Flying mishap #1

I have my private pilot’s license.  Over the years I have had a few air-mishaps, but they mostly weren’t my fault.  Let’s see…I guess I’ll start with my very 1^st flight after I got my license.  It was the middle of winter.  I called my friend Laurie Tyler and told her I’d just got my ‘ticket’ and asked her if she wanted to be my very first passenger…she was excited and totally into so we rented a 2-seat Cessna 152 out of Madison’s airport and headed out.  I wanted to practice some touch-and-goes at an out-of-the way airport (where you power down, make the landing, and instead of coming to a complete stop you power up again as soon as you’re safely on the runway and take off again…then you circle around and do it again…good take-off and landing practice). 

So we headed west to Sauk Prairie’s small single-runway airport that didn’t have a tower.  I did a fly over to see which way the wind-sock was pointing and picked my landing direction (you always land into the wind).  We’d had a huge storm recently with tons of snow, but the runway looked like it had been cleared with just a few white patches and I figured it was okay or they would have the runway marked with a big X if it was unsafe…we circled around and prepared to land. 

I powered down and hit the runway going about 50-60mph, started braking, and soon we were fish-tailing all over the runway.  There were patches and strips of ice on it and I was swerving, hitting ice, then pavement and the tires would catch, and then slide on the ice.  There was no way I could take off again and suddenly I was off the runway and heading for a 10-foot snow bank that ran the length of either side of the runway.  Once I was on the snowy grass I thought we were doomed and I was frantically pumping the brakes and hoping not to hit the snow bank and/or flip over.  Luckily we finally came to a stop just before hitting the snow bank.  I looked over at a wide-eyed Tyler who had never said a word through this whole thing, and watched as she had to extract her white knuckles from the death-grip she had on the dashboard in front of her. 

Now we had to figure out how to get out of there.  You need a certain amount of distance to get enough speed to get an airplane off the ground.  We taxied back and found a length the longest stretch of runway without ice that we could find.  I went to the very beginning of it…full power with brakes on till the prop was whining away at full speed and then I released the brakes…we shot off with a massive jerk and started our roll down the runway with an ice patch looming in front of us and getting bigger and closer every second…I pulled the wheel back right before we hit the ice…we didn’t have enough speed to fly, but we kind of floated in what’s known as ‘ground-effect’ a few feet off the ground till the plane had enough speed to actually start ascending…we made it up into the relative safety of the friendly skies and got the hell away from that airport.