Unusual Attitude

No, this isn’t a reference to The War of the Roses. I’m thinking about a late-summer transcontinental trip with former AOPA colleague Katie Pribyl in her classic Cessna 180. She tried to kill me in the Rocky Mountains with a navigational error, and I returned the favor with my own version of attempted murder by under-fueling her airplane in Kansas.

Fortunately, we ended up bailing each other out, and forgiving—if not exactly forgetting—our mutual transgressions.

The wrong turn in the Colorado mountains was easy to make, even in the age of GPS, since our destination was a grass strip not listed on any aeronautical chart or aviation database. Katie had been there once before and thought she knew the way, but she zigged when she should have zagged. Then the warning signs started popping up to let us know things were going downhill—because the terrain ahead was all uphill.

First, radio transmissions from other airplanes near our destination airport got weaker, not stronger, as they would have if we were getting closer to them. Then, when the airport didn’t appear at a bend in the river where we expected to see it, an escape maneuver was our best option. Having practiced hugging a hillside, dropping lift flaps, adding full power, and turning toward lower terrain, the maneuver itself was a nonevent. Even at 10,000 feet msl, a Cessna 180 requires precious little real estate to perform an actual one-eighty. But this was the first and only time I’d seen that maneuver as other than a hypothetical “what-if” exercise.

My own under-fueling folly in Kansas is much harder to explain away.

I was perched on a shaky stepladder at a self-serve pump, and the sensor on the fuel nozzle clicked the pump off about when I thought it should. Fuel consumption on the previous leg had been less than usual, I reasoned, because we started high in the Rockies. I stuck a finger down into the tank and felt the cool presence of blue fuel about an inch below the rim. (I’d previously spilled avgas at another fuel stop and didn’t want to repeat that odoriferous episode.) But that inch or more of air at the top of the tank should have been occupied by avgas, and failing to take on every available drop for what I knew would be a long leg was stupid.

Fortunately, Katie knows her airplane and its idiosyncrasies. When its notoriously jumpy fuel gauges started settling earlier than they usually do, she made a wise call to divert to a rural airstrip in southern Indiana. There, we landed with only 30 minutes of fuel remaining when, by my calculations, we should have had a full hour. It was only then that I fully appreciated how my lazy fueling error had put us in peril.

So why didn’t our blunders result in bent metal? A willingness to question our own actions, accept our fallibility, and back each other up was our best defense.

Am I really dumb enough to pump less than full fuel into a tank I intend to top off? Why, yes I am. Admitting that unflattering truth, embarrassing as it is, sure beats clinging to a false self-image of pilot perfection and running the tanks dry.

Is Katie fallible enough to fly up the wrong canyon while returning to an airfield she’s visited before? She sure is. But she’s also courageous enough to recognize a deteriorating situation and reverse course without letting pride get in the way.

Weeks after we’d returned to our homes in Maryland, I sent Katie a work-related email that contained an oblique reference to my regrettable Kansas mistake.

Her reply: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

OK, then, let me spell it out for you: “I’m referring to the time I didn’t fully fill the tanks in your 180 and we had to land short in Indiana.”

“I know!” she wrote back. “I was trying to show you I had forgotten all about it.”

Am I really so dense as to completely miss it when a fellow pilot graciously tries to let me off the hook?

Why, yes I am!