Aviation Safety Reporting System

The NOTAM for glider activity doesn’t let pilots transiting the area understand the nature of the hazard presented by dozens of paragliders operating at once from the cloud base to the ground in a narrow gap in the hills. Anyone that’s not familiar with the hazard is likely to have an accident or near miss. It’s like a drone show at Oshkosh.

Our concern here in the Tehachapi Valley in California are the two airports close together with traffic patterns that have been known to conflict with each other.

The other pilot said that they had us on their ADS-B in, but in my opinion they did not because we barely were able to avoid them.

What really caused the problem was that I allowed my impulse to not allow the helicopter pilot’s politeness to be wasted, to override my initial decision to go around, and attempted to salvage a touch and go landing from an unusual position, in an intentionally tight pattern that offers minimal margin for correcting off-nominal altitude and speed.

I could smell a distinct smell of oil/rubber burning. I decided to get the fire extinguish ready and available if a fire broke out.

This is a relatively new aircraft with three different fuel gauges and it has a very low burn rate. I have come to not trust two of the gauges.

Fortunately my incident caused by the improper repair of my engine was not fatal. No one was injured when we landed with loss of forward thrust. However, the next pilot may not have the good fortune that we had.

The 421 was completely out of control and at full power about to hit and kill us head on.