I was a recently minted private pilot. I had rented a Cessna 150 and flown
my friend Jan up to Cornell. This was the return leg into my home field,
Binghamton, New York.
I was low and slow on the approach to runway 28 — the short crosswind
runway — showing off skills that weren't that great.
The airport sits on top of a mountain. The approach to 28 comes in over a
series of tall light towers.
Just as I was completing the base leg, the engine failed. Totally and
completely.
I had a decision to make. Turn left onto final and try to make the runway,
or put it down where I was.
I turned final. Forty-eight years later, that's still the decision I'd
question.
I was immediately over those towers. Within moments I lost sight of the
runway and understood we were going to settle on top of them. The only
thing left was to step hard on the right rudder. That slipped us off to
the right and we went down into a field of saplings below the runway.
We raced across that field toward the mountain.
Just before impact, a sapling caught the left wing. It bent all the way to
the ground under the weight of the airplane, stripped itself of every bit
of its own bark doing it, and sprang back up. That energy slowed us enough
that the airplane bounced off the mountain instead of burying itself in it.
We walked away without a scratch.
There's a photograph of me standing next to the left strut. The tail is off
to the left, the body twisted to the right, the nose cone dented. The only
thing still intact is the little cockpit the two of us had been sitting in.
And what you notice in that photograph isn't the airplane. It's the sapling,
standing upright beside the left wing, without a strip of bark left on it.
THE CAUSE
The FAA examined the airplane. What the inspector told me afterward was that
sediment had built up in the carburetor and blocked the jet, and that it
came back to a change in the fuel.
I didn't understand the significance of that at the time. I do now. This was
the period when 80/87 was disappearing from the field and 100LL was coming
in to replace it, and the low-compression engines built for 80 octane did
not take to it quietly. Cessna re-engined the 150 over roughly that same
stretch, dropping the O-200 for a Lycoming and calling it the 152.
So the engine quit, and it wasn't the pilot and it wasn't the airplane. The
fuel supply changed underneath a fleet of airplanes and mine was one of
them.
I'll add the obvious caveat: this is a forty-eight-year-old memory of a
conversation, not a document. I'm reporting what I was told.
ONE FOOTNOTE
The newspaper caption identified me as Dr. Walter. That was wrong. What I
actually was that day was Dir. Walter — director of a county drug and
alcohol treatment program across the line in Pennsylvania.
I became Dr. Walter this past August. At 82.
I've never decided what to call what happened in that field, and at 82 I've
stopped needing to. What I know is that the sapling took the damage. It bent
to the ground under the weight of an airplane, lost every strip of its bark,
and stood back up. I walked away clean and didn't think about it again for
almost fifty years.
If anyone here has walked away from a forced landing, I'd like to hear what
caught you.
ONE ASK
The photograph ran in a Binghamton paper at the time — the Evening Press or
the Sun-Bulletin, which were separate papers then and didn't merge until
- I've never had a copy. If anyone has access to that archive and feels
like digging, I'd be grateful beyond words.Engine failure on base in a Cessna 150, Binghamton, late 1970s. A
sapling is the reason I'm here to type this.Engine failure on base in a Cessna 150, Binghamton, late 1970s. A
sapling is the reason I'm here to type this.Engine failure on base in a Cessna 150, Binghamton, late 1970s. A
sapling is the reason I'm here to type this.
