The Captain's Seat

October 15, 2009 Archives

Transiting the Atlantic (Part 1 of 5)
France to France

On Wednesday, September 16, 2009, I found myself on the ramp in Agen, France looking over a beautiful Piper Malibu that I was preparing to fly across the Atlantic Ocean with a friend of mine.  I bumped into him at the airport about a month ago and he asked if I wanted to join him (I'll call him "Tim").  He had an empty aircraft and could use an experienced pilot (although I've never crossed the Atlantic in the front seat of an aircraft).  Between the two of us, surely we could safely depart Europe and find North America.  Once we did, it'd be easy to find Indiana; it's about right there in the middle, right?

With the preflight complete, we were ready to take the plane out for a good, long run up to check all the systems.  After a thorough check, we headed out to the runway for a test flight.  The aircraft had flown less than 100 hours in the past year, and unlike most inanimate objects, need to be used to stay healthy.  There were a few bugs to figure out, but with a satisfactory run up I called tower for takeoff clearance.  With a heavy French accent, the controller cleared us for takeoff.  Once airborne, I finally had the opportunity to see the rolling countryside from the air.  We'd just spent 3 days riding through the countryside and mountains, and it was just as beautiful from the air... if not more.  It shocked me how dry the landscape appeared.  From the ground, you can always see something green, but from the air, a blanket of brown covered the ground.  Clearly, they'd had a dry summer.

We turned West, up the river that flows through Agen and out into the Mediterranean Sea.  The sun was getting low on the horizon, and it was beautiful.  The rolling hills of the French countryside slid silently underneath the wings of the high-performance Piper.  The contrasting colors of the brown on green and nearly black water all made for a serene scene.

After a beautiful landing, Tim and I rolled down the runway and headed back to the hangar.  This bird was ready to fly, and so were we.  We jumped back on our bikes and headed home to the vineyard for our last night in the French countryside.  I took the opportunity to take the motocross bike I'd been riding the past three days on the road to finally go a little off-road through the hills on my way home.  It was so fun to thrash through the woods, up the sides of mountains, and just work the bike over a bit.  I'd never ridden a bike like that before, and I am extremely impressed by their ability to take nearly anything it's thrown at.  That was a lot of fun, and it worked out a lot of stress I'd had built up over the past week.

That night, Philippe and his wife treated us to another wonderful dinner.  This time, it was a French pizza, with an egg cooked right into the middle of it.  It is a novel idea, and actually the two tastes blend well.  We enjoyed great conversation, lots of wine (although neither of us pilots drank), and generally just relaxed before the big flight the next day.  Philippe kept bringing up the "bottle to throttle" rule and laughing.  I don't think it's very clear that in the states, that "bottle" usually beer, not wine, so the implication is that we must be refrained from drinking the whole bottle before flying.  I don't know, it must be lost in translation, but it was funny to hear him have so much fun with it.

The next morning, we were up making final checks of the weather and preparing for our long haul.  In short order, we made the 1 hour drive to Agen to go over the airplane one final time.  While we topped off the fuel one last time, I filed the international flight plan to Birmingham, England.  It was much like filing a flight plan in the United States, with the added bureaucratic questions that you'd expect from Europeans.  Despite that, the French briefer was extremely helpful and very kind as we worked through the plan.

Philippe stuck around to bid us adieu and tuck us into the airplane, then waved goodbye as we taxied to the runway.  After liftoff, we brought the flaps up, the gear up, and begun a climb to about 5000 feet.  A yellow light on the status panel brought our attention to the "gear unsafe" light.  We waited to see if it would resolve itself, but it stayed illuminated.  The most important thing about an abnormal situation like that is that the pilots split the responsibilities of the aircraft.  One pilot flies, and the other troubleshoots the problem.  Well, I wasn't flying, so I told Tim that I'd take care of the problem.  As I finished the sentence, I noticed the aircraft beginning a bank to the right as I looked over the panel.  I looked at Tim, and there he was, leaning over toward the center of the airplane, fixating on the yellow light.  I asked him what heading he was flying, and he looked irritated.  I wasn't about to let him get violated for busting a ICAO regulation, nor was I going to let him fly me to the nearest crash site, so I looked at him and asked him if I should fly or troubleshoot, hoping he'd get the hint.  I saw it click in his expression that I was disapproving of the meandering about that we were doing, so we straightened things out.  After recycling the landing gear, checking the circuit breakers, checking the aircraft speed, and executing the abnormal checklist, we decided to return to the field and have the home-based maintenance take care of the problem.

I notified Toulouse Approach that we had a gear problem and would need to return to Agen.  They turned us back direct to Agen and handed us back over to tower.  After a few low passes with the tower looking closely at our landing gear, they cleared us to land.  Naturally, our concern was with the gear locking in the "up" position, and when the gear was extended, the three green "gear safe" lights illuminated, so we were assured that the gear was extending properly.  The Malibu is designed in such a way that nearly every single landing is a beautiful kiss on the pavement, regardless of what the pilot has in mind, and the unusually high stress of this landing was no different.

When we taxied up to the maintenance hangar, a mechanic met us on the ramp as we explained what happened.  He asked what it was that he should do; we just looked at each other.  I expected the mechanic to tell us what he wanted to do, not ask us what he should do.  "Well," I said, "I suppose we ought to make that light go out when the gear is up."  He mumbled something as he walked away.  He looked confused.

An hour later, I cornered the Director of Maintenance (DOM) and asked what the status was of our airplane.  He was a tall, skinny, and awkward guy with a huge Adam's apple sticking out of his thin neck.  Although it is completely irrelevant to this story, I feel the urge to mention that he had a feather, roughly the size of a regular band-aid, stuck in his hair.  It was sitting there, perfectly flush with his hair, right where a native American warrior would have had it, if it were an eagle's feather.  I assumed it had to be on purpose--perhaps some sort of fashion statement--because I couldn't think of the process it would take to accidentally end up with a chicken feather in your hair like that.  Regardless, I cornered him, feather and all, and asked how our airplane was coming.  He explained with a voice that sounded like he'd swallowed a golf ball that our airplane was still where we parked it, and that everyone was busy washing a King Air outside.  Everyone.  Mechanics, engineers... everyone.  They would get to our airplane after lunch.

It only took four hours, but the mechanics turned a nut about three turns and we were on our way.  It seems that a squat switch that senses when the nose gear door is completely shut (thereby telling the "gear unsafe" light to go out, and the hydraulic pump to stop pumping) was not adjusted correctly.  These things happen.  They just don't usually take six hours to fix.

Capt. Jonathan Fussle