inquiring minds want to know more.
you have to share this one colmbo. details! have to read more about this!
I was hauling skydivers with a P206, door up front instead of the cargo door aft.
My normal procedure at the drop was as soon as last jumper away roll hard right to eyeballs jumpers clear then left rudder to close door while letting the nose drop then throttle up to the power setting used for the descent. I wouldn't trim all the elevator pressure off since I would need to roll in a lot of down for the dive. The initial pitch angle would be 30-50 degrees nose low, with the low starting speed I could get rid of a bunch of altitude before speed built I had to pull up to keep speed at an acceptable level. All that only took a few seconds…10-15 maybe…never timed it.
This time as I started coming in with power the airplane started pitching up. I figured I had too much up trim and pushed the yoke but it didn't move. WTF? Nose above the horizon now, I push real hard…yoke doesn't budge. Hmmmmm. I turned and looked at the tail and see what looked like a glove jammed between the end of the stab and the elevator mass balance. The elevator was stuck at about 1/2 up deflection. By now nose is well above horizon and speed dropping off so I rolled hard left and let the nose slice below the horizon. When I rolled wings level it starts pitching up a bit more aggressively this time because I had more speed from the slice down. About here I called the manifest girl, happened to be my lovely wife Bobbi, and have her switch to company freq. When she gets switched over I tell here that I have a control malfunction, elevator is jammed. I tell her I'm south of the DZ and working toward the mudflats (also south of the DZ). I tell her to go out and get eyeball on me that I may have to bail out of the aircraft. Bobbi is a skydiver with a gold medal in world competition, has participated in world record large skydives, she is an AFF instructor and Tandem master and a registered nurse. She's pretty cool under pressure. Her reply to me was a simple, firm "Roger!"..
While I'm talking to her I'm still trying to find a sweet spot with the power to get things balanced out…in the process did a couple pretty spiffy wingovers until I started thinking and got off the power sooner and used reduced bank angles to get things stabilized.
Meantime she's got the boss on the radio and he and I come to the same conclusion -- force the elevator to move to get the glove out. What could possible go wrong.
I zipped up the flight suit, tighten the parachute harness and put my gloves on just in case I had to make a skydive. I figured I would pull instead of push, more comfortable with + g and pushing points me toward the dirt. I had to pull very hard, I was concerned about breaking the yoke or something in the control system, but I could tell the elevator was moving a little bit and finally it gave and came back to almost full up elevator and of course that honked the nose up sharply. I thought yippee and pushed the yoke forward only to find it was now stuck in an even worse position. The next moments were the most intense with some creative aileron, rudder and throttle use I did some mini acro. I wanted to be nose high before forcing the yoke forward in case it again stuck so I would have some time to haul back on it before I was to steep in the dive.
While I was wrestling the airplane I could hear the boss coming in broken on the radio. What I didn't realize at the time was I was pushing the mic button as I was fighting the airplane and they were hearing me grunting, groaning and sweet talking the airplane. I guess it was quite concerning for those on the ground.
Gave a big push on the yoke and it move full forward, airplane pitched over hard enough that my legs came up against the bottom of the panel and the airplane screamed. I think it was downward flow over the wing root vents that made the noise, but it was a weird sound. And of course the yoke stuck forward. As I was moving it these times I could "feel" the glove….I imagined it was kind of rolling as I move the controls. The elevator being stuck down isn't something you can control so I gave another big pull and this time I could tell that the elevator was free. I told them that I was ok, airplane appeared ok and set up for a slow descent back to the field.
This had all started at 11000'. When things came clear I was about 9500'…altitude is a good thing when you're working on issues --- unless the issue is fire. Just a couple weeks earlier I had practiced flying without elevator control. I "pinned" the yoke with one hand and played around with using power for pitch control, using bank to control pitch, etc. Bored jump pilots have to do something to stay awake, this time it paid off.
We talked about it that night after jumping was over and pondered if it might have been better to just land with the jammed elevator. If I hadn't known what was causing the jam that's what I would have done. Since I could see the glove I figured it would be easy to work it out thinking "it's only a glove".
The airplane was ok, the skin at the end of the stab was bent where the glove was jammed. Pretty amazing how "hard" a little bit of leather can be. We have no idea where the glove came from. None of the jumpers on the load was missing a glove, we speculate that it was inside the jumpsuit used by the tandem student and blew out as they exited.
The next weekend I posted on the bulletin board that due to this incident all future skydives will be done nude to prevent a repeat.
Almost forgot. After I took a leak and checked the airplane over Bobbi walked over and asked it I was ok. "Sure!". She said are you sure? I said I'm okay. She replied "Then get back in the airplane, I've got a bunch of loads manifested!!"
