Strike Force Behind The Book: strikeforce.mp3 Writers Roundtable Interview With Dale Brown ATARI ACT OF WAR: DIRECT ACTION LINKS Dale Brown Interview With: Peter Anthony Holder When a former pilot turns his hand to thrillers you can take their authenticity for granted. His writing is exceptional and the dialogue, plots and characters are first-class... far too good to be missed.' --Sunday Mirror ‘Dale Brown is a superb storyteller’ --WASHINGTON POST ‘Dale Brown is the best military adventure writer in the country’ --CLIVE CUSSLER

A Little Heart-Thumper
by Dale Brown, 2008

ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED AT TheBigFiveOh.com Blog @ Yahoo.Com, July 06, 2008

Fourth of July in Tahoe is always crowded, but this year it seemed it was doubly so, and extended for many more days before the Fourth.

I think it's a combination of high fuel prices forcing many folks who would take longer trips to stay closer to home, as well as the smoke from the fires in California driving many folks to travel up to the (relatively) clear air in the mountains. The smoke has decreased visibility here somewhat but it's not too bad.

I took a test flight in the Aztec yesterday to check out the new GAMI tuned fuel injectors my brother Ken installed and to get some instrument practice in. Flying over the Sierra, we could see a thick layer of smoke covering most of the Sacramento Valley. It was especially thick around Blue Canyon.

I learned a lot in that short flight. The Aztec may look beefy and rather ponderous, but it will not slow down in a clean configuration in a descent at all even with low power settings. Compounding the situation is the Aztec's low gear and flap speeds. You have to be well prepared for an instrument approach to avoid overspeeding and damaging stuff on the plane.

My GPS approach into Minden was a bust. I should have been properly configured, at the right altitude, and slowed down twenty miles out. Instead, I arrived over the initial approach fix too fast, so I couldn't descend at the proper speed to follow the approach path. I arrived at the runway way too high.

Because I was simulating an actual approach in poor weather, I would not have been able to see the runway at the missed approach point, so I had to fly the missed approach procedure.

No problem--that's what practice is for. The second try went much better.

In the busy pattern, we had another glitch occur--a flickering left main gear down light. The light was solid when I put the gear down, but not any more. Now it's not certain if the left main gear is down and locked.

Cycling the gear--raising and then lowering them again--is not advisable in this situation unless you can't reach a suitable airport with the gear down. Some suggest flying near a control tower where the controllers might be able to tell you if the gear is down or not, but Minden doesn't have a control tower, and that's a risky maneuver anyway. Slowing down and yawing the plane--shaking it side to side with the rudder--sometimes helps, but not this time.

The Aztec has a manual hydraulic system pump, but that didn't help. It also has an emergency system that uses compressed carbon dioxide to blow the gear down, and I considered using it. But this was a flickering light, not a completely extinguished light. It looked like an electrical glitch to me, not a gear problem.

If you're going to choose an inflight emergency to deal with, an unsafe gear indication is one of the more benign ones. The survival rate of a collapsed gear is almost 100%. The plane gets scratched up, you might lose a few antennas, and you may have to tear down an engine if the propeller hits the runway, but everyone walks away just fine.

Pilots with this kind of emergency get into trouble not because of the emergency itself, but they get distracted or panicked while dealing with it and forget to properly fly the airplane. I was determined not to allow a relatively minor problem turn into a disaster.

It was probably my smoothest and slowest landing ever...and we landed on all three.

I avoided tight turns and hard braking--anything that might cause the gear to collapse if it really was broken. We made it back to the hangar just fine. Ken will be carefully inspecting the gear in the next few days to see what's going on.

That glass of wine sure tasted good after I got back home!

We are still planning to fly the Aztec to Ft. Knox, Kentucky in a couple weeks for my brother Jim's change of command ceremony, where he'll take command of an armored officer training battalion. But I have my American Airlines reservations in place in case we can't find the glitch.

Welcome to AirBattleForce.Com Lake Tahoe, Nevada, USA Cyberspace home of: Dale Brown readermail@dalebrown.info