Soon after Brother Dave took off from Douglas Municipal Airport in Charlotte it was obvious even to me that something was wrong — we had stopped gaining speed and altitude.
Imagine yourself in a car, going 45 miles an hour on an interstate access ramp. You try to accelerate to 65 mph so you can merge into traffic, but your car won’t go any faster. You’re stuck at 45. That’s was our problem – the plane had enough speed to take off but it wouldn’t accelerate.
Dave was carrying valuable cargo, my sons, Bo and Mark. The four of us were on our way to Atlanta. Dave was treating us to an afternoon at the zoo at Grant Park and an evening of baseball, an Atlanta Braves game.
He opened his mike, radioed the tower, and declared an emergency. And then he turned the single engine plane around and headed back toward Douglas.
Declaring an emergency is a drastic measure, something no pilot wants to do. It puts all of the airport’s assets at the pilot’s disposal – to start with he get his choice of runways and he goes to the head of the line of planes waiting to land. But when he gets down there will be questions — and it better have been an emergency.
At the plane approached the end of the runway Dave had chosen he tried to reduce power. But he couldn’t. It was like the throttle was stuck, he couldn’t make the plane go faster, and he couldn’t slow it down, either.
That’s when he switched off the engine, pressed the button of his mike, and began talking, fast, describing what he thought was wrong with the plane. I knew what he was doing, and it finally dawned on me that we might be in trouble. Every word he spoke was being recorded and he was leaving a record for the crash investigators.
Only we didn’t crash. We glided, silently, landed softly on the runway and coasted to a stop.
And then we went home?
Oh, no, no, no. Dave rented another plane and flew us to Atlanta. We had a wonderful time.
Coming Friday: The Hike Of A Lifetime Lottery
Brother Dave and I were jammed together tighter than Dick’s hat band, like Saturday night on the midway of the N.C. State Fair, times two.