Free Kelly by Clarence L. Johnson Page A

license to fly the airplane, but I knew very well how to fly it since I’d been on every flight from the first. I gave him takeoff speeds, direction on handling the flaps, and power settings for the engines. If all had gone well, no one would have known about our unofficial status.
    The flight itself went off just fine. I gave directions for landing—hold up the tail, put the nose gear down first, then let the tail settle. The landing also was fine until we got about 800 to 1,000 feet down the runway. The airplane suddenly yawed to the right and ended up going sideways. I looked out my side of the cockpit and there, sticking up through the right wing was the main landing gear strut! Migawd, I thought, here I’ve taken an airplane, checked out a pilot illegally, and wrecked the plane. There goes my job.
    But when the inspectors checked they found that, instead of six bolts holding the landing gear, only three had beeninstalled when it was signed off by inspection. McCloud and I were in the clear.
    A very, very serious danger in those days was icing, because few airplanes could provide enough heated air for the carburetor to prevent ice formation in it. And with ice in the carburetor, the engines would lose so much power that you were in real trouble even if they didn’t die completely.
    For the first time, with the Model 14 we had available a carburetor designed to correct that—the Chandler-Evans non-icing carburetor. We decided to incorporate it in the airplane. Fortunately, we didn’t rely on it solely.
    One of the tests that had to be passed before the aircraft could be certificated with this modification by the CAA—now the Federal Aviation Administration—was performance in icing conditions. The local CAA inspector, Lester Holoubek, was aboard to see how the new carburetor operated on one flight out of Mines Field. We had to fly up through about 3,000 feet of heavy undercast and had just broken clear for another 1,000 feet when the left engine gave a few hiccups and quit. It wasn’t long before the right engine slowed and gave every evidence that it would follow suit.
    It was a scary situation, especially since we couldn’t see the airport and knew that we had 3,000 feet of icy clouds to drop through on the way down—with the CAA inspector aboard. But we had not relied totally on the new carburetor and had provided for alcohol injection, too. We turned on a small, hand-operated pump and quickly dissolved the ice before we had descended below 1,500 feet. The engines operated again and we were able to maneuver down out of the overcast and land. We found we not only had a problem with the non-icing carburetor but with the CAA inspector, who decided—quite rightly—that if we were going to fly with that carburetor, we had to prove it with a lot more flying in icing conditions.
    The problem was compounded when about that time one of Northwest Airlines’s Model 14s, flying between Seattle and Minneapolis-St. Paul in icing conditions, crashed near Bozeman, Mont. The cause of the crash, of course, wasn’t immediatelyknown. I was on the investigating team and joined in inspecting the wreckage.
    It was apparent immediately that the two vertical tails were not on the airplane—they were just gone. Absence of the tails, of course, would lead the airplane into a very unstable flight regime and inevitable crash. Heavy snow was on the ground and we accepted the offer of the Bozeman ski club to hunt for the missing tail pieces. I even joined the search on skis one time—profiting by my boyhood experience in the winters of northern Michigan.
    When the tail was found and brought to the accident investigation center, the rudder was missing completely. Just the control to the rudder tab was hanging there, with nothing behind the hingeline.
    The regulatory agencies immediately imposed requirements for lead balances on both vertical tails above and below the horizontal stabilizer as well as some other specific changes.
    But I