Musings: Human ballast

My maternal grandfather was a mechanical engineer and inventor who immigrated to the United States from Germany. Like many engineers, he was talented, creative, and knowledgeable. And like many Germans, he was stubborn. At the tail end of his successful career inventing many machines that touched the lives of billions around the world, he decided to take up flying. My father took on the task of instructing his 65-year-old father in law.

Both Dad and my grandfather had a mutual respect for each other and their respective fields. Dad was a medical doctor and accomplished ATP/CFI who started flying in his teens. He even had a stint with the airlines in his early 20s. Dad was a very conservative pilot. There were a few occasions, though, that had my dad really worried about his latest student, who had earned his private certificate and started flying—his way.

There was the time when an awful line of thunderstorms created a wall between New Jersey and my grandfather’s destination, the family’s farm airstrip on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. My dad hoped that Granddad had landed short and waited out the weather. But the approaching drone of a Cessna 206 dashed my father’s hopes. After landing, the interior of that 206 looked like a battlefield. Charts, flashlights, luggage—and, best of all, a stewpot no longer containing the beef tongue in raisin sauce he was transporting for dinner—were strewn about the cabin and baggage area. My grandfather’s sweat-soaked shirt said everything my dad suspected about the weather he just tangled with. My grandfather naturally downplayed the event. He wanted to get home, and he did. Thankfully, the 206 is a stout airplane.

There was also the time that the family was gathered in the living room one evening in my grandfather’s home. He was due to come back from New Jersey again but since it was after dark, we assumed he stayed the night. There are no lights on the runway so landing at night is out of the question. Once again, the sound of an approaching 206 raised my dad’s eyebrow. Knowing my grandfather had an established record of completing missions, Dad directed my oldest brother to get in a car and head to the approach end of the runway to shine his lights at one end and he’d do the same at the opposite end.

Impatient, my grandfather wouldn’t wait for the car to get in position at the approach end and as my brother drove down the runway with his high beams on, my grandfather overflew him and landed in a harvested corn field adjacent to the runway. Afterwards, my grandfather claimed he was blinded by the car lights, which caused him to miss the runway. Again, the tough 206 was unfazed by the off-runway excursion.

But the defining event in my grandfather’s flying career came on a cool spring morning when my dad wasn’t there. So wet was the runway that my grandfather got the nosewheel stuck despite using full aft elevator and a ton of power. With knowledge of the previous events, readers who have been paying attention know that this stubborn, mission-oriented engineer wasn’t going to let some wet ground stop him.

He trudged back to the house, eyeballed his wife and adult daughter—who were witness to the unsuccessful takeoff—and hatched a plan. He instructed his daughter (also a pilot) to sit on the airplane’s tail in order to extricate the Cessna, to which she complied. A very smart woman in her own right, my aunt Sue ashamedly admitted later that “she didn’t really think this through.”

With his human ballast on the tail, my grandfather successfully unstuck the nosewheel and put the coals to the Continental IO-520. As speed increased, mud and grass kicked up by the main wheels were now pelting my aunt. She came to the realization that he had no intention of stopping. She thought, “if I stay on the tail of this airplane, we’re both going to die.” Somewhere in the vicinity of 30 to 40 knots, she smartly rolled off the front of the stabilizer, rolling to a heap on the muddy grass, and watched as her father completed the takeoff and climbed away to the north. He didn’t circle back looking for her “I’m OK” wave, either. In fact, there wasn’t even a follow-up phone call to check on her wellness when he reached his destination.

Upon his return, he took an earful from his wife and daughter, but he wasn’t bothered. His attitude was that any child of his should have enough common sense to take care of herself. No surprise that his preferred method to teach kids how to swim was to toss them in the water and have them figure it out—supervised, of course.

My grandfather hung up his flying cleats at the age of 75 when he lost his medical. He had retired from the company that bore his name and really didn’t need the airplane much anymore. This retirement was a relief to my father, who had become rightfully worried that the FAA might target him over some of his student’s aerial antics.