Unusual Attitudes: Is That a UAV or an Angel?

Fellow pilots, are we doomed to go the way of white-gloved lady elevator operators and those humans who used to answer telephones?

Last October I was in the kitchen fooling around with my sourdough starter and watching network TV coverage of the helium space balloon that "got loose" from a backyard in Colorado. The guy who designed and glued it together was so frantic he alerted the media when he realized his badly behaved 6-year-old son was missing and probably inside. It was really exciting, with jets scrambling and airlines diverting while the news helicopters tracked this thing as it floated toward Denver. Alas, there was no emergency since it was very unmanned, with neither aliens nor big-mouth 6-year-olds on board. But it took me back a few years to another "unmanned" event, this one on a Sunday morning in late fall.

In the kitchen again, this time wallowing in the glorious mess of baking Kentucky hootenholler whiskey cakes for Christmas. At the part where you "moosh" raisins and nuts into the bourbon-laced batter with your hands, the phone rang. I left it to the answering machine until I heard an obviously upset man's voice saying he really, really needed to talk to me.

"Oh, gee, I'm glad you're there. This is Pete So-and-So from New Carlisle." I remembered the guy; he was one of the Flying Angels and owned an Aeronca Champ that won the bomb-drop contest (I came closer but was unfairly disqualified for cheating).

Flying Angels is a unique club. Its members own and maintain Andy Barnhart Memorial Airport northeast of Dayton, Ohio. I've got to say that, from the air, this airport looks kind of weirdly surreal. There's a "normal" clubhouse on the north side of the east-west runway, but from there it's an aeronautical ghetto with odd-shaped hangars, leaning electric poles and a tangled network of wires that look like Christmas lights strung by drunken elves. (Boy, am I going to be in trouble about this one but, yes, I'm sure it's all to code). As unlikely as it seems, stashed under roof in this shantytown are lovingly restored antiques and homebuilts, some quite rare and most of them very actively flown. You "get it" when you realize that New Carlisle is just north of the Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and many Angels are expert craftsmen from the museum's restoration facility.

When I came back to southern Ohio in the '80s, the Angels ventured way outside their comfort zone and invited me, an FAA inspector, to one of their meetings. The safety talk morphed into a session of those questions that always start with "I know this guy who … ." I leveled with them about what a pilot should do if the "what if" ever happened because I suspected it probably had or was going to.

"Don't imagine you'll get a break for spilling your guts; keep your mouth shut even if you feel guilty as hell, and get some legal advice. And if this 'what if' thing has already happened, let's talk after the meeting." Some months later I bought the iconic Cub 906 (which Steven Coonts finally offered to sell back, and how I wish I'd taken him up on the offer) from member Lila Brown and, to this day, I'm an honorary and fiercely proud member … even if they lied about me cheating in last summer's bomb-drop contest.

Meetings of most flying clubs start on a high note with the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag, but from there on, it's downhill. Everybody fidgets through the minutes and long-winded treasurer reports and tunes out those same two or three members who like to hear themselves talk. Finally, they vote for stuff that was already decided upon at an earlier board meeting.

Not so the Flying Angels. On my first visit, when the new president proposed he be "compensated" for his time, a near riot broke out. The boos and catcalls and waving fists were glorious, and I loved their outrage and passion and fierce independence.

Andy Barnhart is only a short distance from Urbana, Ohio, and flying to Urbana Grimes Field (I73) for Sunday breakfast is a time-honored tradition in these parts. The original little terminal building has an old-fashioned airport restaurant, and on this late November Sunday morning, after church, of course, a gaggle of Flying Angels had headed over for pancakes and coffee. That Pete's 65 Continental quit on final approach didn't seem to be too unusual, and he landed no-sweat on the hard surface, rolling off into the grass to clear the runway for other traffic. But his buddies were already parked up at the restaurant and unaware of his predicament.

So he climbed out, and you can probably fast-forward to what happened next. Who knows where the throttle was positioned when he hand-propped it, but probably either too far open or it crept forward when the engine fired. And the little Champ did what little Champs — manned or unmanned, not firmly attached to the ground and with full power — will always do. It launched itself into the wild blue, narrowly clearing the roof of a hangar. Performance was wonderful with no weight except avgas, and it climbed to 12,000 feet on a subsequent two-hour, very solo cross-country headed (thank heavens) south of the Columbus, Ohio, metropolitan area.

Since this was pre-9/11, there was no Homeland Security to take Pete into custody and the military didn't deploy heat-seeking missiles. Several Ohio Highway Patrol aircraft tracked the Champ since there were genuine concerns about where it would descend back onto Mother Earth. The tanks finally ran dry and the Champ called it quits over a sparsely populated area near Coshocton. Witnesses said it descended in kind of a porpoising motion and impacted a drainage ditch in a farm field, sadly in the nose-down cycle of the porpoise. Otherwise it might have been a not-half-bad landing.

My worried pilot friend wanted to know what to expect from the feds and, God forgive me, I probably uttered that phrase dear to the heart of every FAA inspector, "Well, it's not in my district. … " But I recovered my wits and repeated my earlier advice: "Don't just spill your guts. Keep your mouth shut and get some legal advice (I can give you some names) and get a NASA ASRS form. I think you're looking at a suspension, and the NASA thing probably won't help since this is an accident, but it can't hurt."

Normally a "careless and reckless" (91.13) violation doesn't stand alone, but is tagged on to some other dastardly thing you're charged with like low passes over your girlfriend's house or cloud flying without an instrument ticket. But pilotless, hand-propped airplane events, in my experience, are the exception. Yeah, I know, almost any pilot who owns a flying machine without a starter has done it (this story was written by one) but you're hanging way out. Even with extra caution, good intentions and skill, you need a healthy dose of luck. If it gets away you lose your airknocker (and maybe a Citation X or Lear), your pilot certificate and maybe some body parts.

Understand I am not advocating this but, with nobody around, I would pull Cub 906 out of the hangar and drag the tailwheel into a really deep hole in the grass. I'd chock the mains, prime it, pull the prop through with the switch off, crack the throttle and turn the fuel valve off. I'd know where to set the throttle, I'd know it didn't "creep" and I'd know it would start on the first or second try. When it fired, I'd adjust the throttle and run around, hanging on to whatever I could, and kick the chocks. Then I'd leap in to get the fuel back on before it quit. Most normal-size people can prop airplanes like the Cub from behind with one hand on the throttle, which is much safer, but I can't. I'm incredibly strong but, OK, "challenged" when it comes to upper body mass and strength … and that's all I'm gonna say about that.

Things had finally calmed down that night. The Champ was on the ground, nobody was hurt and I was dribbling bourbon on the hootenhollers hot out of the oven when the phone rang. It was a buddy, Bruce Cornett, an Ohio Highway Patrol trooper pilot whom I'd flown with when he was a student.

"You will never believe this story but I swear it's true. … I was flying all morning, tracking a pilotless Aeronca Champ around southeastern Ohio. …"

Postscript: Life went on and I didn't hear any more from Pete. Evidently the incident slipped through the cracks or some sensible head decided a runaway Champ wasn't the crime of the century. The Columbus FSDO released the wreckage without looking at it, and the Angels hauled the pieces back to New Carlisle. The pilot made sure his paperwork was in order, kept his head down and wisely declined an offer to appear on national TV. I think there was talk about a 709 (re-examination) but it never happened, and now he lives in Alabama, flying an L-2 that makes a yearly pilgrimage to Andy Barnhart field for its annual. Once a Flying Angel, always a Flying Angel.

And I've been practicing, guys, so just wait until the picnic and bomb drop next summer!