“Well, in my illustrious 270+ hours of recreational flying as aprivate pilot, I just yesterday had my closest near disaster” starts off thismonth’s Close Calls pilot. He hadn’t flown for a little while so thought he would “shoot a couple circuits before heading out for a local sight-seeingflight.” The first circuit went without anything of note taking place. On ourpilot’s second touch-and-go… well that was another story. 

After landing, our pilot retracted the flaps as usual, carb-heatcold, then he smoothly applied full throttle. Within seconds of applying full takeoffpower, he “popped” right back up into the air. Before he knew it, our pilot was100 feet up and his airspeed was critically low – “I mean, really, really low”he exclaims, “Shoot!” (paraphrased).

Our pilot pushed the control column full forward. It took quite a bitof force to just get the nose down to level. All the while, the airspeed washanging in just above the stall. “What the heck is happening?” wonders our pilot.

Initially, he thought he might have “screwed up” and forgotten about the flaps,but when he looked at the flap selector it was fully up (flaps retracted) –where he had distinctly put it. “It was only after I had the plane more or lesslevel at about 500 feet and a few more comfortable knots on the dial that Ilooked over my shoulder and noticed that the flaps where still fully down (30degrees).” Repeats our pilot, “What the heck?!?!”

He continues, “I was about to radio the tower to say I needed to return(carefully) for landing. I can’t fly around very easily like this. I thenthought I should at least try to recycle the flaps, so I put the flap switchdown then back up again – and voila, the flaps came back up. Whew!”

Admits our pilot, “It must have looked like a pretty lousytouch-and-go circuit to the tower, but soon after the flaps came back up,things improved quickly. I ended up doing a couple more circuits with noproblem (visually checking the flaps prior to taking off again), and then sinceI was a lot calmer, I went off on my local sight-seeing flight.” Our pilotreturned an hour and half later with the remainder of the flight goinguneventfully.

“But for me, that was a very scary 20 seconds or so. Really, I was within aknot or two of stalling out at a couple hundred feet and a full load of fuel.That would not have ended well.” our pilot concludes as he revisits thescenario. “I’ve had three what you would call “close calls” in the years I havebeen flying – but this one scared me the most.”

Our pilot confirms that he has learned from the experience and has added to hisroutine the practice of visually checking that the flaps have extended orretracted in concurrence with the flaps position switch. He admits “I guess Ishould have always been checking visually if doing a touch-and-go, but thatnever really dawned on me. I check that the flaps work as part of thepre-flight, so why wouldn’t they work a few minutes later?”

In fact, for many PICs that very question would have been enoughto end the flight at the earliest opportunity. Fortunately for our pilot hischoice to continue the flight worked out for him.

Fly safe(r)