen on the support side. His interest usually digs no deeper than the operation of the airplane in flight, and that interest quickly wanes at the arrivals gate.

Rarely, unless there is a mishap, or on the off chance someone happens to suffer through an article on the subject, does the public hear about the behind-the-scenes operations, the maintenance side of aviation. Even though what is accomplished in the maintenance shop affects every flight, events related to the airplane in flight are more spectacular and therefore garner greater public interest.

Here we have three events wherein the maintenance team was in the position to effect change, to prevent potential disaster, in one case, if only to make the pilot’s life a little easier. Instead, perhaps out of laziness or disrespect or simply nonchalance, maybe simply being too busy or too frugal, lacking knowledge, common sense, or ambition, airworthiness took a back seat.