I have dead sticked a 152 and a 182 to an airport landing, with mechanically caused engine outages.
Another very nice leaseback 182, let me nurse it back to a runway with a vibrating engine that quit in the flare when I pulled the power to idle...was unable to restart that one after landing and it had to be towed off the runway.
Once while riding with the appropriately certificated owner of a turbo C-210, we had to change our mind about continuing on to Garden City Kansas after he went "OH OH!" while looking at his meteculous flight log that he was monitoring. When I said, "What's 'OH OH!' mean?" I got the answer about two seconds later in the form of an engine that began to stumble off towards idle. After switching tanks and tossing on the boost pump, he advised me the other tank was not as full as we would like it to be either. We were at 10,000 feet in IMC with an unexpected tailwind and both of us had painstakenly did the flight planning on this trip.
He was timing the tanks and writing down the times of fuel valve switching and doing one hell of a good job at following and annotating his flight log. According to our calculations we should have landed in Garden City KS with more than 1.5 hours of fuel in the plane...without considering the unexpected tailwind.
I instantly said, "Let's quit staring back and forth at the dash guages, our flight plans and each other and DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT, NOW!" I had him dig out the plates for MAYS and I confessed to the controller that we needed to do a 180 direct back to the MAYS VOR and that I wanted to conserve altitude. The controller cleared us direct, cleared us altitude at our discretion and cleared us for any approach.
With the field at 3,500 or so OVC and better than 10 vis, we were able to get on a runway and taxi in to the FBO without much fanfare and even had to slip to lose the conserved altitude...thank goodness it's flat as hell at mays. We thanked the controller when we cancelled and never got querried beyond that cancellation. It sounded as if the controller was just glad to see things worked out for us. We fueled and found that the run down tank accepted the exact amount of usable fuel that the manual specified and the remaining tank took two tenth's of gallon shy of total usuable...whew! It was to find out later, that when we departed the owner of the plane had an 'old wive's tale' 'hanger flying' based technique of short fueling the plane so that when he hangered it, fuel would not run out the vents while it sat. The only problem was, he never told me about this habit of his and I had even stood out there when he fueled the dam thing and watched him put the caps on. Short fueling the plane as he specifed, was later determined to be the equivelent of 10 gals per tank. Silly him.
Then there was the PT-6 powered Caravan that I landed after a two hour flight which only had 4 qts out of 14 remaining. Thank goodness I didn't have to hold that day, but I did have to shoot an ILS to mins. The variance in oil quantity was discovered when I shut the van down and the rampies came out to get the Priority 1 freight out of the pod. They kind of had that "WTF?" look on their faces when I looked out my side window at them. Got out and the Van looked as if it had been dipped up to the prop centerline in turbine oil. A scavenge line o-ring must have gotten pinched after maint and was letting the engine's life blood oooze out, leaving me with no chance of catching it on the "Cockpit Warning System" or the engine guages. "Identify and Cancel!"...not.
Shot an ILS once to 100 VV and 1.5 miles vis with a failed attitude gyro in the VAN, another instrument failure got me in an Aztec when I saw the the attitude gyro roll off while joining a loc back course.
Three different times the airspeed indicators failed on me in Senecas while flying IMC in icing. Once, I lost airspeed indication (pitot heat DOA) in a nicely equiped C-310R. The nicely equiped C-310 also gave me problems when the encoding drum altimeter failed and it kept faithfully holding altitude for me and it did a nice job of telling ATC the altitude it froze at. And I don't mean it facetiously, this C-310R was a cream puff. I even got a speeding ticket once on the way into work at "O'dark thirty" and told the cop I was speeding because I was excited to be flying my favoritest plane in the fleet that morning...he didn't buy it.
After a new engine was placed on a 414, me and a mech went up to put it through it's paces. While climbing we developed a rough running engine on the 'new' side of the plane and after doing some trouble shooting, we returned for landing. The mech jumped out before I did and the next thing I hear is the engine cowling come off. Next thing you know, he's cussing and running in the building with arms flailing and spittle flying from his lips. That is soon followed by the sound of yelling and screaming and tool boxes and office furniture getting tipped over. I get out and there is a car sized puddle of 100LL under the engine nacelle and the brand new engine, including the turbocharger housing, is stained as blue as could be. Fuel lines at the bendix were finger tight when we took off...how was I to know?
On another new engine test flight in a Navajo, the take off was followed by a radio call from base. Seems that from the ground the gear retraction sequence was off a bit...the gear kind of did a 'river dance' then retracted. We had indication that all was well, so we went out and did a shake down cruise on the new engine and came back to base. Oooops...two green lights at gear extension. Press to test...light bulb works. Call to base...do some flybys with the gear extended. Looks good from the ground...let's land. When we get in, we find that the mechanic that plumbed the hydraulics for the pump that went on the new engine, used the other engine as a plumbing schematic. Unfortunately in this case, Navajo's have counter-rotating engines...and for some reason we were not stocked with counter-rotating airplane mechanics.
Once while flying jumpers, I observed a skydiver's reserve pilot chute deploy as they prepared to exit the plane and the door was open. He didn't see it, nor did I waste any time waiting to see if anyone else saw it. I grabbed the thing as it extended up by his neck and used my elboe to pin him to the floor. As he gave me the "WTF?" look, I craned my neck to see if the guy leaning out the door 'spotting' had seen what was going on...hahahaha, that dumass was giving me corections with hand signals and looking straight down at the 'spot'! The jumper behind him was looking down at the spot as well.
Finally, the guy spotting looks up and sees why I'm not responding to corrections and his face turns white as a ghost, he then jumps across the guy I pinned, pinning him to floor the jump plane as well. The third jumper saw what was going on and reaches out of the plane, grabs the door and pulls it closed, locking it. I then hand the several thousand jump jumpmaster his reserve pilot chute and the blood from his face drains out, leaving him pasty white with a stupid look on his face. Kinda like those ink pens with the girl in the bathing suit, where you tip em upside down and suit drains away, revealing the nude girl underneath. As this was a 'sun set' load, we descended and started the saturday night bonfire early and got wasted as a mofo.
Let's see...then there was a broken intake valve on a night 135 flight in an Aztec that gave me some problems. Try to trouble shoot that one in flight.
There was the saga of dissapearing nose wheel axels on a Seneca and an Aztec. The director of maint told me that in 20 years of wrenching, he had not ever seen one nose wheel axle come loose, much less two to same pilot in the same month. I was kind of wondering if the the departed axles had killed anyone out hoeing in their gardens when I dropped the gear to land, but I did find one axle the next day sitting on the runway of the airport I fly jumpers at on the side. If you truely love something, set it free and if comes back to you...take it in to the director of maint and beat him over the head with it!
