Saw an almost successful off-airport landing today

Salty said:
This reminds me of the thread where some were saying they'd land in the lane against oncoming traffic instead of with the traffic......
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Ha...that was my thread

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Based on my experience moving an airplane (Navion) a couple miles down a country road from a bumpy field to a nice field with a "runway". Yea, land in the field.

But, I wasn't there.
 
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Very impressed with the pilot's responsibility - snap decisions are easy to ACQB later, but I like that he always had responsibility for himself and his aircraft and didn't try to squeeze it onto the the right shoulder where maybe he would have made it, but maybe he would have taken out the jeep. Maybe not intended, but he knew he wasn't going to clear the jeep, so he went off the road and destroyed his airplane rather than risk injuring anyone else.

Glad everyone is ok. Or at least we assume everyone is ok, no telling how his wife reacted ;)
 
So now that you can see the aircraft type in their photo, the fuel thing won’t give the type away.

Pilot said he noticed the header tank float was very low all of a sudden and had no power response on throttle control.

Engine was either windmilling or idling but not enough power to do anything. He said the engine is so small and quiet usually in reduced power settings that he didn’t know it wasn’t responding at first, but it only took a couple seconds to realize it wasn’t coming up.
 
Wait! Rattlesnake Fire Protection? How often do you have Rattlesnake Fires? How would they even strike a match?

Oh, and while you are there, scroll down to the "Don't charge you cell phone under your pillow"...
 
Capt. Geoffrey Thorpe said:
Wait! Rattlesnake Fire Protection? How often do you have Rattlesnake Fires? How would they even strike a match?

Oh, and while you are there, scroll down to the "Don't charge you cell phone under your pillow"...
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who in their rt mind charges a battery hooked to 120 V electricity and covers it with a damn pillow? I would think zero... but apparently I am wrong
 
Link goes all FUBAR when I try to open it.
 
So the heart rate from the Garmin pilot watch turned out to be pretty entertaining.

Watch is off at home in the morning.

Peak at airplane incident is first.

Bigger peak at shooting range, but that was probably because we dragged an arsenal to let the kid shoot and I had to lug it all inside.

Two huge peaks at the TV interview. LOL!

Then mellow the rest of the day until the phone started ringing all evening until just before midnight.

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Is that accurate? Your resting heart rate is in or near the triple digits?
 
Peak?? Those are little spikes, you need to get up there and hold it there for a few hours, those are the fun times.
 
Heart rate typically rises with exertion, but Nate's was probably from stress/adrenaline! When I'm cycling, my HR is typically around 160 bpm. 220 minus your age is a crock in terms of max HR. I can push 185 if I try. Pro cyclists can cruise all day (25+ mph) at 120 bpm.
 
N659HB said:
Heart rate typically rises with exertion, but Nate's was probably from stress/adrenaline! When I'm cycling, my HR is typically around 160 bpm. 220 minus your age is a crock in terms of max HR. I can push 185 if I try. Pro cyclists can cruise all day (25+ mph) at 120 bpm.
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Mine has always been highish. Even when I was a lot younger and a lot healthier as well as now with some poor lifestyle choices and habits. Theories abound, but I was a premie and popped out over two months early so there may have been some developmental issues. No signs of any real problems with the ticker over the years, so I’m not going to go getting any modern day scans of anything and start digging for trouble.

70s is about as low as I go. Been that way my whole life. Heart is probably a touch small. Never had it imaged, like I said. Have had other interesting imaging done but never the heart. (There’s a couple Docs somewhere who really have some nice photos of my intestines and colon, though! hahaha! And not just the usual ones. Long story, long ago. No problems since.)

I have a friend (that bastard! Ha!) who’s resting rate is in the 40s and he’s no better lifestyle, diet, or anything else. If you take his pulse you wonder if anything is even going on. He drops into the high 30s when he’s super relaxed. I don’t think the guy even knows the meaning of the word “stress”.

During a normal day without stress or exertion mine will wander from the 70s to mid 80s. Just where it’s always been.

My friend who recently had the pituitary area surgery which killed off his pituitary but saved his vision and removed a tumor, learned during that process that he had been producing nearly zero cortisol going into his mid-40s. It’s been fun talking to him about the changes in his behavior and attitude caused by massive changes in hormones so far and seeing them too. They got him on cortisol which nearly instantly removed his “always mildly stressed” demeanor he’s had for the two decades I’ve known him.

He was never super bad about it but we all knew he would be more bothered by certain events at work than anyone else. But without this massive change to his life, we’d all have never known this wasn’t “personality” it was chemical. They’re hopelessly intertwined of course.

Already he’s gained a little 40s “belly” he never had any sign of before, and that’s due to this change and another...

With the pituitary dead, he’s now gone from normal testosterone levels to off the charts low. Not just this fad of “low T” that many boutique docs offices are prescribing for, but none.

There’s also something else for kidney function but I forget what it is. When he first started taking it, the laugh was you could set a watch by him taking it, needing a huge glass of water soon thereafter, and then a trip right after that to the men’s room.

His docs and their staff are working with insurance and what not to get all of the correct things pre-approved as medically necessary and the testosterone one is the hardest. Too much fraud in that one at these “anti-aging” boutique docs.

The insurance companies don’t even believe the story when a prescription for FULL testosterone replacement, age-appropriate, comes through. They stall and mess around.

Meanwhile we chuckle at our old friend. He’s not only getting the tiny signs of growing that belly from the cortisol replacement regimen, but he’s got almost zero energy to do any sort of physical stuff. He went golfing and had to go home and have a three hour nap afterward. At the office, he used to be the guy who dashed around (see: stress puppy) and did everything in person at every desk, now he sits at his desk and people come to him.

They’ll get it all straightened out here soon, but it’s been a fascinating thing to watch and joke with him about it. He knows his behavior changed and it’s ALL chemical, but it’s still entertaining. He’s nearly impossible to get riled up right now, and even if we do manage it, he will just sit at the desk and pound out an email about it. Ha.

Timing is a bummer. It looked like the last of the prescriptions to get started on figuring out dosages was going to be approved sometime around today, but it’s a holiday... so he’s waiting. Because bureaucracy doesn’t work on holidays of course.

The joke was, “Well at least you’re SUPPOSED to fall asleep after Turkey dinner!”

The human body is amazing. The interconnect between his chemicals and his behavior is so blatant, and yet he’s still “him”. He’s just muted in some ways and amplified in different ways right now. It’ll be interesting to see and talk to him as they get him back to whatever modern medicine considers “normal” for all these numbers. I suspect he will never be quite as stressed as he sometimes was and he’ll be back to golfing and other stuff he does soon enough without needing a half a day nap.

Like he jokes, it’s a lot better than going blind.

He’s also a pilot in a self-certifying category and he won’t go anywhere near an aircraft right now. He knows stuff isn’t “right”. I’m sure OKC has plenty of horror stories of pilots who do bad things they know better about, but he’s not going to be a problem child in this regard.

Looking forward to flying with him when he and the docs get it all sorted. Fascinating stuff.
 
Given the complexity of our bodies systems, it's a wonder we typically function so well for so long. Hope your friend finds an effective treatment regimen.
 
denverpilot said:
I have a friend (that bastard! Ha!) who’s resting rate is in the 40s and he’s no better lifestyle, diet, or anything else. If you take his pulse you wonder if anything is even going on. He drops into the high 30s when he’s super relaxed. I don’t think the guy even knows the meaning of the word “stress”.
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I had a cousin that his blood pressure and heart rate was so low that every time he would go to a doctors office they would check his vitals and then want to rush him to the hospital thinking he was having a heart attack.
 
pmanton said:
One less Ercoupe perhaps the pump to the header tank failed
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You must know Ercoupes. That was the pilot’s theory. He rolled out of a maneuver and the float bob in the header on the cowl was bottomed out. Engine wouldn’t respond to throttle. It never fully quit but it wouldn’t produce any power above an idle.
 
I took a couple photos of the landing area sans airplane and airplane parts on Wednesday and haven’t had a chance to post them yet.

This is looking westbound, the direction I was going, about 2500’ BEFORE where the airplane came to rest on the left hand side in this photo.

The point of this photo is to show that once you come eastbound down that big hill, it’s fairly flat but still downhill for a while and then you run out of options at the river and this bridge.

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This is about where the airplane came to rest, on the left side in this photo, and again we are looking west and the airplane was eastbound. The hill ahead is what I had just started climbing in the Yukon as I was watching the aircraft do maneuvers slightly west of the top of that hill. On the other side the hill is steeper yet going back down and it’s rolling hills that are about a 4-6% grade up and down all the way to the edge of far southeast suburban metro Denver.

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This is looking east, the way the aircraft landed. The sign on the left is nearly identical to the sign that was hit but it was further down on the right, just to show what spun the aircraft and sent it into the ditch and out across the barbed wire and into the field.

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Here’s the road sign the day of the incident. It did what it was supposed to do and sheared at the base where the unistrut sleeves into a larger piece of unistrut. It didn’t get tossed from its mounted location, it just folded directly over. There’s airplane wing bits wedged into it, as you can see.

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I haven’t talked to the pilot about releasing the rest of the photos, but I hope he’s enjoying meeting his new grand baby over the holidays and commercial air travel has been kind to him.

Just wanted to show the general “scene” so folks could get a lay of the land.
 
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