There was myself, two other men, the wife of one of the men, my mother, my son and one of my daughters. One of the men was the thirty year old manager of a building materials business in Alamogordo, let's call him Tom. We were all living in Alamogordo at the time. Tom had never been up in an airplane.

OOPS!

I had just tuned to 123.9 on the radio. "Albuquerque approach, this is Cherokee November three, six seventy six whiskey reporting about eight miles south for landing at Albuquerque". At that moment the motor stopped running. A quick glance at the four fuel gauges, and all where showing "E". The flying club in Alamogordo needed to send an airplane prop to Albuquerque to be rebuilt so the deal was that if I would take the prop to Albuquerque, I could use the plane for free. They also said that aviation fuel was 37¢ a gallon in Alamogordo and only 34¢ a gallon in Albuquerque. So, I was to fill up in Albuquerque.

Airport! What Airport?

The airport by now, had realized that I was flying dead stick (dead stick means without the engine running). I was flying at about 11,000 feet ASL. Albuquerque Airport is at 4,955 feet ASL. That meant that I was about 6,000 feet above the ground. With the load that I had and no engine running, the plane would loose about 800 feet a minute. At 90 MPH I would get 1 and 1/2 miles closer to the airport each minute. If you do the math, you see that I had between 6 and 8 minutes of flying time left. NO PROBLEM! the airport is only 8 miles away. Oh! That Airport!

Airport Straight Ahead!

We did make it to the airport runway and just before touchdown, it was time to set up for the landing.

Landing Dead Stick

The plane lands differently when there is no propwash to help keep the nose up. On the Cherokee with the nose so long, it is very important to keep the nose high. If you allow the nose wheel to touch down first you could bust the nose wheel off. The Cherokee will not taxi very well with out a nose wheel. It would be hard to steer and if the engine was running, it would damage the prop. However, our engine wasn't running so I didn't need to worry about damaging the propeller. Without the engine running, you exaggerate the nose up position so you flair nose high.

Lucky Landing

Just before the plane was to touch down, I pulled way back on the wheel to bring the nose high for my flair. With the nose so high, a little fuel ran to the back of the tank and down to the engine. With this new little bit of fuel, a second before the tires touched the runway, the engine restarted. It didn't start soon enough to help with the landing, but it did start soon enough to help with the FAA. Because the engine was actually running when I landed, I was able to taxi to the fuel pump. Just as I arrived at the pump, that last bit of fuel was also gone. The luck was this, technically it was a controlled, power landing.

New Mexico Sunset

My mother said we might have only seen three men in the plane, and only known of three men in the plane, but she was convinced there was a fourth man riding in the back seat that day. She might have been right, and if she was right, the extra weight of a fourth man that I didn't know anything about, could explain why I used more fuel than I had estimated, and caused me to almost run out of gas, before I made it to Albuquerque, New Mexico.