Humility: A Fly Baby Pilot’s Hard Reality Check

Back in ancient Rome, if the commander of a legion gained a great victory, he would be allowed to enter the city in a triumphal parade. Wagons would show the haul of loot, prisoners would wail in their chains, and the general himself would ride in all his polished glory in a great war-chariot.

But with the general rode a slave. The slave was assigned to keep the great victor humble. He’d remind the general that he was a human being, not a god. He’d claim the general’s lorica made his butt look big, claim every good-looking woman who winked at the hero was actually a man, and wrinkle his nose suspiciously every time the chariot passed a stockyard. All during the great parade, the slave would remind the general that he put his toga on one fold at a time, like any other man.

Two thousand years later, we don’t have slaves. We have airplanes instead.

I hadn’t been having a real good day (to start with) and decided to strap on my single-seat, open-cockpit Fly Baby for a quick visit to a nearby airport. I’d flown to that field quite often, but today, the active runway was the opposite of most of my previous visits. I knew, though, that the ground dropped away radically at the approach end, and I’d heard mention of some turbulence.

No matter. I’d been flying Fly Babies for years and had about 500 hours.

But on short final, the bottom dropped out. Airspeed evaporated like dry ice in the Sahara. I slammed the stick to the aft stop, and my left hand started to ram the throttle forward.

Let us pause, for a moment, with the Continental happily idling, the bracing wires singing a gay tune, and a faint whimper rising from the cockpit:

You see, a Fly Baby doesn’t have a lot of things people expect these days. Doors, a canopy, and pitch trim, etc., were all sacrificed to the goddess of simplicity.

A major thing it doesn’t have is any sort of shock absorption capability in the landing gear. No springy steel. No oleos. No bungees. No “Land-o-Matic.” Just a fraction of an inch of Mr. Goodyear’s best, and a puff or two of air.

So there I was, heading down …

WHAM!

We hit with a slam I hadn’t felt for years. The aircraft rebounded into the air. The Continental finally caught. I kept us from hitting again and established a climb. My gaze shot left and right. Both wings were in place, and landing wires were no slacker than normal. No shouts on the radio about parts left behind. Doubts warred. I had plenty of runway left. Should I pull the power, land, and check the aircraft over?

Just then I looked down into the face of a man who had been working on his airplane. I could see the grin. There had been two airplanes waiting to take off behind me.

Sad to say, that clinched the decision. I didn’t want to be seen; I wanted to climb under a rock somewhere and curse the Wright Brothers. I kept climbing and headed for home, just 7 miles away.

In retrospect, I feel less guilty about my decision not to try to salvage the landing. I was definitely rattled. I could have brought the aircraft around for another approach, but would have had to face the sink again. It was probably better that I took 10 minutes to settle down on the way back to a familiar runway.

I was still jittery as I turned final to my home field. I stayed much too high on approach and ended up in a prolonged slip on short final. I then overflared. The crosswind waggled the nose. I added a bit of power and managed to ease the wheels onto the runway.

My mind unclenched as the Baby rolled out normally. Roll down to the hangar, spin the tail around, and kill the switches.

And then for the first time, I remembered it. One luxury my Fly Baby did have was a recording G-meter. I looked.

It was pegged at the maximum reading: +4.0 G’s.

With a feeling of dread, I unfolded myself from the cockpit and walked around the wing to examine the gear.

No damage. The axle might have a slight bend to it, but I couldn’t swear the bend hadn’t been there before. No cracks in the wheels, no gouges out of the tires, no stripped bolts, no broken welds, no snapped wires, and the bottom longerons where the gear legs attach flowed with nary a kink. I noticed the rubber cuff around the gas-tank filler tube. The cuff was about a one-eighth inch above the level of the surrounding sheet metal. Either the gas tank flattened slightly on impact, dragging the tube down, or the metal skins flexed and shoved the cuff up.

Either way, that is one strong homebuilt.

I had been feeling like hot stuff. Touch-and-goes had become routine in an aircraft that many find difficult to land smoothly. Maybe I’ve been so full of myself that I haven’t been listening; perhaps the airplane decided that whispering in my ear wasn’t enough. There’s nothing like a nearly bent bird to point out both one’s flaws and one’s mortality.

Any landing you can learn from is a good landing. On that basis, maybe I didn’t do too badly …