1 ~\ J\ G J\ Z I I I r' - American Bonanza Society

This is the story of one of my stupidmistakes, and I certainly learned fromit. I hope others can benefit fromthis if only to reinforce what theyalready know.Show me someone who has neverdone anything stupid and I'll show yousomeone who has never done anything.My "old man" used to say, "I hope I canlearn from the mistakes of othersbecause I won't live long enough tomake all the mistakes myself."Well, I made a zinger of a stupidmistake when flying my TwinComanche. the plane I owned before mycurrent F33A.Knowing the reputation of PA-30s Iconsoled myself that my airplane was alot safer than others, with the extrapower of Miller mods and the betterhandling of Robertson STOL.After an excellent meeting in SanDiego and a great visit with my daughter,my wife and I were ready to roll onMontgomery Field's Runway 28L.To understand what happened next,note my propellers would not synch upat full duottle. This is in spite of fairlyrecent overhauls. So after takeoff andreaching 400' or 500' above groundlevel, I usually gave the prop controls alittle tweak to eliminate the annoyingbeat from the asynchronous props. Noproblem! Heck, I've been doing this fora long time. Right? o. not necessarily.Back on the runway, we werecleared for takeoff. I watched thegauges as the throttles advanced andeverything was OK. We started downthe center line. But just as we started tolift off, the pilot (who would rather notuse the first-person pronoun here)decided to adjust the props. Seemed likea good idea at the time. But it was not.That airplane veered right, thenbanged back on the ground and veeredleft off the runway faster than you couldbelieve! At this point it was chop thepower, hold on and steer clear of anythingbad.The bad in this case was an airplaneon taxiway D. The reason I rememberthat is because the lesser bad was a taxiwaysign with a big D on it. So it was aninstant choice: Take out the sign or takeout the plane?We zoomed through the muddyfield, tore out the sign. shot across thetaxiway in front of the startled Cherokeepilot and rolled to a stop, having dissipated75 to 85 mph.WHRT HRPPENED?As the plane stopped, the rightengine was idling normally, oblivious tothe excitement and scare. The leftengine was shut down with the propfeathered. The left propeller control wasfull aft.I' ve done a bit of soul searching andoffered a few prayers since this experience.Apparently, as I anempted to syncthe props at the moment of rotation, theleft control was inadvertently pulled allthe way back. It happened so fast I didn'tnotice the lurch to the right caused bythe pitch change of the left prop. Mywife felt herself being strongly lurchedto the left as the plane veered right. Andthis lurch caused my hand on the propcontrol to come all the way back, featheringthe left prop.But the real reason is: It was a stupidthing to do. And this comes from a pilotwith more than 1,600 hours-330 in aCessna 195 and almost 500 in the TwinComanche before moving into an F33A.Along with a huge dose of humilitycame a renewed respect for flying and acouple of real object lessons:J Ie 11col' a a ntl I tin nl rexI