E R N I E ' S   H O U S E   O F   W H O O P A S S

Hi Ernie. I don't know if you will be interested in this story about my ten minute trip in our company Super King Air this morning or not, but I thought I would share it with you. I had an interesting morning. We were taking the King Air to Auburn this morning and we took out a couple of Seagulls immediately after takeoff. One of them hit the pilot's pitot tube thus he had no airspeed indication on his side. Luckily the co-pilot's pitot tube was spared as you can see in the frontal picture. Had we lost both, we would have been in a pickle. As you can see the radome also got hit. We lost the yaw damper too, probably from lack of input from the airspeed indicator. It was overcast at 800 feet and Dothan's ILS is inop due to runway repairs right now. We made a wide 360 degree turn to the right in the soup and used the GPS to get back to the runway. If the ceiling had been any lower we would have had to hunt somewhere else that was VFR and who knows where that would have been this morning. Takeoff to touchdown was 10 minutes. The fire trucks were waiting for us when we got back and one followed us to our hanger. Then one of the airport guys brought us the seagulls he had retrieved from the runway. Of note, the airplanes like I used to fly only have one pitot tube and airspeed indicator. As a pilot and able to look forward and see by the instruments what was going on, I was concerned, but not frightened. On the other hand, there was a lady on board who I thought was going to die before landing due to her fright. Our pilots did a great job! LBEH again this year! Pictures I took are attached. John E, Dothan, AL

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