AOPA Turbine Pilot Magazine - July 2014 - 96

P&E

96 | 

NEVER AGAIN

Passing 5,400 feet we heard a muffled
pow/blam, had immediate white smoke in
the cabin, and a spray pattern of oil on the
windscreen. I put out an immediate mayday,
and opened the window to clear the smoke.
My son? Being of the Y generation, Taylor
turned on his cellphone video and told our
passenger to cinch down her seatbelt.
Birmingham cleared us to land on any
runway and ATC started to tell me where
the freeways were. I did not think we had
engine power to nurse it the eight more
miles to the field. I did play with throttle and
mixture to see if there was any power setting that gave me any horsepower, but when
I pulled the propeller out to increase glide,
nothing happened. I slowed to 100 knots,
trimmed, and everything settled to the nominal 1,000-feet-per-minute rate of descent
and about 1,100 to 1,200 rpm. The prop was
driving the engine and clanking and vibrating. I reached down and switched tanks.
There were no freeways in sight; I-59
was too far north and I-20 was too far

south-and I could see neither. Nothing
hard-surfaced was showing up anywhere,
just lots of trees. My son kept pointing out the Birmingham-Shuttlesworth
International Airport at 12:30 and kept scanning the instrument panel and the outside
with his cell phone. I was committing to
the only open field in my view at about 10
o'clock, with a north-to-south orientation
and trees all around. It appeared to be about
2,000 feet long (turned out to be about eight
acres with a fenceline down the middle).
At 1,800 feet (900 agl) we were
approaching abeam the north end of the
field on pretty much a high left base. I
turned left, or south, to about 150-degree
heading, extended the gear and full flaps,
trimmed some nose up, and then S-turned
and slipped to the right to attempt to get
down in the northern half of the field. I
really had to dump the nose down in the slip
to aim where I wanted to touch down. As we
lined up parallel to the fenceline, I could see
a gray barn at the far south end of the field.

Where I wished to touch down ended up
about 1,000 feet behind me. My estimated
touchdown speed was 90 knots; we bounced
twice, and the brakes were locked. Our skid
marks showed up about 300 feet prior to
the barn, which I was keeping to the right.
As we hit the southern edge of the gravel
drive leading up the barn, we went airborne
again and into the treeline at 50 knots and 15
degrees nose up. I was aiming at light spots
between the trees, which were mostly small
oaks. We did not hit any head-on.
The right wingtip light was removed by
a pole next to the barn, but the left wing hit
a tree with enough force to turn us left 90
degrees before we came to a stop by a hefty
tree, which caught the airframe at the right
wing root where the door hinges are. The
door flew off and landed about 30 feet away;
my sunglasses and my son's cellphone went
another 100 feet down the same track.
My son unstrapped, helped our passenger out, and pulled my left leg free where it
was jammed between the instrument panel

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AOPA Turbine Pilot Magazine - July 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of AOPA Turbine Pilot Magazine - July 2014
