New2view's Blog   Life on The Blue Marble

My real estate employer had a passion for betting on horse racing and traveled to Vancouver from Victoria from time to time for that purpose.  So on one occasion I boldly offered to transport him in my venerable, newly re-covered Piper Tri-Pacer to YVR. It had droop wingtips and a modest 135 h.p. Lycoming engine, the first airplane I owned.

I was a fairly inexperienced pilot, but had become familiar with the Piper.  However I didn’t always adhere to standard pilot procedure, in particular W&B, namely calculating weight and balance before a flight.

This omission was never so obvious as we rolled down the approximately 1800′ grass Butler-Howroyd airstrip in central Saanich where I kept the plane.

I had offered to deliver my heavy-weight employer, (of approximately 300lbs), plus another 160 lb realtor friend, about my size, to Vancouver airport, even with significant fuel on board to boot!

As we accelerated down the airfield I began to realize this was not going to be an easy takeoff. For those who are familiar with the Tri-Pacer (also known as a flying milk-stool owing to its fairly high tri-gear wheels, it has a unique ability under normal conditions to actually leap off the runway when full flaps are timely applied.

As we gained speed perhaps 2/3 of the way down the field I applied full flaps but was shocked at virtually no response!  Now recognizing the fact I had not properly calculated the load, I withdrew the flap handle and continued to accelerate, albeit slowly, irrationally never doubting we would get airborne!

Now we were rapidly running out of the small airfield grass runway facing a line of large trees!  Again I applied full flaps, this time encouraged by a few feet of elevation.  I calmly maintained a level or slightly nose down attitude little more than a dozen feet off the ground in order to gain as much speed as possible before sharply pulling back on the yoke. Thankfully we just barely cleared the trees!

Even then I had to maintain full flaps in order to maintain a modest climb attitude before reducing to half-flaps as we cleared Victoria airport to gain cruise speed of about 100 mph over Gulf Islands and Georgia Strait to Vancouver airport.

Later we discussed the flight with my passenger who had returned to Victoria by bus and ferry. He described a vivid memory of a Robin abandoning her nest in panic as we barely cleared trees on takeoff! 🙂 Indeed it was a close call, yet somehow it never occurred to me would not make it.