Cessna 206 hauling skydivers. Normal drill was as last jumper exits I'd roll right as they left the step, a little top rudder to swing the jump door closed then hard roll left so I could see jumped below, release back pressure on yoke allowing the nose drop steeply and increase throttle to bring power up to bottom of green arc of manifold pressure for descent then ease the nose up to normal descent attitude and trim for the descent. My technique would get the nose way down, probably 30-40 degrees and allow me to eat up a bunch of altitude before the speed got up near redline -- descent normally made about 10-15 mph below redline.
On this drop as I steeply nose low and brought the power in as the speed increased the nose started pitching up. I think I must of been out of trim on jump run and put forward pressure on the yoke but nose keeps coming up. More forward pressure and I realize the yoke isn't moving. WTF?
I take a quick look over my right should at the tail and jammed between the end of the stab and the elevator mass balance I see the fingers of a glove. The glove is in the small space between the stab and mass balance jamming the elevator at about 2/3s up.
Rut roh. By now the nose is well above the horizon and speed decaying so rolled knife edge left to let the nose fall back through the horizon, it took a couple repeats until I damped things out and found a power setting to give me a nice gliding descent at about 65 IAS.
I got on the radio to manifest (happened to be my wife working the radio) and tell her "Bobbi, I have a control issue with the airplane. I'm overhead moving south toward the flats (large unpopulated tidal flat area), get someone outside to get eyes on me in case I have to get out of the airplane." She replied with a simple "Roger!" She hollered for the bosses wife who went to wake the aircraft owner from his nap.
I switched to Approach and let them know I had a problem and asked them to track my position in case I had to bail out. I zipped up the flight suit, snugged up the parachute harness straps, put my gloves on and did some mental bail out practice. The boss came on the radio, we chatted and both pretty much came up with the same plan...try to work the glove out to free the elevator. I most likely could land with the elevator jammed but our DZ runway was surrounded by trees, hill on the approach end and homes at each end of the runway. If I had tried to land it I would have gone to Anchorage and used one of their 10000' runways to give me room to work things out.
To free it I first pulled. It took a very hard pull to move the yoke only to have it stick again. A hard push move it forward a couple of inches where it again jammed and the a/c started to build up speed. With each movement the yoke seemed to move a bit easier so I assumed I was probably cutting through the glove. I yanked again getting it about back to the original position resulting in a nice pitch up and zoom, rolled knife edge again at the top to let nose fall, once back to horizon rolled level and gave a big push. Yoke went way forward and stuck, pitched down hard enough my shins came up and banged bottom of the panel with the dive steeping quickly. I almost got out. Thinking it's the last chance to fix it I heaved aft on the yoke and felt it come free...feel back to normal. Recovered from the dive and radioed to Bobbi that everything was back to normal. While doing the octaflugeron to clear this up I would hear snippets of the boss on the radio, broken transmissions that I didn't have time for.
What I didn't realize is the web on my glove was intermittently keying the push to talk and they were hearing snippets of my grunting, pleading, cussing with the airplane and it was causing some concern on the ground.
Once of the ground we found the aluminum skin edges in the area where the glove was jammed were slightly deformed.
We assumed the glove was in the sleve of a student jumpsuit, the jumpers on that load weren't missing any gear.
I made a new rule --- all future jumps would be nude to prevent a repeat.
