The International Cessna^® 170 Association

Guys,

Here is another 170 pilot in the news.

http://www.newsminer.com/view/full_stor ... st_popular

Glad it all worked out!

I just thought of something after looking at numerous posts... when it comes to news media, they often move the story to another archive and the link above will no longer work. Figuring someone in the 170 Association might want to read this a year or more down the road, I'm copying the story to below. So, with credit to reporter Tim Mowry, of the Fairbanks Daily News Miner, the story is as follows:

Close call has Fairbanks pilot counting his blessings
by Tim Mowry
2 days 10 hrs ago | 4175 views | 9 | 55 | | FAIRBANKS - When he felt a momentary shudder in the engine of his Cessna 170, Rick Schikora didn’t give it much thought.

All the plane’s gauges checked out, and the plane was flying fine. Schikora figured it must have been some ice in the gas that didn’t drain out of the system when he checked for water.

“That happens sometimes when it is cold out, and now that I was up in the warm air, it probably just melted,” Schikora wrote in an account about a recent close call that forced him to perform an emergency landing on Nome Creek Road, about 50 miles north of Fairbanks.

Schikora, 58, was flying over the White Mountains National Recreation Area on Dec. 20 on his way to pick up legendary Alaska trapper Heimo Korth, who traps on the Coleen River in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, almost 250 air miles north of Fairbanks, and his wife, Edna, to bring them into town for Christmas for the first time in 10 years.

The Korths are good friends of Schikora, who just happened to purchase the plane he was flying, sight unseen, from a gravel bar outside Korth’s house almost 30 years before where it had crashed. They’ve been friends ever since.

After checking his gauges, Schikora, who has accumulated about 5,800 hours of flying during the past 38 years, settled back into cruise mode. It was a beautiful day for flying, and the temperature at 6,300 feet wasn’t nearly as cold as Schikora had thought it would be considering it was 20 below in Fairbanks and colder to the north.

But not two minutes after he felt the initial shudder in the engine, the shudder returned, and this time it wasn’t momentary; it was continuous.

“I immediately turned around and called in an emergency to flight services in Fairbanks,” Schikora said.

His engine gauge showed that the No. 2 cylinder was showing no temperature, so Schikora knew he had a major problem. The plane still was running smoothly enough, though, that Schikora didn’t feel the need to shut the engine off.

“It was running smooth enough that I didn’t think it was coming apart,” Schikora said. “I said to myself, ‘I’m going to fly it until it quits or until it starts shaking so bad that it comes apart or I find a place to land.’”

He told flight services that he was headed back 25 miles or so to Nome Creek Road, a summer road that runs from the Steese Highway to the headwaters of Beaver Creek.

Schikora was told he was breaking up on the radio, so he tried repeating his message. It was at that point that another pilot came on the air and offered to relay information to flight services for Schikora. After doing so, the pilot said to Schikora, “That you, Rick?”

As luck would have it, the pilot was Joe Mattie, a friend of Schikora’s who was heading north to check his trapline.

“He normally doesn’t listen to that frequency,” Schikora said of Mattie. “Something told him to listen to it that day, and here I am declaring an emergency.”

Mattie headed in the direction of Schikora to offer any help he could.

The engine was shaking as bad as some of the stories Schikora has read about engine failures, so he figured he would keep flying until he ran out of oil or found a spot to land. He recalled a book he had just read by Anchorage bush pilot Mort Mason, who said the main problem that arises when something goes wrong is the pilot panics and stops thinking about flying the airplane.

“I kept telling myself, ‘Fly the airplane, fly the airplane,’” Schikora said.

Another problem had arisen, too. By this time, Schikora’s windshield was covered with oil that was spraying out of the engine compartment.

“I couldn’t see,” Schikora said.

The fact he was losing altitude and speed because the plane was running on only three cylinders was working against him, too, as was the fact he was flying into a slight headwind.

Now down to 4,000 feet, Schikora wasn’t sure he was going to be able to clear the final ridge before reaching the road.

Just as he cleared the ridge and the road came into sight, Schikora noticed smoke coming into the cockpit. It wasn’t so thick he couldn’t see, and Schikora figured it had to be oil on his exhaust pipes. But there is something unnerving when you have smoke coming into the cockpit of the plane you’re flying, Schikora said.

As soon as he found a relatively straight stretch of road, Schikora decided to put the plane down. He couldn’t see out the windshield so he was looking out the side window to see how high off the ground he was as he prepared to land. Even in the summer, Nome Creek Road would barely be big enough to accommodate an airplane. In the winter, it is nothing more than an eight-foot wide, packed snowmachine trail.

Remarkably, Schikora was able to set the plane, which was equipped with skis, down where he wanted. The right ski got off the packed portion of the road and was sucked into deeper snow, which forced Schikora into a slow right turn off the edge of the road down into the ditch. The plane came to a stop with the right wing resting against two trees.

Schikora sat there for a few seconds to collect his thoughts before radioing Mattie to tell him he was OK. Then he called his wife, Cheryl, on his satellite phone to tell her what happened as Mattie landed.

It didn’t take long for Schikora and Mattie to figure out what happened. The No. 2 cylinder had separated about where the barrel is screwed into the head where the valves are. Schikora checked the oil level. He had only 1 1/2 quarts left.

What followed was a classic example of can-do Alaska attitude.

After positioning the plane so the wing wasn’t hanging over the road in case any snowmachines came by, Mattie and Schikora climbed into Mattie’s Supercub and flew back to Fairbanks, where Mattie dropped Schikora off at his house.

Then Schikora and his brother-in-law, Bill Allen, drove 70 miles up the Steese Highway and rode snowmachines another 16 miles to reach the plane. They took everything out except the radios, put the wing and tail covers on and locked it up.

Two days later, Schikora, Allen, Korth — who Schikora arranged for an air taxi to pick up the previous day — and mechanic Mark Hasner snowmachined to the plane and set up a heated garage in the form of a parachute set up over some tripods with a wood stove in it.

They arrived at the plane at 9:15 a.m., and within three hours, Hasner had replaced the cylinder and Schikora was able to fly the plane home.

It’s a temporary fix and Schikora will need to have the plane’s engine torn down, but it’s a happy ending to what could have been a tragic story. Looking back on it, Schikora can’t help but wonder if fate played a large role in it.

For instance, the heater he put in the engine compartment of the plane the night before quit, forcing Schikora to spend an extra hour that morning heating the plane to get it started.

“If I got of here when I wanted to get out of here, it still would have been dark when I was over the White Mountains,” he said.

Chances are he would have still tried landing on the road, but it would have been much more difficult doing so in the dark than the light, he said.

Normally, Schikora tries to take as much with him in the form of food and supplies as possible when he flies to Korth’s cabin because it’s so expensive flying supplies in. But this time he wasn’t able to get a list of supplies Korth needed, so he left with a little more than 200 pounds of gear in his plane, a light load. Had he had a fully loaded plane, Schikora might not have been able to maintain the altitude he needed to get over the mountains to Nome Creek Road.

The fact that he was so close to Nome Creek Road, the only decent landing spot for miles, is another thing that worked in his favor, as is the happenstance that Mattie happened to be flying close by and was monitoring the emergency frequency Schikora was using.

“With that country up there, if I didn’t put it where I did I probably would have wrecked the airplane and that would have been the least that happened,” he said. “What isn’t rock up there is fire-burned spruce. If you land in that stuff, you’re going to wreck an airplane.”

In 38 years and almost 6,000 hours of flying, this was Schikora’s first major in-flight problem.

“I was just really fortunate,” he said. “So many things went right. I call it an early Christmas present.”

Very well written article. Rick is a 28-year member of TIC170A, and hosted the Fairbanks convention in 1988. I'll email a link to this thread to some members who may not have seen it.

Miles

I sure wish we could get good factual articles down here in the lower 48. If this had happened in FL the airplane would likely have been listed as a turboprop twin and none of the other facts would have been much closer. I'm thrilled to hear that such an incident ended so well. Rick flew Sharon Trembley and I out to his hunting camp the day after the '88 convention and if something like that had happened after the first 15 minutes of that flight, likely they would never have found us. Good show Rick!!!

Dale

If I recall correctly, Sharon Trembly landed on a dirt logging road near Lake Livingston, TX and managed to get it back out of there a few years back. It was written up in "The 170 News" with pics.

You would be correct, George... That would have been enroute to the Roswell convention.