Okay, this is a fun one. One summer afternoon back in maybe 1994 or so, me and my buddy Chris Galanos took off out of Madison, WI in a 2-seat Cessna 152 and headed west to Devil's Lake in the Wisconsin Dells to check out the scenery, fly through the canyons and cruise around. Well it was fairly windy out so the plane is bouncing around pretty good, especially when we got to Devil's Lake where the winds were swirling through the canyon.
So we dip into the canyon and are flying pretty low over the lake with the canyon walls on either side of us and people swimming on the beach and fishing offshore and probably staring up at us (it’s a very small lake surrounded on all 4 sides by canyon walls with a beach on one end). I’m smoking a cigarette (I used to smoke but quit 5 years ago) and Chris is smoking a bowl and having a couple of beers. Well I go to tap my ash into Chris’s empty beer can and suddenly we hit a gust of wind and my lit cig hits the side of the can and goes flying.
Where did it go?! F*ck! Of course I start to smell smoke, but it was acrid smoke like the chemical smell of burning carpet so I realized it’s under one of our seats. The damn plane is burning up for all we know.
Chris is tall and a 2-seater is tiny…2 adults are basically shoulder-to-shoulder. We try reaching forward under out seats to feel it but come up with nothing. I tell him to look in back…the luggage compartment behind our seats is a small narrow little space just large enough to cram a small suitcase or two into. So I'm in the left pilot seat and he’s leaning over his seat on the right with half his body in the luggage space and his legs bouncing around in the space above his seat. Well he can’t find the cig and he gets stuck, wedged between the seat and the side of the plane with more of him in the back than in the front. In addition, the plane has dual controls with a steering wheel on either side so as he’s struggling to free himself and get back into his seat his feet keep smacking into his steering wheel and pitching the plane violently down further into the canyon. The whole time I’m trying to fly the plane in the gusty winds and keep it from going down any further or hitting the canyon walls...plus the end of the canyon is coming up soon so we have to ascend out of there. Also, the cig is still burning.
Chris cannot make it back to his seat so I ask if he can keep going forward into the luggage compartment. He makes it, but it’s almost comical seeing this 6’2” guy who weighs at least 200 lbs curled up back there with this stoned/worried look on his face. Also, now he is weighing down the back of the plane so it’s pitched nose-up dangerously and I have to push the throttle full forward to keep from stalling and to be able to ascend out of the canyon. Well we clear the canyon wall and make it out of there, so I grab the map to find the nearest airport because we need to land asap and find the lit cig before we have a full blown fire on our hands.
I see a little non-tower 1-runway airport on the map about 10 miles away so I gun it for there. Unfortunately the wind is blowing strong and perpindicular to the runway, so I have a dangerously overloaded/tail-heavy plane landing in a strong crosswind that is blowing the plane sideways…it was a crazy tricky landing but we got her on the ground and I immediately shut it off and jumped out and found the cig had rolled way under my seat and burned down completely and left a long black burn-hole in the carpet, but then luckily it had just gone out. Lesson learned…no more cigs in the planes.
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