One year the day before Thanksgiving I had to fly to Minneapolis on a trouble call. It seems a pressure washer manufacturer using our pumps on their machines couldn’t get our pumps to pump. I flew up on a Northwest Airlines EMB 110 out of Rockford airport. I was picked up and driven to their factory where a lot of people were standing around waiting to get back to work.
After a lot of checking and fiddling around with our pumps, I could find nothing suspicious. I asked to have a tech check one for me. He installed it on the test stand and started it up. It started normal and delivered a stream of oil then just quit delivering. I had them bring me a fresh can of fuel oil and connected it to the pump. The pump worked normal. what we discovered was that gasoline had been put in to their oil supply tank which dropped the viscosity too low to operate the pumps internal valving.
Problem solved we headed back to the airport. On the radio we heard that there was an ice storm headed for Minneapolis. I immediately began hoping we would get out of there before the storm hit.
We barely did. But it caught up to us in the air. We were being pelted with ice crystals, when suddenly apparently the propellers iced up. The plane began to vibrate something awful. The overhead bins popped open, and luggage began to fall out. We were all terrified. Then a voice comes over the intercom. It’s the pilot who calmly says, “Perhaps you have noticed a slight vibration in the aircraft”. He continued to talk to us in a very calm manner telling us about the sound we would hear which would be the propeller heaters. The ice would shear off and things would smooth out.
Amazingly it all happened just like that. I got to be home for Thanksgiving dinner. However, I will never forget the coolest pilot I have ever flown with.
