The propeller is just a big fan in the front of the plane to keep the pilot cool. Want proof? Make it stop; then watch the pilot break out into a sweat.
That’s what the aviation joke says; but it couldn’t be more accurate regarding a pilot’s reaction to the loss of his propeller thrust. I remember one day, in Luena aerodrome – Angola – during the UN mission to support the country’s 1992 elections, when the pilot of a Beechcraft C-90 GT King Air aircraft landed in such conditions.
During the final approach, the twin engine King Air seemed to have difficulties in landing. One of its engines was stopped and the other one was making a random noise of engine power. That pilot was definitely in serious problems!
When the captain finally managed to park the aircraft at the UN spot, he got out of the cockpit sweating like a fount, and pointed out to the southern horizon. Far in the distance, we could see an insurmountable wall of clouds, formed by huge cumulonimbus towers. Those things in Africa can be enormous, rising up to 45.000 feet and above. Inside of a cumulonimbus tower there’s electrical storms, heavy rain, very strong winds and ice; small and big balls of ice, flying up and down the cloud. Not a good place to fly into!
Looking at the aircraft, it seemed that it was attacked by a pride of lions; such was the quantity of deep scratches and dents in the aircraft’s plating. In several parts of the fuselage the painting was gone; its communication and navigation aids antennas were broken; the rubber cover of the anti-freezing on the leading edge of the wings was hanging in stripes; some windows were cracked; the ailerons and stabilizer were dented; all external lights were broken and both propellers were prorated, as if a horde of rats had been feeding on it. However, the thing that impressed me the most was a tremendous collision that must had occurred on the tapering nose of the aircraft. It would seem that someone had given a valiant punch in the nose of the Beechcraft, turning what was concave into convex.
The sweaty pilot-in-command simply said:
– “Southeast of this location there’s a long and tall Cumulonimbus. We had no ability to go over it and the turbulence was too strong to fly under it; hence i decided to cross it perpendicularly … shortly after we entered the clouds, it looked like we had hit a wall of ice … I started sweating when we lost engine number one and number two had a drastic loss of power”.
Regardless the technology, Mother Nature was still in command, and we could all see in the distance that big “Cumulonimbus Africanis”!
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