Normally, I am not superstitious. I do not believe in "omens" or "bad luck". If I did, I probably would never have started the engine that day. After a three hour series of problems, my first solo flight as a private pilot ended up shutting down the active runway at Glendale Airport for about twenty minutes.
It all started the night before. My plan was to start off with a few touch and gos to warm up, then do a little round-robin exercise. Starting off at Glendale (GEU), fly south to Goodyear (GYR) and pick up V-16 to the Buckeye VOR (BXK), turn north to Wickenburg (E25), then head east over to Lake Pleasant, then south back to Glendale. A nice casual flight over the Arizona desert that I could use to practice a combination of pilotage, dead reckoning and using radio navs, as well as flying into unfamiliar territory for the first time since my training. Since I had just passed my check ride a few weeks earlier, I wanted to stay relatively close to home and not have too many surprises to deal with. Also, I had done all of my training in a Cessna 152, and only one flight in the C-172 so far. I figured that in a worst case scenario, I could easily land at Goodyear or Buckeye if I had problems dealing with the unfamiliar airplane early in the flight.
After filling out some details on my navigation log, I used the AOPA Internet site (http://www.aopa.org) to get an outlook weather briefing from DUATS for the following day. While looking at the weather reports, Glendale Aviation called and said that the Cessna 172 I had reserved would be down for maintenance, but there was another C-172 available an hour earlier. "Well.... OK. Which 172 is it?" I hoped she would say that the brand new C-172, was available. Apparently it wasn't. "It's not a plane that is normally on our line." Hmmm. A C-172 is a C-172, right? "OK, that's fine". If I had been the superstitious type, I might have decided that this was really the first sign that someone or something did not want me to fly the next day.
I am not much of a morning person, so after getting my weather report and eating breakfast, I was about fifteen minutes behind schedule already. Since I had planned a decent margin of time around the flight, it didn't bother me too much, as long as nothing else went wrong that morning. It turns out the airplane was rented through Glendale Aviation from another company on the airport, and that was apparently a standard practice. I asked if the airplanes were normally topped off, and the dispatcher said that they were. So after signing off on the dispatch binder, I had to make a long walk over to where the airplane was parked. Of course, Murphy's Law being what it is, I quickly discovered during my preflight that the fuel tanks were dry. No big deal, just a few more minutes lost while I call for the fuel truck.
Set COM1 to UNICOM, "Glendale Aviation, Cessna 73818." No response. Try again. No response again. Hmm. Switch to ATIS frequency. Nothing there. At that point, I realized that no two airplanes ever seemed to have similar audio panels and proceeded to play with switches, knobs and dials trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. Better to learn this one on the ground, I thought. Not having any luck at all, I switched to COM2 and started over. Still no response from the FBO, but at least I could receive the ATIS broadcast. Well, at that point I gave up and started the long trek back to dispatch to see if I could get some help figuring out the radios. It was already a very warm summer day in Arizona at 0730, so huffing and puffing and pouring sweat, I stumbled in through the door and asked, "Did you hear me on UNICOM?".
"No... oh wait, somebody changed the frequency on the UNICOM radio!" Argh! After calling for the fuel truck, an instructor was kind enough to give me a ride on a golf cart back to the airplane and see if the radios worked any better now that someone was listening. The COM2 radio worked fine, but COM1 was still having problems with audio. No big deal, I was used to having only one set of radios in the C-152 anyway.
I proceeded with my preflight, and found everything to be normal. Tanks topped off, oil quantity good, no black cats in the luggage area or other anomalies. The one thing that I wasn't used to was that unlike the C-152 I trained in, the C-172 had wheel pants. This makes it difficult to inspect the tires and brakes since there is only a very small clearance to view the tire surface under the pants. You really have to get on your hands and knees, check about two square inches of tire surface, then roll the airplane back a couple of inches and check the next small patch and continue to do this until you have seen the whole tire. Then repeat for the other side. Well, that's a pain to do, and maintenance is pretty regular, so usually tires are not in such bad shape that they become a problem. Right?
After strapping on the 172, I get down to business. Arrange my maps, set frequencies, start the engine, call ground and go do my run up. Everything looks good; taxi to the hold short lines and call the tower. Taxi onto the runway, apply full throttle, plenty of right rudder, airspeed alive, cross check engines, everything is green, rotate and I'm off! Just like normal, except it was really nice having a 180hp engine out front.
After turning downwind, I get ready for my first touch and go. There was a definite cross wind from the east, but nothing I couldn't handle. Cross the threshold, right wing slightly low, throttle to idle, and ease it down. Whoa! Drifting left, more right rudder! More right rudder! Back to the centerline and takeoff. Wow, was the crosswind stronger than I thought, did I do something wrong, or what? That was not as clean as I would have liked. On the second touch and go I better prepared myself for corrective action. By the time I turned for base, I already knew what I was going to do after touchdown. Throughout my training, my instructor was always reminding me to think several steps ahead and plan my actions. I could almost hear Ben's voice now, saying "Think ahead of your airplane."
The second landing was better than the first, but the airplane definitely was feeling squirrelly on the runway. Without having much to compare to however, it was hard to tell if it was me, the airplane, the crosswind or something else that was a factor. It was the third landing that had me concerned. After touching down, the plane didn't just drift to the left, it turned to the left. Hard right rudder to keep it straight. I could actually feel the plane tilt left and the steering felt mushy; almost like how a car feels when you have a tire going flat and you get a slight fishtailing action. I immediately called the tower and said I would make this a full stop so that I could see if there was a problem with the landing gear.
I parked the airplane and took a look at the tires. Although the left tire didn't appear under inflated, I went ahead and called the FBO for a tire pump. I figured it would be better to be safe and verify the tires were properly inflated than risk an accident on the runway. It turned out all three tires were significantly low. Of course, the fuel truck has a compressed air tank that is used for inflating tires out on the line, and Murphy's Law being what it is, the tank was empty and the fuel truck had to go back and get more air to pump up the tires. An important lesson here is that you simply cannot tell tire pressure from looking at the profile of the tire. They looked almost the same after being inflated to the proper pressure.
I decided at that point that enough of the time margin I had planned for had been used up and that I couldn't reasonably complete the cross country I had originally planned. It was already 0900, the trip would take over an hour, and the plane had to be back by 1000. I decided just to do a little sight seeing trip out to the Buckeye VOR and back just for fun and to get used to flying the airplane at cruise for a while.
I was off the ground again by 0915, and after shooting one more fairly uneventful touch and go, I departed to the south and climbed to 3,500. Knowing the Lufthansa flight school students are active during the week, I turned to monitor Goodyear tower as I went over the top of their class D airspace and picked up V-16 on my way to Buckeye. I also knew that Luke AFB would be active, and was on alert for F-16 activity. It was a nice clear day, and it felt great being able to easily cruise at over 110 knots without even coming close to straining the engine.
After reaching the VOR station, I did a 180 degree turn and headed back the way I came. Constantly scanning the sky, I was approaching Buckeye airport when my brain kicked into self-preservation mode, and before I had a conscious thought, I was pushing the nose down hard to avoid a pair of F-16s screaming in from over the White Tank mountains at my nine o'clock. They must have passed less than 500 feet directly above me. While on my check ride, I thought my examiner was being overly paranoid about the Luke F-16 activity; especially when, much to my surprise, she grabbed the yoke a few times and either quickly descended or rocked the wings to get the attention of the F-16 pilots. I knew after this encounter that I needed to be equally concerned! Noise abatement is important, since most people do not enjoy the sound of an F-16 hitting a Cessna 172 at 300 knots.
After regaining higher brain functions, I settled on 2,500 as a good altitude and called Goodyear for a transition over to Tolleson. It was nice to hear the friendly voice of ATC clearing me for the transition. After a short cruise, I called back to Glendale for landing clearance and started in for a two mile right base. Down to 2,000 feet and 85 knots, everything was looking fine. OK, start final descent by pulling carb heat... pull carb heat... pull really hard on carb heat. The carb heat control on this airplane has a push button that releases it, and that button was stuck. Grand. What else could go wrong today? All of these little things were really beginning to add up. After about thirty seconds of playing with the control, I finally got it unstuck and proceeded to set up for landing. By the time I turned to final, I could feel the wind a bit, so I asked ATC to "Say winds".
"Zero-nine-zero at six" came the reply. That would be almost a direct crosswind onto runway 01, but I felt it was within my personal limits. Cross the threshold, power to idle, right wing low for crosswind landing, and after settling onto the runway, I knew something was wrong. The airplane pulled hard to the right, and I ended up applying full left rudder and hard left brake to avoid sailing off the right edge of the runway. Since there was other radio communications going on, I knew there was other traffic behind me, and as I fought to keep the airplane on the runway, ATC called and said to exit at the next taxi way.
By this time I realized I had a blown tire. Normally, it would have been no problem to make the exit at Delta, but barely being in control and still moving at a good clip down the right side of the runway, I called back and said "Cessna 818 - I have a problem. I have a blown tire; I might be able to make Echo."
The controller quickly replied, "OK, just park on the runway and we will get someone out there to help." By this time, I managed to stop the airplane just short of intersection Echo. Having never been in a situation quite like this, it felt really strange to be parked on an active runway, listing slightly to the right. Almost by reflex, I called back and asked if they really wanted me to park on the active runway. He assured me that was correct and said that a ground crew and the airport manager were on their way out.
After unclenching my white-knuckled hand from the yoke, I shut the airplane down and opened the passenger side door. Sure enough, that tire was completely flat. I climbed out of the airplane and waited to be rescued. It seemed like forever, but it was only a few minutes until the ground crew and airport manager met me on the runway. After getting the flat main onto a dolly and towing the plane off the runway, the mechanics pulled the wheel pant off so that they could put a good tire on and get the plane back to the hangar.
I was surprised at the poor condition of the tire; there was a hole in the middle of a large worn out area. It looked almost like somebody dragged the tire down the runway with the brakes locked up and wore it down to the radial material. It is ironic, now that I think about it, since it was probably the extra pressure from being properly inflated that caused the weak spot in the tire to finally give out. Fortunately, aside from the dead tire, there was no other damage to the plane or myself, but I was still pretty wound up about everything that had happened. I finally started to breathe and relax a bit when someone said, "Well, the tire is only flat on the bottom..."
Despite the events of that day, I am still looking forward to that first cross country flight. Only next time, I will be just a little bit wiser.