SAY YOUR INTENTIONS! by Captain Mark Conner

Here’s another story submitted by Captain Mark Conner. Remember, anyone who has any good aviation-related stories, please send them my way! Thank you!

SAY YOUR INTENTIONS!

This is a story of a very young and inexperienced aviator long before the accurate weather forecasting that we have these days.  I was all of 26 years old with just over 1200 hours of flight experience when I landed my first job moving bank checks in an R model Cessna 310.  Like most Flight instructors I had had very little practical experience in wintertime weather but for the same reason, wars are fought by young men, I was bulletproof.

I had only been on the job for a few weeks, based in Omaha, Nebraska when I looked at the weather channel from home and saw the forecast for an area of freezing rain in the vicinity of Kansas City.  My route that night took me to Des Moines, Iowa back to Omaha to Lincoln, Nebraska, Kansas, Kansas City, then Des Moines and back to Omaha again.  Making a mental note to be careful in the vicinity of Kansas City, I pre-flighted my airplane and blasted off into the night sky.  

The first leg to Des Moines went just fine and on return the weather in Omaha was reported a ceiling of 600 foot overcast 2 miles visibility but no mention of freezing precipitation. I took vectors for the ILS runway 32 and did it textbook perfect with flaps set to approach and 120 knots planning to extend the landing gear over the outer marker to begin my descent.  

A couple of miles before I got to the outer marker I started hearing the telltale clank of ice sling from the propeller blades. I turned on the wing inspection light and was horrified to see crystalline, jagged ice, extending from the leading edges of the wings.

This particular 310 was actually legal to fly in the icing as it had a hot windshield plate along with the normal leading edge boots and heated propellers. I immediately turned on the propeller heat, the windshield heat, and cycled the leading edge boots. I was gratified to see a huge amount of ice blow off of the wings, but there was still a fair amount adhering to the boots.

Crossing the outer marker, I extended the landing gear and as planned broke out of the clouds around 600 feet. I could see out both sides of the plane, but there was no forward visibility, the windshield was completely opaque with ice, including the small electric plate that was supposed to be heated.

I had heard plenty of stories about people landing, looking laterally out the sides of the windshield so I continued down to about 50 feet above the runway. I could see the runway edge lights go by, but certainly did not have enough forward visibility to stay aligned with the runway.

I didn’t know what to do so, I flew most of the length of the runway and then executed a missed approach. Tower handed me back off to approach control, who asked me my intentions. This is where my inexperienced kicked in. I assumed that I still had a job to do and that I would just go back and shoot the approach again.

All the way on downwind I was building ice at a pretty scary rate due to light freezing rain, but to my relief about 5 miles before I turned final a baseball sized peep hole appeared as the hot plate on the windshield finally caught up and was doing its job. Bolstered by this good news, I continued around for the approach, but the airplane was growing ice at an alarming rate.

By the time I reached the outer marker on the second approach gear down approach flaps required 25 inches and 2500 RPMs just to go downhill at 700 ft./min. on the glideslope.  Only a few years before someone had crashed a Cessna 310 into the Earthen berm off the approach end of the runway that separated the airport from the Missouri river with a loss of all souls.

I knew there was no option to go around from this approach. When I landed, I landed fast with a little flare and only use the approach flaps.

What a  relief to be finally on the ground, I called the FBO on Unicom and the one lineman that was working that night answered promptly. I told him that I would need deicing as quickly as he could, pulled in, delivered my freight and collected the freight for the next leg. About then, the lineman showed up with two coffee cans of isopropyl alcohol stating that was the only deicing fluid available.  

Again, my bulletproof mentality convinced me to use a wheel chock and go all the way around the airplane beating the ice off of all the surfaces that were unprotected. One of the more interesting things was the bullet shaped spinners were completely square where droplets of water had struck, slung outboard and froze making them look like the bottom of a coffee can instead of the tip of a bullet. This task took me at least 30 or 40 minutes and when I was done, there was an outline of a twin Cessna on the ramp in the form of crushed ice.  

This bulletproof young man jumped in cranked up and blasted off into the night sky again.

Luckily, I only accumulated a small amount of ice in the climb out and as all of you know who are experienced with this, freezing rain means it’s warmer above and all you have to do is climb to the altitude that is rain and all of your ice will go away. The rest of the night was uneventful, but I am sure that God was looking out for this young man that night, it just wasn’t my time to go.

Mark Conner

Call sign Don Juan 321