An Open Door in Flight Almost Killed Me

“Whatever you do, you are not to take MY children for a flight!”

My wife had overheard me telling our young children that after their soccer practice we would go to the airport to visit my flight instructor Cap’n John and attend the airport open house, provided they were well behaved.

The children in question, our two boys, were HER children whenever she thought my decision making in their upbringing required her intervention, were MY children when they misbehaved (as in “your children got in so much trouble at school today!”), and were OUR children in normal social discourse.

I had been a private pilot for some years now, my graduation present from her, but she clearly didn’t yet deem my piloting skills sufficiently advanced to be worthy of exposing our children, or in this scenario her children, to any aviation-related risks.

This fine Saturday, the airport was holding an Open House, one of those modest events where the GA airport engaged the community, hopefully staving off noise complaints with awareness and outreach, and the flight school and university flying club tried to find new customers. There would be discovery flights and static displays, and my flight instructor, John Larson — beloved “Cap’n John” to the boys — would be there helping at the FBO booth.

Soccer went well, so soon there we were chatting up Cap’n John in between frequent interruptions from the boys jumping up and down begging for us to “take a Discovery Flight for only $49!” The perils of teaching your kids to read, I guess.

Up until that point all my flight time was in the Flying Club’s 152s, and I mentioned to John that a cut-rate Discovery Flight would be enticing to me as well since it was conducted in the club’s 172, but for the admonishment from my wife regarding her children. John had a mischievous side to him, and he really loved the boys. “Wait — your wife only said YOU couldn’t take the boys for a flight, right? She didn’t say anything about whether I could take the boys for a flight, now did she?”

This attractive parsing of the wifely directive I was operating under immediately appealed to the boys, so the die was pretty much cast at that point. Plus, I really wanted to kick the tires on the club 172, and the Discovery Flight price was right.

Next thing you know, we were strapping the boys into the back seat of the 172, John occupying the right seat in true flight instructor fashion, with me in the left seat pondering how I was going to explain this turn of events to my wife. I decided I would leverage John’s language lawyer parsing of her edict, point out that a world-class expert had been available to fly the boys, and that it would have been a crime not to take advantage of the situation as priced, hoping against hope that I was not committing a marriage-limiting maneuver.

My hope that the flight would not be very memorable to the boys faded right at liftoff, when an affliction all too common to flight-school beater Cessnas reared its ugly head — for I had not learned that the 172 door took even more muscle to close than the 152, and my door popped open. Thanks to the slipstream holding the door “in trail” this is a non-event in a 172, mind you, and John had a fix for the situation.

“We’ll deal with this on the crosswind turn — get ready,” he said.

John popped open his window to better equalize pressure, and on the crosswind turn banked the plane aggressively enough that my door slam attempt was considerably aided by my weight. The result was the door latch caught enough to belatedly check off the “cabin door — closed and latched” checklist item and we could continue with the flight.

I turned around to see how the boys were doing, hoping they had been distracted by the scenery or takeoff or something. Their attention was firmly fixed within the cabin, and it was obvious the scenery had not provided sufficient competition to the whole sequence of door-related events, though they were unruffled by it all.

At an unscheduled Baskin-Robbins ice cream stop post-flight, I was able to obtain the boys’ wise agreement that postponing any mention of a Discovery Flight in their rundown of the day’s events to their mother until some later, more convenient point in time might help ensure continuing marital harmony or perhaps it was my rapid acquiescence to double scoops that did the trick. To my intense surprise, the boys held to our agreement inked in ice cream, and my wife was none the wiser that day of how far the afternoon had diverged from her direction.

Any reader at this point, especially those who have been married more than five minutes, now understands the title of this tale — the door popping open in flight was not directly going to be the cause of my demise, for it was to be my wife who was going to kill me the moment the view-limiting device was pulled back from her eyes.

And with two boys at the ages they were, this was like impending engine failure in a low horsepower twin-engine plane, where the remaining engine, or boy in this case, would only serve to convey us to the exact scene of the crash caused by that initial engine failure.

It didn’t take too long. A few days later we were in Arizona celebrating our wedding anniversary and visiting my wife’s aged uncle. He had aged to the point where his main waking activity seemed to consist of watching TV all day long. This happened to be August 2010, and unfortunately a Cirrus taking off from Deer Valley Airport in Phoenix suffered an open door upon takeoff, resulting in a fatality, making it worthy of one of those inaccurate, sensationalized “breaking news” segments.

As luck would have it, the boys were in taking a break from uncle’s swimming pool, and after the commentator’s breathless bombastic recounting of the tragedy, my younger boy turned to his mother and blurted “guess what, Mom — the door popped open when we went flying with Dad too, but we didn’t crash!”

My older boy, perhaps remembering how I had intimated that an untimely revelation of that event might adversely impact marital harmony, attempted to smooth things over by saying, “don’t worry Mom, Cap’n John got the door closed by making the airplane go like this” with a dramatic accompanying hand gesture of a maneuver worthy of Bob Hoover.

Both boys, astutely reading the look on their mom’s face and realizing they were in breach of our Baskin-Robbins contract, decided it was time to return to the pool. I will draw a curtain of charity over the ensuing events of that day, other than to tell you an open door in flight almost killed me.

But, nearly 20 years later, still flying and still happily married, I do smile every time I get to the “Cabin Door – Closed and Latched” checklist item.

Rajeev Pandey is a private pilot with over 500 hours logged. He owns the more expensive half of a 1976 Grumman AA-5B Tiger, based in Albany, Oregon. He recently celebrated his 32nd wedding anniversary.