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central mich | I don't have a license but I have flown quite a few planes. Including Paul Fuller's stick and pedal 1936 Great Lakes Bi Plane. You can Google and it will come up.
Paul's brother Estan was a commercial pilot for Eastern. He is a friend. And now retired. For several years he flew
A300s or L10 from Miami to Rio , Brazil. So they are loaded with 300 passengers on board and Estan contacts ATC and just by luck picks the longest run way at Miami. So they get set up and let her go. Plane gets to rotation speed and it will not rotate. Now he is pass abort. Finally they get it to rotate and just clear the end of the run way..
As Estan says we almost put her right through the fence at the end of the runway with all those people on board.
So they are over by Cuba and they have an extremely low climb rate and only at 18,000 ft when they should be at 29,000 when Estan gets a call from
Miami. Estan says we are way too heavy and Miami says that when the baggage and freight switched crew during loading that weight limits got messed up during crew rotation so plane was heavy like 30,000 lb if I remember correctly.
Well the plane was full of fuel as fuel was less cost at Miami than in Rio. So he dumped fuel and finally got some altitude and made it safe to Rio.
When Estan retired he flew Lear Jets for Sun Air out of Sanford International in Fl. He was scheduled to fly the the professional golfer Payne Stewart to Texas the next morning. Well by chance something came up and he did not fly that plane the next morning. Another male pilot and a female copilot flew the plane and just by pure chance and
luck Estan avoided that flight and certain death. There is a lot more to this story but I will not take the time to tell it now.
My brother in law was a Naval officer and he flew the T28, T38, P2V,P3V and F15. Saw one of his flight helmets on Ebay a few years ago and I did not buy it. Wish I had now.
Edited by jimgen 1/13/2019 13:45
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close calls on flying
