SPC094 [HS] Engine Out – Who Showed Up

Well, I got the airplane down in one piece.

It was in a cornfield in southeastern Colorado, far southeastern Colorado.

My son was sitting next to me, and nobody's hurt, nothing's

on fire, the airplane's intact.

I didn't do it perfectly, and I'll get to that, but there's a whole

episode in what I'd do differently.

But I did enough.

And then I stood there in the dirt in a field full of corn that was maybe four

inches tall, and I had one thought.

Now what?

Nobody ever trained me for this next part.

It turns out a dozen other people were ready, though.

So this is episode 94 of the Student Pilot Cast, Gratitude.

Welcome back to the Student Pilot Cast.

I'm Bill, and this is the first post-Osh episode.

But I need to tell you up front that this is not the episode

that I planned to record.

The plan was fly my Jabiru to Wisconsin with my son, Trey, tie

it down in the north 40, camp under the wing for a week, fly home.

That's the trip, and that's what we'd been building up toward all year.

That is not what happened.

On Saturday, July 18th, two days before the show opened, the engine in my

airplane quit over southeastern Colorado, and we had to put it down in a field.

Everybody's fine.

I wanna say that immediately because I know how that sounds.

Trey and I both walked away.

Nobody was hurt, not us, not anybody on the ground.

Airplane's okay.

And I'm gonna be clear with you about what this episode is and isn't.

What it isn't: it's not the debrief.

I'm not gonna walk you through the troubleshooting, or the decisions, or the

cause, or what I'd do dif- differently.

That episode is coming, and honestly, it's probably more than one episode

because there's a lot in there worth pulling apart carefully.

It's not today, though.

I don't even know most of the answers yet, so it would be pretty hard to

debrief it I've gone over that morning dozens of times, probably hundreds,

and there's a list of things I'd do differently or do sooner or do

at all, things maybe I didn't do.

I have a lot to learn from this, I'm sure, and I'm still

in the middle of learning it.

So when we get to the debrief episode or episodes at some point in the

future, you are sure to hear me second-guessing myself a lot, most likely.

What I'll say is this, though: I did enough.

Enough of the training was in there, and enough of it came out at the right moment.

The outcome is what it is.

My son and I are here and undamaged, and I'm grateful.

In fact, that's what this whole Oshkosh episode is about, gratitude.

And for the incident we had and the outcome, I'm especially grateful.

Like I said, I didn't probably do everything perfectly, so

there was a margin there.

There was a gap between what I did and what maybe I should have done.

Everything I've thought of after the fact probably wouldn't have changed the

outcome, but I'm not sure of that yet.

But in any case, the gap got covered by some luck and by

a whole lot of other people.

That's one of the things I'm grateful for, the covering of that gap.

So what this episode is then, it's the story of who showed up.

Because here's the thing: I can't stop thinking about it.

Three weeks later, between that cornfield on Saturday morning and walking into

the grounds at Oshkosh on Monday morning, I can count somewhere around

a dozen people who had absolutely no obligation to me and helped anyway.

Some of them I'll never be able to thank.

One of them I now consider a friend, and another of them is my kid.

So that's the episode.

It's a gratitude episode, and I don't say that to be soft about it.

I mean, it's the actual subject.

Everything else I want to tell you about Oshkosh this year

sits on top of that gratitude.

I'll never forget this year's Osh for a lot of reasons, and

this incident is one of them.

But it did lead to the event itself, which had its own personality and

probably the best weather we've ever seen at Oshkosh once the

smoke from Canada cleared up a bit.

I'm grateful, first of all, to have made it there and to see the people

I love seeing there, but also to meet some new people as one does at Oshkosh.

So first, I'm thankful that I still got to go So let's get on with the rest.

So let me set the scene quickly, because the timeline is one of the most

remarkable parts of this, and I wanna make sure you have it in your head.

We left Mesa, Arizona very early on Saturday morning.

We dodged some weather in Arizona, crossed most of the mountains, and made our

first fuel stop in Las Vegas, New Mexico.

Yes, New Mexico.

There is a Las Vegas there.

It's a small town.

We took off from that very high-density altitude field, thank goodness

it has a long runway, and we flew for a couple more hours, maybe

an hour from our next fuel stop.

So that Saturday morning en route to AirVenture over southeastern Colorado,

it's where Colorado meets Kansas and Oklahoma and Texas and New Mexico.

It's kind of where they all come together.

That's where the engine went quiet.

I'm not gonna give you the play-by-play yet, but I'll tell you one thing

that was interesting to me, which was not really about flying at all.

From a couple thousand feet or so, the field I picked looked like

bare dirt, freshly plowed, clean.

It looked like the best option I had, and it probably was.

There were some county roads and some things like that, but we'll,

we'll get into that next time.

So then we're on the ground, and we're rolling out, and

I realize it's a corn field.

It was planted.

Little, tiny corn plants, three, maybe four inches high, all the way across.

It's spaced out further than I would have expected.

Actually, when you see a full-grown corn field, it looks like

everything's pushed together.

These plants were pretty far apart, but then again, I don't

know much about growing corn.

So there's a lesson probably in that, in what you can and cannot

know about a surface or a landing spot from a couple thousand feet up,

It was hot down there.

We chose a field near a farmhouse in case we needed help, but the landowner

turned out not to be home anyway.

His working dogs were, though, and they came out to greet us.

Only one of them stayed mad.

The others rolled over to be scratched once we made friends with

them, so I'm thankful for that.

There's gratitude there as well.

And that the still-mad one just yelled at us.

He didn't really wanna do anything about it.

He just kept barking So something I want you to internalize about this.

We're in a cornfield in the middle of nowhere, Colorado.

Monday morning, we're walking into the grounds at Oshkosh

through the AirVenture gates.

And the part that kinda still gets me is almost all of the stuff that happened

in between happened on that Sunday.

Sunday morning we were in a hotel room in a small town in Colorado with no

airplane, no rental car, and only a vague idea how we were getting anywhere.

By midnight that night, we were in a tent at Camp Scholler a thousand miles away.

Church, lunch, a wait in a country airport, a flight across the plains,

a fuel stop in Nebraska, landing in South- Southern Wisconsin, and a

drive north, and in camp by midnight.

One day That doesn't happen without the help of a bunch of people in

general aviation, especially with the emotional tax I was carrying about

what had just happened, how I was gonna take care of my airplane, et cetera.

Well, I wanna tell you about some of these people.

Quick thing first, because I know you're wondering, and it'll bug you

the whole time if I don't say it.

The airplane is okay.

She's in storage up in northern Colorado right now with her wings off.

There's some minor landing gear strut damage from the field.

It was a pretty bumpy rollout, and obviously there's an

engine that quit to sort out.

I'm working with getting help from a mechanic.

Um, I, I really don't know exactly what happened yet, and I don't

know what it's gonna take to get her fixed, but she's not a loss.

She's fine.

Um, she's just out of service for a little bit, and I fully expect her to fly again.

All of that, the cause, the troubleshooting, the repair, the

whole process, later episodes.

I, I'll share it with you.

But now, back to the people.

That's this one.

So as I start to relay to you some of our experiences, you can

almost think of them as rings of people that we're grateful for.

Ring one is inside the airplane.

Ring two and beyond are outside the airplane, but they come in waves,

and they sort of go out from there.

Uh, it's like a distance and relationship kind of makes up the ring.

So hopefully you get the idea what I'm talking about, but as I refer to rings

here, that's what I'm talking about.

Uh, I'm sorry to be so philosophical about this, but this experience

sort of demanded it of me.

So just go with me, please, and hopefully it'll all make

sense and be interesting to you.

So I wanna start inside the airplane, because that's where the first

person I'm gonna talk about was.

Ring one, closest to me time-wise and physically, and that was my son, Trey.

He was in the left seat.

I usually fly from the right seat these days.

I'm used to it, but also most of the people I fly with are wanting

to learn something and feel more comfortable in the left seat.

The exception is my wife.

I always fly from the left seat with her.

She doesn't care to learn anything about flying directly, although

we'll talk about that a little bit in a few minutes, and she feels

more comfortable in the right seat.

It's where she's been since I learned to fly and we took our

But Trey, he's also my student and was getting some good

experience on this flight, and he usually chooses the left seat.

He's 23.

He's in school to become an A&P, or an aircraft mechanic, and when time

permits, as I said, he's learning to fly with me as his CFI in Little Roo.

That's the name of our Jabiru.

And I need you to understand something about this kid, which is that he is

one of the most unflappable human beings I know, from experience.

This is a pattern with him.

Trey seems to b- be there when people, including himself

sometimes, are having a traumatic or scary or dangerous experience.

More than once in his young life since becoming a teenager and able to

assist, Trey has been the first person on the scene of a car accident or

other incident where people need help.

And every single time, he just goes.

He jumps in, he figures out who needs what.

He helps strangers he'll never see again.

He doesn't freeze, and he doesn't panic, and he doesn't stand there feelm-

filming it or something like that.

He just gets to work.

He's, he's had car accidents, a dirt bike accident, skydiving.

I, I, I'll tell you one or two.

So w- we went skydiving a couple of years ago back in my hometown

in the Central Coast of California.

And as usually happens on a first skydive, everything goes perfectly for everybody.

But for Trey, uh, he's with a, um, instructor who's had maybe 25,000

jumps, like very experienced instructor.

And, um, he, he has something happen to him with this instructor that

I think the instructor said he's only had happen one other time, and

it wasn't nearly as bad as this.

And that's that the lines on their main chute got all twisted up.

And so they spent most of their time under the canopy before landing

kinda kicking and twisting and trying to get it unstuck, um, untwisted,

which they did successfully.

The canopy finally opened all the way and, and they landed normally.

Uh, but I saw somebody below me.

He had-- My family had jumped out before me, and I saw somebody that was twisted

up and having problems with the canopy, and I couldn't tell who it was, and I was

sitting there hoping, "I hope that's not somebody in my family." But in the back of

my mind I'm going, "It's probably Trey."

And it turned out it was.

And he's, he's just unflappable.

When the instructor said, "Hey, we have an issue. Help me kick to

twist around," he told me later, he's like he wasn't really scared.

He just figured there's nothing he can do except help and do what

he said, so he started doing it, and he started kicking around.

So they, they got it undone and, and landed successfully.

But that's just the type of experience that Trey-- experiences that Trey

has had over and over and over again.

So it's not that surprising that when this happened, it was with Trey.

So we're in the airplane.

The engine has quit, and now I'm busy.

And what Trey did, and I've thought about this a lot since, is he found ways

to be useful without ever once being in the way I want to focus on that for

a second, because if you, you've never been in a cockpit when something's going

really wrong, you might not know how rare it is that, or how rare it likely is.

Most people do one of two things.

They freeze up completely, or they fill the airplane with noise, questions,

suggestions, what's happening?

Are we okay?

You know, that, that type of thing.

Both of those costs the PIC something, and the PIC usually does

not have anything spare to give.

Trey did neither of those things.

He was looking for ways to help the entire time.

He just instinctively knew where that line was.

Nobody taught him that.

I certainly didn't teach him that in any deliberate way.

He just knew.

He was reading out the messages and alerts from the PFD.

He made one or two suggestions and asked three times over four and a half minutes,

"Is there anything else I can be doing?

Anything else I can help with?" Then he'd wait.

He'd continue monitoring, thinking, et cetera, but not overreacting.

We'll talk about the communication part in a minute, but he saw I was

too busy to continue talking on the radio and offered to respond

to questions about our location.

I probably should have taken him up on it, but I was so task-saturated

at that point that I didn't even make the decision to allow him to do that.

But he was asking the right questions, making the right suggestions, and

he was doing it at all the right times So as many of you know, I

record audio for most of my flights.

I always have.

So there's a recording of this.

And some days later, after Oshkosh was over and we were home, I sat down and

I listened to it for the first time.

I, I hadn't really consciously been avoiding listening to it, but maybe I had

some hesitation in the back of my mind that I didn't realize because it was over

a week before I played it for myself.

I had been pretty busy, I guess, but in any case, the following

Monday, I listened, and it was a bit surreal and a little eye-opening.

What both Trey and I thought had been about 90 seconds from the time the engine

quit to being on the ground was more like four and a half minutes, which tracks

because as we were figuring out, we were over 3,000 feet above the ground.

How did, how did it only take 90 seconds?

But both of us had this sense that that was about how long it took.

It was over four and a half minutes.

There were long pauses of silence while we worked the problem and

tried to restore power and made decisions and finally landed.

And I listened to what Trey had said and did.

And then I went and found my son later that day, and I gave him

a hug and told him he's a stud.

That was full circle because one of the first things he had done when we stepped

onto the cornfield out of the airplane was he gave me a hug and said, "Nice job."

But I told him that because he is a stud.

Twenty-three years old, and he handled the worst day of my flying life better than

a lot of people twice his age and with a lot more training probably would have.

There's a version of this where I turn what Trey did into a lesson how

a passenger could and should behave in an emergency, what to say, what not to

say, what to do, and that's probably a genuinely useful thing to do, and

I'm probably gonna do it someday.

But again, not today.

Trey is not my case study today.

He's my kid, and I'm grateful for him, and I'm grateful for how he reacted

and helped me that weekend Now I have to back up to standing in the field

again, and another person that I'm grateful for, and this is a big one.

Ring two, if you will.

After the airplane stopped, and after we'd made sure we were okay,

we were both okay, my very first phone call was to my wife, Crystal.

Before the sheriff, before the FAA, before Kent, before anybody, and here's

what she did with that phone call.

She did say at first, "You're k- you're kidding, right?" I guess I've

been known to kid around from time to time, but once she realized I wasn't

kidding, her reaction was perfection, especially what she didn't do.

She didn't panic.

She wasn't somebody I had to manage.

I, I did not have to spend any of what I had left that morning

taking care of her, and if you've ever had to make a phone call like

that, you know what a gift that is.

What she said was essentially, "Okay, thanks for letting me know,

and I'm so glad you guys are safe.

Now, what do you need?

How can I help?" And then she did help.

She really helped.

She was in on the decisions we made over the next 24 hours.

She made suggestions.

She made sure Trey and I both knew from almost 1,000 miles

away that she was in our corner.

But that's not the only part I wanna tell you about.

She told me later, maybe later that night or maybe the next day, I don't

remember exactly when we talked about it, but she told me what she

d- what the first thing she did was after she hung up the phone with us.

She knelt down and offered a prayer of gratitude that we were okay

I can't tell you how supported and loved that made me feel, but

I'm guessing you can imagine.

I've been sitting here calling this a, a gratitude episode, and I've

been planning it that way for a week, and I've had a couple of weeks to

think about it and arrange my ideas and decide what this is all about.

My wife got there in about 90 seconds.

On the floor before there was a plan, before we knew where we

were sleeping that night, before anybody had made any decisions,

she had already gone to gratitude.

So the theme of this episode is not really my idea.

I got it from her.

She got there a lot faster than I did, and then she went and

took care of everybody else.

It's what she does.

Because here's what happens after something like this.

The phone tree lights up, extended family, friends, they all start hearing

about it, and they're maybe a little shocked, a little bit scared, a little

bit worried, and they're asking questions, and somebody has to field that, and

I was in a corn field in Colorado.

It wasn't gonna be me.

So guess who it was?

It was her.

And people asked her all kinds of things and started asking her things

like, "Are, aren't you freaking out? Are you ever gonna be able to

fly in that plane again?" You know, all, all kinds of things like that.

And her answer, and I wanna get this right because I think it's better than anything

I would've said was, "Everything's okay.

Everyone's okay.

He did what he was trained to do, and it worked." She would say

things like, "Pilots train for this.

They're always thinking about where they would go if the

engine stops doing its work.

He does it when I fly with him," she said, "and it turns out that today is

the day he had to use that training.

Of course, I'll fly with him again.

I'm not freaked out.

I'm grateful That's a non-pilot, that's my wife, who does not hold a

certificate, explaining continuous force landing planning to a frightened group

of people who don't really understand, and she was doing it correctly.

In a few sentences, and with no jargon.

And I w- wanna pull one practical, real thing out of that for you.

She had the language because she's been in the airplane with me while I used it.

When I fly with my wife, I s- or anybody, really, I say that stuff out loud,

where we would go, what's off the nose, where the wind's coming from, what's

behind us, where the closest airport is.

Not to be dramatic, it's just how I fly.

It's how I brief myself and anyone else who's with me, and I've been

doing it in front of her for years.

So when the worst version of it actually happens, she wasn't

guessing at whether I'd be ready.

She already knew.

She had heard me do it a bunch of times.

So here's your action item, and it's not a flying skill, it's

a people and a family skill.

Narrate it out loud when you fly with people who love you, especially.

Not just to reassure them, but to give them the vocabulary and the language

and the understanding that they'll need if it's ever their phone that rings.

Because somebody is gonna have to explain to your family and your

friends someday, so give them the words and the understanding now.

So, obviously, I'm really grateful for Crystal and how she handled the situation,

but how she handles most situations.

I'm really grateful for her

All right, so we're done with ring two, so let's move on.

For this one, we're gonna go back to the airplane after the engine quit, and

we'll talk about the first people who we told that we were having an issue.

So where we were and how low we had g- you know, we were at the time,

ATC could not hear f- hear me.

I made a mayday call, but I did it on guard, and the people who heard it

were airline crews at altitude overhead on their way somewhere else entirely.

They heard it, and they relayed it.

They picked up a microphone for a stranger in a little airplane below them who was

having a pretty bad morning, and they made sure that the system knew where we were.

I'll never knew- know who those people were.

I've… So I've thought about this a lot.

There's somebody up in the front of an airliner who did that for

us, went, went on to wherever they were going, landed, went home, and

has no idea how much it mattered.

I can't send them anything.

I can't buy them a beer.

I can't even find out their names.

And they probably would've done it for anyone.

But I'm grateful f- for them anyway, even though I don't know who they

are, and that's kind of a strange type of gratitude, and I've kinda come to

like it, the kind of gratitude that I can't even talk to them about and

thank them for Funny additional story.

I learned today in fact, uh, from my, my middle son, who is

also a s- a certificated pilot, um, that he was doing a job.

He does tile and grout repair.

And he was doing a job today, um, at a person in the Phoenix area's house,

and as soon as the guy walked in, he said he knew, he knew he was a pilot.

The mustache, the clothes he was wear- everything.

He just knew he was a pilot.

So he asked him who he flew for.

And the guy was like, "How did you even know?"

And he said, "I, I, I could tell." And so he said that he flew for a major airline.

He's a first officer.

And he asked, uh, w- what my, my son flies, and he said, "Well, I'm not

flying a lot right now, but my, my dad, um, you know, has an airplane.

He has a Jabiru, and it's a little out of commission right now." And he

proceeded to tell him the high level of the story, and he said, "No way.

This happened on the Saturday before Oshkosh, right?" He said, "Yeah."

And so he pulls up his phone, and he says, "Was it this airplane?" And

sure enough, this guy that my son Merek had, uh, been working at his

house had heard our call on guard.

Um, he wasn't one of the people that spoke to me, but, um, he said he turned

up the radio, and he listened in.

He said everybody's been kinda wondering how that turned out

since, so very small world.

Um, so kind of a funny story that, um, I didn't even know about un- until today.

So let's move on to further rings in the system and people I'm grateful for.

It, it keeps getting all these little strange twists, but because the FAA and

the ATC didn't just log it and move on, somebody, some human in that system,

started making phone calls, and they worked out who owned the airplane.

They called around.

They found my phone number, and then they called me while I

was standing out in the field.

So think about that for a second.

I teach students to think of ATC as a service you request.

You call them, they help you, that's the model.

That day, they came looking for me to make sure we were alive, make

sure we were okay, and get whatever information I could give them.

Some stranger, a government worker, got me on the phone and said something to the

effect of, "I'm looking for the pilot of November 648 Juliet." And I said, "Well,

you got him, and I have an idea I know why you're calling." And then I proceeded

to tell him that we were okay, that I didn't know precisely where we were,

but he could probably get that from the deputy who was starting to pull up and

who had already been talking to them.

I gave them a bit of additional information that I would've given him on

a mayday call if he could've heard me, and he ended with something like, "Well,

you probably have some stuff to take care of. We're real happy around here that

you got it worked out and that you're okay, so good luck," and we hung up.

And the deputy on scene was on with the FAA as well, like I

said, coordinating from his end.

Everybody just doing the job all at once for two guys standing in a field next to

a little airplane All right, so now I have another funny thing to tell you about that

happened, um, during the incident, and it happened during the worst part of it.

Don't tell me God doesn't have a sense of humor.

So I'm working the problem.

We're still in the air.

I'm working the problem, and at a certain point, I stop talking on the radio.

After the mayday call and initial kinda, "This is where we're at," I, I stop

talking because I'm flying a powerless airplane toward a cornfield, and

talking is now the third most important thing I'm doing, as you all know.

And this pilot comes up on the frequency, uh, while we're lining

up, well-meaning, genuinely trying to help I'm sure, and he says, "Aviate,

navigate, communicate," over the radio.

Now, I did not respond to that.

I was, as it happens, aviating and navigating, so I didn't have time.

And before I could have said anything, even if I had wanted to, another airline

pilot pops up on the frequency and he says, and I quote, "Not helping."

Two words, deadpan, instant.

I didn't laugh at the time.

I had things to do, but Trey and I have laughed about it,

I don't know, 10 times since.

And I told that story a couple of, to a couple of different people at Oshkosh,

and every one of them was cracking up.

And I wanna be clear, I know the first guy meant well.

I have no shade for him at all.

He was trying to help a stranger, and that's a good instinct.

But here's what makes it perfect, and I, I don't know if you

ever thought about it this way.

Aviate, navigate, communicate is a priority list, right?

It tells you what to do first.

It's a mantra that we all know, ev- every pilot knows.

And the reason I wasn't talking anymore was that I was aviating and navigating.

So the mantra got used to correct the exact behavior that the mantra tells you

to do, which I thought was pretty ironic.

And then some other pilot who understands, understands that instantly shut it down

in two words, and that is aviation.

That's the whole culture in one exchange.

Somebody says the obvious thing, and somebody else immediately will

not let them get away with it.

Every hangar, every ready room, every frequency forever,

that's what we do in aviation.

So whoever you are up there over Colorado on that morning of July

18th, I owe you a drink for the funniest thing that happened that day.

So that's two of them now, right?

Two strangers I can't identify.

One of them picked up a mic and probably saved me a lot of trouble.

The other one made the worst day of my flying life funny.

It might be the same person, I don't know, but it's likely two different

people, and I can't thank either one to their faces, so I'm thanking them here.

All right, so let's move on to ring four or whatever we're at.

I'm- I've lost track.

So we're on the ground.

First thing I did after the airplane stopped, and we got out, and I

made sure Trey was okay, and I made that phone call to my wife, is I

started making other phone calls.

One of them was to Kent.

We'll talk about that a little bit later.

But I also started searching around for a nearby sheriff's office, and I called.

Turned out, called the wrong one.

I called the wrong county.

But of course, I did that because which county am I in right now is not a

question any pilot has ever rehearsed.

I could tell you my position from a VOR.

I could not tell you whose jurisdiction I happened to land in.

They didn't make it weird, though.

They just started marshaling information around, gave me other phone numbers, and

sent information to people who needed it.

Everybody was really helpful.

Nobody was annoyed for me for not knowing exactly where I was.

Then the responders started arriving: deputies, paramedics, fire.

Trey and I were fine, completely fine, and, and in order to get the

paramedics to clear the scene, we had to sign refusal of care documents on

a tablet that was very hard to use.

So there I am standing in a cornfield.

We couldn't even see it in the sunlight hardly, but we're standing in a cornfield

in the middle of southeastern Colorado doing an electronic signature on a

ruggedized tablet to legally certify that I do not require an ambulance.

Nobody puts that in a training manual.

And here's something I didn't learn until afterwards, and it

sobered me up a bit for sure.

Before anyone knew that we weren't hurt, before anyone on the ground had any

information at all, really, except a general idea of where we were, several

of those responders were driving very hard to get to us on gravel county roads.

They heard aircraft down, and that's all they had.

For all they knew, somebody was dying in that field, so they came

as fast as the roads would let them.

Nobody got hurt, thank goodness.

But it coulda gone another way, and if it had, if it did, it would've

gone that way because of my airplane.

And that's a thing I don't hear pilots talk about much, so I'm

gonna say it in plain words today.

Your emergency has a blast radius that's bigger than your airplane.

When you go down, people you've never met get in vehicles and

take risks to come and find you.

That's part of the cost of the thing, and it's worth carrying that around with you.

So when I say I'm grateful nobody got hurt that day, I don't just mean Trey and me.

I mean the first responders on those roads as well Now I want to tell you

about two people who are a big part of the reason I wanted to make this episode.

The fire chief showed up.

His name's Everett.

He also happens to be the county coroner, and he wears a few other hats besides

because that's how things work in a place with not a lot of people in it.

His wife, Becky, happened to be with him that day, so she pitched

in, too, because she was there.

The two of them loaded up me and Trey and all of our stuff, which by the

way, was mostly just loose in the back of the airplane, not in bags,

not in cases, because why would it be?

We were planning to fly all that stuff there and fly home in the

airplane with it all there as well.

So they drove us 50 minutes, five zero minutes, to the nearest hotel.

That's already more than anybody had to do.

They helped us make decisions.

They told us where towns were.

They, they took us places.

They, they just helped immensely.

Uh, they'll never have a full idea of how much they helped.

So it's Saturday night.

Trey and I are in a hotel in a town we've never heard of.

No airplane, no rental car.

Nearest one was 235 miles away, the nearest rental car.

Too far from home to drive home, too far from Oshkosh to drive to Oshkosh, and very

far from any major commercial airports.

And we walked to a truck stop that was somewhat near the, the little hotel

we were in and got convenience store pizza, and we sat there trying to figure

out what on earth we were gonna do.

That's the picture I keep coming back to from this whole thing.

Two guys who put an airplane in a corn field that morning eating gas

station pizza that night, trying to work out how to get somewhere

else, either home or Wisconsin.

We didn't even know what we should do, let alone what we

were really gonna be able to do.

I, I told Trey, "Let's work through w- what our plan is." We called Crystal

and tried to work it out with her help, you know, w- was calling Kent and so on.

Again, none of this is part of your training.

We had an option here that was pretty unique, which we'll talk about in a

minute, but we were trying to work through all of it and what our options were.

So then Sunday happened.

Everett and Becky went to church that morning in the same

town where we were staying.

It was the county seat.

It was the biggest town in the county.

Uh, but it was very, very small, which is quite a ways from their

house, at least in non-rural terms.

They kept saying, "Oh, we're used to driving long ways.

Don't worry about it." But anyway, afterward, they came to get us

because they wanted to take us to their traditional Sunday lunch

at the only restaurant in town, which was obviously a steakhouse.

And their granddaughter came, too.

So that Sunday lunch, me, my son, the fire chief, his wife, their

granddaughter, in a steakhouse in a small town in Colorado about 24 hours

after I'd put an airplane in a field.

And then it gets better.

Everett dropped Becky and his granddaughter off at home, and then

he drove us out to the county airport and that, you know, that was in that

town or near that town, and he sat there with Trey and me for a couple of

hours, waiting for our ride to arrive.

We told him he didn't have to do that.

More than once we told him that, but he wanted to.

So we just sat there and talked and got to know each other a little, and

honestly, the company was very welcomed.

It had been a, a long 30 hours.

At some point in there, Everett made a joke.

He said he was really glad that he got to come out to that field as the

fire chief and not as the coroner

Yeah.

Yeah, me too.

These little rural communities are full of people like that, and I,

I got an inside look that I never asked for, but I wouldn't trade.

Everett and Becky went so far past anything resembling their duty that at

some point in that Sunday they stopped being first responders and became our

friends, which is what they are today.

A couple days later, I got a text from Everett while we were at AirVenture

saying he saw our little plane being hauled north on a flatbed trailer.

Small world out there.

I asked how she looked, and among other things, he said, "Maybe

a little ashamed." Perfect.

That's what friends do.

They make light of situations to help, help us cope with stress, right?

So back up to Saturday night for a second.

Truck stop pizza, no plan, and my friend Kent, a lot of you know Kent from the

Beyond The Checkride episodes, and if we're going way back, from the pilot cast.

He calls and offers to mount a rescue mission to come and get us in his Mooney.

He then offered to fly it out to Colorado, pick up two guys and their gear, and

take us wherever we needed to go.

Trey and I talked about it.

We talked to my wife about it, and this is the decision I want

to name because it wasn't obvious.

We could've gone home.

I, I don't know how, but if we could've made it home, we could've

figured out a way to get there, and that was absolutely an option.

Arguably, the sane option, right?

We'd had a hell of a Saturday.

Nobody would've blamed us for saying, "You know what? The Oshkosh is just

not happening this year. Let's get home and deal with the incident,

deal with the airplane." But we decided to keep going on to Oshkosh.

Part of it was practical, honestly.

There were no good ways to get home either.

No rental cars.

We weren't close to anything.

Getting to Wisconsin was weirdly almost the easiest thing available to

us, but only because of Kent and his generous offer of time and resources.

So again, feeling a lot of gratitude for the friends and the family in

my life, for the people we didn't know, and to our new friends.

So Sunday afternoon, Kent shows up in his beautiful airplane, and Everett

finally gets to go home, having personally supervised our entire weekend.

And on our way out, Kent took us over our landing spot, and we got a

couple of pictures from the air of Lil Roo sitting lonely out in a field.

So we move on, and we stop for fuel in Nebraska.

And at this random airport in the middle of Nebraska on the same day we'd left the

field in Colorado, we run into a group of Warbird guys flying Nanchang CJ-6s

from my home airport in Mesa, Arizona.

What are the odds?

I had to have an engine failure in southeastern Colorado to bump

into my neighbors in Nebraska.

That's aviation for you.

They were hopping across the country in those things, stopping about every hour

because that's the deal with a Nanchang.

You go a little ways, you land, you get gas, you stretch, you do it again.

We exchanged our information.

I'm sure I'll see them again.

Grateful to have had that interaction.

And at that same stop, we met one more person.

He's a local pilot based at that field, does a bunch of things, but among them,

he flies aerial application, crop dusting.

And he heard what had happened to us th- the morning before, and he told us

about his own engine failure situation.

His was worse.

Much, much worse because when you're doing ag work, you're low, and he was

very low when his, when his engine quit.

He was lucky, genuinely lucky to be alive.

And I wanna name what he did here separately because I don't

think he knew he was doing it, but he gave us perspective.

He gave me perspective.

So 30 hours after I'd walked out of a corn field feeling like I had just had the

biggest day of my flying life, a stranger sat down and told me a version of the

same story that was much closer to the edge that it reset the whole scale for me.

That's a gift.

That's a really generous thing to hand somebody.

Me too, and I'm still here.

And it turns out that's not a one-off.

That's a thing pilots do, and I'm gonna come back to that a little bit later.

In any case, I'm thankful and I'm grateful for that perspective because of that brief

conversation with a stranger in Nebraska.

So later on that evening, we land in southern Wisconsin.

Kent drives us up north, and we get into Camp Scholler around midnight.

And then because of pilots we literally had never met in person but only

knew through Kent, who let us set up on the ground where they were

parking their cars in Camp Scholler, we ended up with one of the best

campsites I've ever had in Oshkosh.

Very close to a show entrance.

It was really convenient.

Now, if you listened to last week's episode, I said I was unexpectedly

camping in Scholler this year, and that our campsite location was incredible.

I never explained how either one came about.

Well, now you know.

That's why.

And at one point in that same episode, I mentioned some Nanchangs

that we'd seen gassing up.

Never explained that one either.

Also this.

And Kent sat in that campground and talked to us in that episode about

his Mooney for a good little while.

What he didn't mention, what he never mentioned once in that episode, was

that he had just used it to fly two guys out of a corn field in Colorado.

That's just who he is.

So thank you, Kent, and I'm grateful for everyone involved, named and unnamed

Okay, so we're getting to the outer rings of the people I'm grateful for.

Maybe, like, ring eight or something like that.

I don't know.

But Monday morning, we're at Oshkosh, and I wanna tell you about that

week a little bit because it was one of the best ones I've had there.

One of my former private pilot students, who's also a current

instrument student, decided to come to Osh this year, her first year in

aviation and her first time at Oshkosh.

Her name's Kelly.

She's a lot younger than me, as you can imagine, and one of the funnier

observations that she made at AirVenture this year was that she was shocked

at how much older the demographic was at Oshkosh than she had imagined.

Yeah.

There's a lot of us oldies that like to go there.

Those of us who've been there, you know what we're talking about.

But what I'm mentioning this for is that getting to be the person who

shows somebody around Oshkosh for their first time is one of the genuine

privileges of being old and infatuated with aviation So this is, I think,

around my ninth Oshkosh or so…

Kent's done more than twice that.

Trey's even done three.

After nine of them, you start to lose a little bit of that thing where you just

can't believe what you're looking at.

Watching a newbie have that reaction gives it back to you.

And I'm grateful for this specifically.

I get to teach talented, passionate people like Kelly.

I get to build those relationships in places like Oshkosh, not just

in the cockpit, and not just in the briefing room, but out on the

flight line, in a crowd, looking at airplanes, and most importantly,

making new connections with people.

But I wanna say something else about my students in general,

and maybe this is unexpected or maybe it's obvious, I don't know.

My students are part of the reason that that morning in

Colorado went the way that it did.

Think about what I actually do for a living.

A couple times a week, I sit in an airplane, and I talk out loud about

where I'd go if the engine quit.

I demonstrate it, I pull the power out on somebody, and I watch them

work the problem, and then we debrief it, and we ge- we get to talk

about it, and then we do it again.

I have been rehearsing that emergency out loud with witnesses for a while, at least

periodically, because that's the job.

So when it stopped being a drill, I was not reaching for something that I had

read about once or that I'd practiced a year ago or something like that.

I was reaching for something that I'd taught the week before.

So every student that I've ever had made me a little more ready for that Saturday.

They didn't know they were doing it.

They just showed up for their lessons.

And here's the thing I'd like to offer to any instructor listening and to anybody

thinking about becoming an instructor.

Teaching is the best currency there is.

Not the certificate, the practice.

You cannot teach this stuff for very long without getting better at it yourself.

So to every one of my students, thank you.

You helped, and you had no idea that you were helping, and I'm grateful for

that Meanwhile, Trey spent his week volunteering most afternoons during the

airshow at the Air Operations Center.

His job was driving the cars for the clap laps.

If you haven't been to an airshow before, after a performer flies their act,

they get driven back down the flight line in a convertible and waving at the

crowd, and the crowd claps for them.

It's a lovely tradition.

Somebody has to drive those cars, and this year, some of the time, that was my kid.

So here's how those two things collided.

I was over at Air Operations with Trey, and some of the

Red Arrow pilots were there.

The Royal Air Force Red Arrows, first time they've ever come to Oshkosh.

They were, they were over here on a US tour for America's 250th, and they

were gonna be performing at Oshkosh.

And they were standing there watching Kyle Franklin's act.

And if you don't know it, Kyle Franklin does a comedy routine, airshow

routine, where he's a drunk guy.

He's a drunk guy in the crowd, apparently takes a Piper Cub and then flies it

extremely badly, which of course means he's flying it extremely brilliantly.

It's a, it's a legacy act his dad, Jimmy Franklin, originated.

It's been going on for something like 50 years or so.

So picture this: some of the most precise formation pilots on the planet standing

around Oshkosh, absolutely cracking up at a man pretending to be drunk and landing

a Cub And I said something to them about how much we were looking forward to their

performance and their show, and one of them, completely deadpan, turns to me,

and with that British accent, he says, "Well, it won't be as amusing as this."

I loved that so much.

It's, it's just perfect.

So then on Friday, I got to watch those Red Arrows fly.

They flew seven jets that day.

They're a nine-ship team normally.

I, I don't know why they were seven.

They probably maybe brought seven over, uh, across the Atlantic.

Um, I'm not exactly sure, but they were planning a, a

seven-ship formation at Oshkosh.

And partway through the display, one of those jets had to leave.

It was a mechanical issue of some sort.

So they finished the airshow with six, reshaped it on the fly, and kept going.

And I sat there on the flight line and thought about that for a minute.

Six days earlier, I'd lost an airplane, or an engine in an airplane, finished

my trip in somebody else's, and here's one of the best formation teams in

the world in front of a few hundred thousand people, I don't know, losing

an airplane mid-performance and just continuing with what they had left.

Everybody flies diminished sometimes.

You fly the show you got, right?

Also, I'm grateful that whoever was in that jet is fine, because a

mechanical problem in a fast jet in front of a crowd is a bad afternoon at

work, so I'm glad it turned out okay.

And I keep thinking about the guy who told me their sh- their airshow

wouldn't be as amusing as the drunk guy, the drunk guy in a Cub.

Maybe he was wrong about that, at least from an interesting standpoint, but I, I

still think that's a, a perfect response and, again, sort of defines aviation.

So one more thing about the show, and this is my actual

practical recommendation for you.

This year, ninth Oshkosh, I finally took the tram tour through the warbirds area.

It was my first time.

Nine years.

It's right there.

Everybody knows about it.

I'd walk past it every year.

So I'm grateful that Kelly got me to do it.

Take the tram.

It's fun.

We learned a bunch of stuff about some of the warbirds that are

off the beaten path a little.

Everyone knows about the Mustangs and the Corsairs, but there's

a lot more history back there.

And the volunteers who run those tours and who keep those airplanes

flying and who stand out there in the July heat all week explaining them

to strangers, those are unpaid people doing that for the love of the game.

So I'm grateful for them, too And then there's the thing that's the

actual reason I go every year.

There are people I only ever see at Oshkosh.

Some of them even live in Phoenix, which is crazy.

40 minutes from my house, I see them mostly in Wisconsin.

I can't explain it.

And it's not just friends.

My cousin Val and his wife Darlene, they live in Idaho.

They come to Oshkosh most years, same as I do, and I don't get

to see them much otherwise.

That's just how it goes when family's spread out across the West, right?

So this year they carved out an afternoon out of a short visit to

sit down with me and just catch up.

And I want to name what that actually was for me as well, because

it's different from everything else I've thanked everybody for.

Most people I've talked about in this episode helped me through something.

Val and his wife gave me an hour where that something wasn't the subject.

So I brought them up to speed on it briefly, and then we just caught up

and talked about Val's airplanes and the backcountry flying that they're

mostly doing now, and family and, and so on We just talked, and after

the few days I'd had, sitting down with people who I've known and who've

known me for my whole life and getting to forget about all of it for a

while, that was its own kind of gift.

I didn't even know that I needed that until they gave it to

me, so I'm grateful for that.

I don't know how to explain it except that Oshkosh is a place where the

aviation part of your life gets to be front and center and g- gets to be

kind of the whole thing for a week.

And a lot of the people you know from that part of your life are standing

in the same couple of square miles.

So Chris, thanks for busting us into the Piper owners party.

We were really hungry, so grateful for that, grateful to be able to catch up

with you and, and all the other people I, I got to catch up with as well.

Plus, new people we get to meet every year without trying and without fail,

which as it turns out, is not a hobby.

It's a network.

Ask me how I got to Wisconsin.

And I love making new friends, especially pilots, so I'm grateful

to all of those people who became my new friends this year.

Now on to the last ring, and this is a large one.

After the incident, word got around, and people started reaching out.

And what they said, almost every one of them in this order, first, thank

goodness you're okay, and second, and I'm gonna use the pun here

because it's the right thing to do.

They'd say something to the effect of, "Props to you for handling it the, the

way you did so that you guys are still here." And then the third thing, which

is the one I, I didn't really expect.

A lot of them told me their own stories.

Person after person, "Here's mine. Here's the day it happened to me." Not

everyone, of course, but those who've been flying small planes the longest

usually had something to tell me about.

And you'll notice that's exactly what the crop duster in Nebraska

did 30 hours after it had happened.

So it's not coincidence.

It's a pattern.

It's a thing that this community does.

When something happens to you, other pilots come and hand you their own worst

day or their own story so you know you're not standing out there by yourself.

And then there were the ones who wanted to learn from it.

Genuinely curious, asking real questions, wanting to know what it

was like and what I'd take from it.

Not rubbernecking, studying.

That's instinct.

That reflex to turn somebody else's bad day into your own

preparation is a huge part of why aviation is as safe as it is today.

It's the same instinct behind the reason that most of us read accident

reports and look into them and kinda try to apply those to our own flying.

So I'm grateful for this community.

And there's one more little group, and I've saved them for last on purpose

because they changed how you should hear everything I've said today.

Every instructor I've ever flown with, every colleague I've ever worked

alongside, I'm thankful for them.

And here's what I mean.

I told you at the top of this episode that I didn't do everything

perfectly, but that I had done enough.

And I wanna be honest with you about where the enough came from.

It wasn't really mine.

Every habit I used that morning, somebody put it in me.

The instructor who would not let me stop scanning for fields, that's in there.

The one who drilled the flow until I hated him a little bit, that's in there.

The colleague who mentioned something offhand in a hangar six years ago

that I've thought about on most flights since, that's in there, too.

I have no idea which specific thing came from which specific person.

It's all mixed together now, and it just comes out as how I fly.

So when the engine quit, there were two people in that airplane, but there were

about 18 years of other people's teachings in that seat with me And that honestly

is the deepest version of what I've been saying for the last, you know, 40 minutes

or however long we've been doing this.

I've told you that other people got us to Oshkosh, and they did, but

it goes way further back than that.

Even the part I did myself was thanks to many other people.

So I'm really, really grateful for that too.

And on that note, briefly, I'm grateful for an industry that

will not stop chasing this.

Mosaic from the aircraft manufacturer side went into effect during the show.

The panels are getting better and simpler.

Training is obviously getting better.

There's real news out of this year's AirVenture on all of that, and it's

genuinely encouraging for the industry.

I'm gonna do a whole episode on some of the other things we saw next time out.

Um, it deserves more than a minute or two.

And there's two more people I'm gonna call out while I'm here

who are part of the same thing.

I got to sit down at Oshkosh with folks from Cirrus about their training

ecosystem and talk to them about it, and I also got to sit down with

Adriana Barragan, who founded FlyORCA, about training efficiency and why

her line, "Logging is not learning."

Both of those conversations are coming as full episodes, and both

those people pointed their entire professional lives at making pilots

better trained, which is the same thing as making pilots harder to kill.

So I'm grateful for them, I'm grateful for all of them, and

I'm grateful for this industry.

So let me leave you with three things, and I'm gonna frame them

the way I actually feel about it.

One, I'm grateful that the flying part worked out well enough.

Enough of that training was there when I needed it, and that training came from

instructors, colleagues, and every student who's ever made me demonstrate things.

And here's your takeaway: Your emergency plan probably ends at land safely.

Mine did.

There's a lot of day left over after that happens, and nobody rehearses that part.

So something to think about and something I'll probably

talk about more in the future.

Two, I'm grateful nobody got hurt coming to help us, including the responders

on those gravel roads before anybody knew what they were driving toward.

Remember that your emergency has that blast radius that's

bigger than your airplane.

Carry that with you when you evaluate risks.

Three, I'm grateful for a phone full of pilots as contacts, a sky full of

strangers who behave like family, and a wife who answers on the first ring.

Everett, Kent, airline crews I'll never identify, somebody in the FAA

who kept dialing until they found me, a crop duster in Nebraska.

That network is not a career tactic, and it's not LinkedIn.

It's what makes life and aviation interesting, and it's the thing

that got my son and me to Wisconsin so we didn't miss the show.

So again, thank you from the bottom of my heart, Kent.

So you all know the drill.

There's a voicemail line at studentpilotcast.com/voicemail.

The Friday Flight Brief goes out every week, so you can always just hit reply and

tell me when I'm wrong about something.

But this week, I want to ask you something specific.

Who is on your list?

Somewhere in your flying life, somebody showed up for

you when they didn't have to.

A CFI who stayed late, a stranger on a ramp, somebody who caught something

on your airplane before you did.

Tell me about them.

Leave a voicemail.

Send an email, bill@studentpilotcast.com.

I'd like to do something with those at some point.

I want to hear about it.

So before I go, Trey, my wife, who got to gratitude about two weeks before I did,

airline crews at altitudes whose names I'll probably never know, whoever it

was inside the FAA who kept making phone calls until they found the guy who owned

the airplane, the sheriff's deputy, the office in the wrong county, county who

helped anyway, responders who drove way too fast on gravel roads because they

thought somebody might be hurt, Everett and Becky, Kent and a mooney, Warbird

pilots from my home airport met hundreds of miles from my home, a crop duster in

Nebraska who told me about his worst day of flying so mine wouldn't feel so bad.

It would feel way more survivable.

Pilots I've never met who gave up a parking spot so my son and I would

have somewhere to put our tent.

Kelly, Val, and Darlene, who gave me an afternoon for my own story.

Every student who I've ever flown with who kept me sharp without even

knowing it, every instructor and every colleague whose habits I was using that

morning, and friends from everywhere who I usually only see at Oshkosh.

So I lost an airplane for a while this summer, and I, I gained about 20

people and, uh, got closer to others.

I, I'd still rather have the airplane, but it's really, really close.

Of course, I'm kidding.

I would not choose to do any of that.

I wouldn't choose to do it again, and I would not choose to have that

experience, but I also would not trade that experience and the people

it introduced me to and the people it brought me closer to for anything.

So I'm still flying, I'm still learning, and I'm really grateful the coroner got to

show up to that field as the fire chief.