DC-6B Cont' Part 2

[earl1937]

  2nd Part of trip in DC-6B

Climbing out of MIA now, heading 135, through 6,000 and told to hold 8,000 until further instructions. Oh well, I want to get to our cruising altitude of 17,000 and relax. I am letting Josh fly right now, so have nothing to do but reflect on that nose wheel vibration which I felt again on takeoff, but not on landing. Wonder why on takeoff but not on landing? Gene says he feels a little vibration every once in a while on the throttle quadrant and thinks it is coming from #1, so I am not surprised as it is a high time engine and is due overhaul within the next 50 hours of operation, according to the logs. If Gene thought enough to say something, maybe we better start monitoring it a little closer.
We finally get our clearance to climb to 17,000 and as we go back to climb power, I placed my hand on the #1 throttle and then prop control, then mixture, but nothing, so unless something else shows up about the vibration, nothing we can do but watch it closer. All engine instruments for #1 are good, oil pressure, temp and the little clock hands showing prop snyc is a little nervous, but so is #3 so that doesn’t mean anything.
At 17,000 now, everything is nice and smooth and I can see the southern end of the Bahama’s island off to our left and I knew South Caucus would be coming in view soon. We got an update on San Juan weather, 3K broken, 8K overcast with light rain showers, visibility 10 miles so that is no sweat, but the altimeter showing a downward trend is not good news. We had been discussing the weather system which was supposed to pass 200 miles to the North of our destination. We hoped the forecast was accurate and that it would pass that far North and if it did, no problem for us.
We just passed the point of no return to MIA and Gene said, we got a problem!
#3 fuel pressure down to nothing hardly and fuel flow higher than usual, which says we may have a fuel leak, so we better shut it down and quick. So we went through the shut down and feather procedures by the book and Gene went back to look it over visually. Now I am going to have to re-compute the estimated arrival time because that is going to cut our cruising speed down about 20 knots. Gene reports back, no sign of fuel leak anywhere, but its just to chancy to run the engine.
I call up center, let them know what is going on and they ask if we are declaring an emergency and I said no, unless something else develops. We will keep them posted.
All of sudden a huge vibration started and Gene said #1 prop surging and we are going to have to shut it down NOW! Again we go through the shutdown procedures, feathering the prop and wow, now we have problems! Down to 2 engines and my mind flashes back to the book and I think we can hold 160 knots and 8,000 feet on two engines at this weight, roughly 96,700 lbs as close as I can figure in my head.
I quickly call up center and declare an emergency, explaining our plight and we would have to cont to San Juan but I would have to descend to 8,000 feet. Going through all the check lists for this situation, tuning 7700 on the transponder, double checking radio’s for proper frequencies, I didn’t want to have to get there and be busy and have to hunt for the right freq while we landing. We had a small chalk board, which Josh wrote all the freq on and we placed it behind the throttles, so that we both could see it.
I ask for a weather update on our destination and uh, oh, its going South! Weather now down to 2K broken, 5K overcast with rain showers. Weather system to NE of Porta Rica now centered 120 miles NE and moving SW. Oh crap, what else is going wrong.
Again, I get that uneasy feeling, one which I don’t care for. I think of my wife Sandy and the three kids which, if something happen to me, she would have to raise by herself. Oh, well, she is a beautiful woman and she won’t have any trouble finding another man, probably marry a ramp agent, who doesn’t make enough money to keep a dog alive. Get that out of your mind “Tater” you got things to do.
Now we are down to 8K and the bird is doing good on two engines, so we tool along until we are 60 DME out and we broke into the clear for a few minutes and looking off to our left about 10 O’Clock, it was black and mean looking but didn’t look to bad up ahead. Getting radar vectors now from approach control, told to expect ILS runway 8, winds 360 at 20 knots with occasional gusts to 30, heavy rain at times, altimeter down to 29.79 and trending downward. I didn’t give a rip
about all that because I was going to land, no matter what. Not even going to consider a go around on two engines. We had a Collins FD-104 flight director, but it was getting pretty rough now, lots of jolts and rain showers on the windshield, so I told Josh, this will be a manual ILS, as I could not depend on the FD.
Approach control had me on a 100 degree heading and of course Localizer needle full right and glide slope full down. They did a good job turning me in, but right away, saw I was going to have to carry a heading of 65 degrees or so to hold the localizer and I had the glide slope pretty well pegged by the time we passed the outer marker. Hard right rudder and right aileron to compensate for hard jolt and veer to left, back on course, localizer trending left all the time now as I am getting closer to middle marker, and there it was, the “rabbit” and I am right of the runway about a 100 feet.  I use rudder and aileron to slip back to center line and we crossed the threshold at about 100 feet. Touching down, it didn’t want to roll out straight because of the cross wind, but a lot of right brake, right rudder and left aileron to try to hold it straight, but nothing doing now as controls lost effectiveness as we slowed and I saw we were going to leave the runway with about 50 knots of speed. Leave the runway we did and you might know, a drainage box between the runway and taxi-way and I knew there would be no more vibration from the nose gear as it collapsed and down on our nose we went, but we didn’t slide to far, maybe it looked like a 100 feet or so, but now we had another problem. The doorway is now about 40 feet in the air, so I said everybody out over the wing hatch, but wait on the fire dept to get us down, no sense breaking a leg after this deal.
Upon reflection, I did a pretty good job, made all the right calls and we got our load of “blue jeans” to Porta Rica. I could have landed at a field short of our destination but  that would have meant added expense of getting the cargo delivered, so I felt pretty good, just wished I could have kept it on the runway, but with the wind like it was, it just wasn’t going to happen that way.

[colmbo]

Gene says he feels a little vibration every once in a while on the throttle quadrant

Funny how just a little shake gets your attention. 

[Mister Fork]

Funny how just a little shake gets your attention. 

Agreed.  Question Earl - in your reflection of all the hours you spent flying, how much did you trust your intuition that the 'weird' vibration caused something bigger down the line?  All machines do have quirks and the more moving parts, the more things that go 'bump' in the flight (sorry - couldn't resist - RCAF joke).

[earl1937]

Agreed.  Question Earl - in your reflection of all the hours you spent flying, how much did you trust your intuition that the 'weird' vibration caused something bigger down the line?  All machines do have quirks and the more moving parts, the more things that go 'bump' in the flight (sorry - couldn't resist - RCAF joke).

I learned a long time ago that one man's vibration, might be a shimmy to someone else! If it had been written up as a "shimmy", I wouldn't have given it a second thought, but a vibration write up could mean anything! I always made a habit of when I felt a vibration which should be reported to maintaince or the chief pilot, explained when it happened and what it felt like to me.
In old worn out airliners, which this cargo outfit had purchased, are going to have groans and creaks and maybe slightly out of rig with the controls. The airframes had been maintained over the years, so it was just a matter of making sure you had good engines, everything else you can deal with.

[Widewing]

I got my Flight Engineer check ride on this C-118 down in GTMO, 1976... Three years later it was in Davis Monthan...

[DaveBB]

Earl, why did the aircraft veer off the runway?  If you would have had 4 working engines, could you have kept it on the runway?

[earl1937]

Earl, why did the aircraft veer off the runway?  If you would have had 4 working engines, could you have kept it on the runway?

Wind at that time I was told later, gusting to 45 knots and with nothing but an inboard engine, #2, I couldn't use power to help keep it straight, like I could have with #1 running! remember, we where trying to slow up, which called for up elevator and I had already called for full forward on yokes, but to late, it was already headed for the boonies and had it not been for that drainage box which the nose wheel struck, we would have been OK. If we had both engines on left side operating, we could have stayed on the runway, using brakes, power and rudder! I thought the up elevator we were holding, Josh and I, was not putting the nose wheel on the ground solid enough for steering, that is why I called for full forward on yokes, to get weight on the nose wheel.
I was getting no nose wheel steering response, so we guessed the shimmy damper or a link had become inop on the last takeoff from MIA. Since the nose wheel assy was a washout, there is no telling what the vibration was in the nose wheel steering.
3 days after this accident, I received a job offer flying a "Super H Twin Beech" and accepted it.
The DC-6B was one of the "Queens" of the air for a long time and a real pleasure to fly. I took another job flying one of these, hauling auto parts from Willow Run in Detroit to Kanas city, which I stayed with for a year, but another good corp job came open and I left the Queen again, never to return this time.

[bustr]

You sound like my Dad when he flew for Hinson out of BWI hauling politicians up and down the east coast. Teddy Kennedy could snore through bad weather because he loaded up before the flight. Or Corning engineers with new goodies they needed in New York. Or lobbyists who had to be in Chicago yesterday. His last security clearance from NSA made him ideal for hauling people like those or Russians to NY for the UN. Part of his specialty at NSA was Russian linguistics.