Clayton Fisher's Greatest Adventures
"Clayton Fishers Greatest Adventures Part 7
(And Their Consequences)"
by Clayton Fisher

A couple of month ago, I landed sort of hard with my Chinook. Wasn’t awful hard, but hard enough that the inside half of the aluminum wheel on the left side – broke – split around the inside edge of the brake drum. I saw it wobble and heard the click, click of the brake lever hitting the wheel. “Bummer”, I thought, but it rolled me on back to the hangar. Next day I called Dale at ASAP and had one on the way pronto. I put the new one on and had every thing back work wise in a few days. A fluke, I thought. Must have hit a big ole frozen cowpile last winter and cracked it, and it must have just now decided to give up. Couldn’t possibly happen again, or so I rationalized. That is until the other side broke a couple weeks ago. Susan and I landed on a newly refinished black asphalt runway. A combination of the black oily runway and sun angle blew out my depth perception, and I went “kerplunk” from about 2 feet off and wobble, wobble, wobble…”Aw @#$%*!” “This could be embarrassing,” I thought as I taxied up to the tie down area. Since Susan was with me I decided to leave her in the pilot lounge, go get the car 20 miles away, and come back and get her. Luckily the broke wheel had one more take off and landing in it. And the best part, nobody saw my trouble!

Now my Chinook has almost 500 hours on her, and as you might expect from reading my “Greatest Adventures” stories, I have made a lot of hard landings. I’ve run over a lot of cowpiles, gopher mounds, logs sticking out of sand bars and unseen ditches and ruts in fields with tall grass. Also, what I have done in the past -great practice for cross controlling- was to taxi just above stall speed down a grass runway (don’t try this on hard surface) with one wheel on the ground and one wheel off. In order to do this one must push forward stick to keep the lower wheel on the ground, just the right amount of right or left flaperon to keep the right wing up and the low wing from hitting the ground, and enough reverse rudder to keep you and the airplane moving straight down the runway. Then, if you have enough runway, bring her back up on the other side. It’s a little tricky but it shore is fun. The problem is that is puts side slip on the tires, which tend to separate from the wheel, and put a lot of pressure on the inside half of the wheel. I quit doing this because I kept shearing off inner tube valve stems. Yeah, yeah, I know – imperfect machines built by imperfect people, and sooner or later one of them is gonna get stupid! Anyway, the little wheels took way more than their share of punishment before metal fatigue finally got um.

One good thing that had come from this, I added “wheel check” to my 50 hour inspection. Pull um off, deflate um, pull the brake drum and look for cracks, especially if your bird is high time or has had several “non-greaser” landings.

I sometimes wonder what the equivalent of 500 hours and 5 years would be in human terms. I know she’s just a machine, but she does talk to me thru my stick and rudder. She does purr in my ear and get me high. She does require a goodly amount of TLC, and she ain’t cheap, just like – well, you know. Although she is about as low maintenance as any old girl your gonna find flying around out there anywhere. We may be about the same age – my Chinook and me. We’ve both had a really good run at life, no complaints.

I do recon, tho, that we could have been a little easier on each other.

“I’ve got a long list of real good reasons
For all the things I’ve done.
I’ve got a picture in the back of my mind
Of what I’ve lost and what I’ve won.
I’ve survived every situation
Knowing when to freeze and when to run
And regret is just a memory written on my brow,
And there’s nothing I can do about it now!”
From a song by Willie Nelson

Well, till another adventure happens, here’s honkin at ya! Yeah Yeah, I know – there’s no fool like an old fool.


 

Clayton Fisher Story 8...