Commercial air travel is more comfortable for passengers on a
bad day than it is for C-130 passengers on a good day. And this
was a bad day.
When our
passengers sat on pallets (
combat
loading), that
was coach class. When they sat on
bucket
seats that
was first class. This day was first class. Those bucket
seats are attached to the
airplane's
sides
and
to
stanchions
down
the center of the cargo
compartment, so
passengers
travel
sideways. This helps passengers get to know
each other better because they sit knee-to knee and during takeoffs and
landings they lean against each other.
Tan Son Nhut, January 23, 1971
We
loaded up our pax for Hue and Danang. Meanwhile
the loadmaster found hydraulic fluid leaking from the aux system
pressure
transmitter behind the right side seats. There's also a
direct-reading gauge so we
just capped off the line for the remote gauge. It probably did
not instill confidence as
the passengers watched the hydraulics man working on our leaky plumbing.
But with that taken care of, we started engines and taxied
out. Before the first takeoff of the day I ran up the
engines to full speed to verify that all was well in that
department. Unfortunately the
tachometer
showed that the
#4
prop was fluctuating badly. Uh oh. C-130 engines are
supposed to run at a constant
speed--only
the
angle
of
the
propeller
blades should vary.
We called maintenance and taxied back in. The passengers remained
onboard
while the prop man worked on #4. He said it was all fixed so I
taxied out and ran it up
again. The fluctuation was better, but still out of limits so we
taxied back in
again. Sigh. Again they tweaked #4 and again we taxied
out. When I
ran it up again, the prop was still fluctuating, but within
limits.
I still had a hinky feeling about #4, but not liking the airplane
wasn't
a good enough reason not to fly it. So I took off. On
climbout, #4 confirmed my hinky feeling. The fluctuation got much
worse--now
three times the max allowable. If a prop fluctuates too wildly,
it can
decouple from the
engine.
And if the prop goes out of control it can leave its usual position on
the
wing and
crash into the fuselage
or
another prop. Would
not
want that.
So we climbed up to traffic pattern altitude, ran the engine shutdown
checklist, and feathered #4. That stopped the engine from turning
and set the prop to its
maximum
blade angle so it had the least wind resistance.
WARNING
When pulling the condition lever to Feather, pull it all the way to
the detent to assure the propeller is fully feathered when the engine
fuel is shut off. If binding occurs or condition lever will not
move, immediately pull the fire handle. If the lever is left at
mid-position, and NTS is inoperative, an engine decoupling is
possible.
This was my first "opportunity" to feather an engine and make a
three-engine landing, but I'd practiced it many times so I wasn't
worried. But when our passengers saw our
#4 prop come to a
stop, it probably did not add to their confidence in air travel.
I declared an emergency, flew the
Tan
Son
Nhut
traffic
pattern,
and returned for a smooth landing. "It is better to be on the
ground wishing you were in the air than in the air wishing you were on
the ground."
I told maintenance that they needed to
really fix that airplane and that
we had flown it all we were going to that day. There
were no more flyable airplanes available, so we were done for the
day.
After 3 trips to the runway and
one trip around the traffic pattern our passengers were a bit tired and
cranky. We couldn't give them complimentary drinks so we sent
them back
to the
aerial port
where they had started hours earlier.
