FLYING Hanger Talk

19th May 1990

This was one of the most frightening experiences I have ever had in my flying career, and a very funny story in the pub afterwards -as they always are in hindsight.

NAC in Port Elizabeth had just done a major overhaul on both engines of a Piper Aztec ZS-PHW which was based in nearby Grahamstown. The engineer who was responsible for most of the work (Jeremy Blanford) phoned and asked if I would like to do the test flight, volunteering to join me. I always think it is a good idea to take the guy who did the work along for the ride. Gives me confidence anyway. In those days I still worked for a living and only freelanced for NAC as well as operating a King Air 200 (N221B) So I was very happy to get out of the office for a few hours.

It was a beautiful day in PE so we opted to fly along the coast towards St Francis bay and back to PE. A test flight of this nature involved running the engines at fairly high power settings for about 30 minutes at a time,if I recall correctly. All went well for about 45 minutes and we were passing the Gamtoos river mouth eastbound on our return to PE when it happened- or I at least thought it did! Jeremy and I were chatting so I was looking at the right hand engine when I saw  smoke coming out of the cowl.

He couldn't understand why quick as a wink I shut the engine down and feathered it. Jeremy hadn't seen any smoke because his back was to the engine. We were at about 3500 feet and maintaining height on one donkey,although we needed a fair amount of power. After much discussion as to what could have caused a fire Jeremy persuaded me that I had probably seen the sun glinting off the breather fairings that an Aztec has on top of the cowling. Why would a brand new engine catch fire,indeed why would it?

Mistake number 1.

Mistake number 2 was the fact that he persuaded me to restart it!! Which I did and it ran for a 3 or 4 minutes until I saw smoke again,except this time it was accompanied by flames. He had no objections this time when I feathered it. Once again he tried to convince me to continue on to PE,as I had decided to land at John English's strip - Progress airfield, which we had in sight. I wasn't going to make the same mistake again. He was fairly relaxed through all of this until I told him to unlatch his door, during a quick briefing,and also that if the engine caught fire again I would be kicking out the window  and he could follow me out on the left hand side. That got his undivided attention.

Unbeknown to us both that nearly happened.

We changed to Progress frequency -it's unmanned ,but we shouted Mayday anyhow(which John happened to hear) and joined straight in on a long final for runway 22.(I think it is?)At this stage we had probably been running the left engine at high power settings for about 10 minutes or so. The CHT was increasing!! This wasn't happening to me! I kept the speed well above blue line and we were fairly fast on the approach but the runway is long.We touched down a tad too fast and taxied off the runway at a fair pace.

We were both in a hurry to get out of the aircraft.

The engine didn't catch fire again and as the Aztec was turbocharged we even did a 3 minute rundown on No 1(left) engine. John had heard our call and was on hand with a fire extinguisher and you won't believe this,but just as well he was! I was about to shut the engine down when believe it or not, SMOKE from that side as well!!! John got to use the extinguisher.

We scurried out of the cockpit like scared rabbits.

Jeremy claims to this day that this 2nd lot of smoke was only caused by some oil spillage in the cowling and not a real fire. If it had happened two minutes earlier we might not have made the field. James Thompson flew across from Uitenhage in his Bell Jetranger and picked us up and we went straight to the Gremlins Grotto (AFC pub) for a few, make that several,calming drinks and lots of discussion.

 Debriefing in a pub is the best.

The funny part was told many beers later by the now much more relaxed engineer who says that when I first spotted the not now disputed smoke,he looked up to see that my face had turned very white. So I'm not to sure why he didn't believe me! To this day I do not know how that Aztec got back to PE from Progress? Also amazing is that according to my logbook I did another test flight a few days later in the same aircraft!

The only other time I have had a suspected fire was in the above mentioned N221B out of Cape Town.

 I will save that story for another tale.