Never Again: Mother’s Day get-home-itis

Our family-owned business deals in new and used resistance welding machinery, and we’ve utilized general aviation for corporate travel since the early 1980s. After a succession of single-engine aircraft, by the date of this flight in the spring of 1994, I was the proud owner of a 1969 PA–30 Twin Comanche.

When a like-new welder we had previously sold came up for auction near Latrobe, Pennsylvania, on the Saturday before Mother’s Day, it was an ideal excuse to extend a business trip to Cleveland, Ohio, and try to snag a bargain before flying home to Chattanooga, Tennessee.

I expected to be home on Saturday afternoon, and to celebrate Mother’s Day I had promised to take my mom and my wife to lunch after church on Sunday. Perfect May weather made for an easy flight from Lost Nation Airport to what is now Arnold Palmer Regional Airport in Latrobe.

The welder went too high at the auction, but at least I was able to meet the successful bidder and offer technical support. With plenty of daylight left for the planned 3.5-hour flight home, I was soon in the rental car headed back to the airport. Only then did I notice the towering cumulus clouds in all directions.

The internet-based flight planning services we now take for granted were not available 25 years ago, but a call to flight service confirmed that it would be challenging to fly home through a line of thunderstorms stalled over the mountains of West Virginia.

My Twin Comanche had monochrome radar and plenty of range with tip tanks, so I probably could have picked my way through the storms. However, since the briefer mentioned that the weather on Sunday morning would be benign, with just an overcast layer, I figured that discretion should trump valor.

No problem, I thought. I’m tired from the trip and I should spend another night and fly home early tomorrow morning. I can still arrive in plenty of time for my Mother’s Day lunch date.

Although the forecast for the next morning sounded good, for some reason I did not sleep well that night. I got up early and the airport was dark and deserted when I arrived.

The briefer had a big surprise for me when I called: Widespread icing conditions and mountain obscurations were now forecast for the Appalachian region between Latrobe and Chattanooga. However, so far that morning there had been no reports of “known ice” and the cloud layer was “only” from 7,000 feet to 10,000 feet at Latrobe, with the freezing level at 9,000 feet.

Being young and naïve, plus not wanting to disappoint my mother and wife, I told the briefer that I would “go take a look and give a report.” Although my airplane’s only ice protection was a heated pitot tube, I reasoned that my little twin had enough power to zoom through the freezing level even if the clouds contained ice.

I took off in the dark and the first part of the IFR flight went well. As I climbed into the clouds, which were exactly as forecast at 7,000 feet, I thought I had it made because the wings stayed clean for the first 2,000 feet. However, when I saw rime ice accumulating on the front of the tip tanks and then along the leading edge of the wings and the windshield, I now had the dubious distinction of being the pilot who would report known ice.

OK, I thought as I pushed the twin’s throttles to maximum and went through 9,000 feet,It’s time to expedite the climb and zoom out of this. I pulled back on the yoke to increase the airplane’s angle of attack.

That tactic worked long enough to barely reach 10,000 feet, where I was supposed to break out of the clouds. However, the airplane would not climb farther and I didn’t see the sky. When I confessed my problem to the controller, he informed me that tops in that area were now at 13,000 feet.

With the Twin Comanche at a high angle of attack and both engines wide open, it was a struggle to maintain altitude. Soon the airplane started to shake and shudder and there was no way I was climbing any higher. With a load of ice on the wings and probably on the belly too, I was on the edge of a stall and out of options. One way or the other, I was going down.

Although I was alone in the airplane, I could hear my longtime instructor, Ben Carr, urging me to “Quit just sitting there and do something!” I radioed the controller that I could not maintain altitude and would be descending. I had rolled the dice and lost.

I accepted my fate and calmly lowered the nose. This ended the shaking, but I started downhill through the clouds at a good clip and without time to check how high the mountains were below me. Thankfully, I had some room to spare when I broke out over a mountainous area of West Virginia which I later learned is often called “Ice Alley.”

I was able to maintain altitude above the mountains, but it took the rest of the flight for the large load of ice to sublimate off. I landed at Chattanooga in clear blue skies like nothing had happened, and I never told my mother and wife about the close call.

It’s still sobering to relate the story today, especially now that I’ve learned one possible outcome could have been a tailplane stall caused by ice accumulation on the horizontal stabilizer. Because recovery from a tailplane stall requires control inputs opposite to a normal stall, I probably would have spun out of control and crashed in the mountains.

I should also add that sometime during my icing encounter I promised the Lord that my next airplane would have ice protection if he got me out of that mess. He kept his part of the deal and I did too, having now owned several airplanes with either boots or TKS “weeping wings.”

And, although my current Beech Bonanza A36 has a TKS system certified for known ice, I’ve never to put it to the test, especially after a friend noted that “it’s usually VFR on the day of the funeral.”

Tom Snow is a business owner and commercial multiengine pilot living in Tennessee.