When your propeller breaks, you can die quickly if you don’t remember one thing. My Dad’s training took immediately took over as he cut the engine of his little blue Cessna airplane.   If he hadn’t swiftly acted, the unbalanced remains of the propeller would have shook the motor loose causing the now fatally unbalanced plane to fall directly to earth.

That was the first rule.   The second, more obvious one, was to find a place to land within gliding distance. You don’t need a working engine in order to glide. He took a moment to think. On the positive side, he had bought himself some time. On the negative, he was not in a friendly landing area – he was over the San Francisco Bay – and his plane was not equipped for a water landing. Also, he had two passengers who were his responsibility – that made things a little more critical.

He did what was necessary, and landed on a empty dirt roadway on Mare Island near Vallejo. He landed safely except his wing tip hit a small trailer at the side of the road and spun around. His beloved 06Xray was totaled.

Laura got the call in Berkeley, and we were initially confused. What happened? He was a little shook up himself. I believe I drove up and picked up the three of them.

Later, Ron found a Cessna similar to the one he lost, but it was never the same.

[Recently I found an report from a Naval flight trainer who witnessed the landing: “the pilot handled this emergency commendably .. his quick analysis and prompt corrective action probably prevented this from becoming a fatal accident”]

I had it in my blood, but it only manifested briefly.  My dad was a radio ham in the early days when Morse code was the only means of communicating by amateur radio. Moreover, I later learned that my maternal grandfather Charlie was a telegraph dispatcher/operator when he first came to California.

Dad encouraged interest in amateur radio by plunking down a heavy all-band radio (with no cabinet) on my desk when I was in grade school. I never was interested in listening to the radio chatter, but learning ‘code’ appealed to me as a cryptographic puzzle. Since I loved building electrical projects, I convinced my best friend Jim Anderson to try out house-to-house communication. I ran a wire pair along back fences to his house, which was just around the block. Then I put a big battery under my desk and used one of my dad’s sending key and clicker to communicate (see below). Unfortunately, it was never used because Jimmy didn’t want to learn Morse code.   Oh, well.

This didn’t interfere with my mission to build a code-sending machine, using cotton thread spools turned by a handle, with bent copper wire to sense the dit’s and da’s.   Holes punched in a long tape were supposed to contain the codes. I was happy to build something that sort of worked. After testing I never used it — that wasn’t the important part.

4/9/15

[note missing bakelite nob on keyer]  ouch!