Confession time (long)

"George Patterson" wrote in message news:e7i4e.2533$7b.110@trndny04...
Yep. I brought my 150 in on fumes once, skirting a thunderstorm to get
home. I
can still taste the bile.

I was helping a friend out who didn't have his license yet and had bought an
AA1C in OK City... We had refueled at Greenville-Majros and thought that we
could make it all the way to Houston-Hobby (HOU)... The AA1C uses sight
tubes with floats in them... The floats had bottomed out, it was at night,
one tank ran empty as I was on base right before turning final... We
couldn't see the runway, so the tower diverted routed us away from the
airport to come around again... I had switched to the non-empty tank, but as
I said, the float was bottomed out... We had no idea how much fuel we might
have had in that wing and definitely didn't want to do a go around... I was
looking very carefully at the highways in case I had to try to land on one
of them... Came in a bit to fast, hit nosegear first and porpoised...
Normally, this is an immediate go-around on a AA1x or AA5x, but I didn't
want to risk it... Added power, floated in ground effect for a bit and tried
again... Porpoised again... Added power, floated in ground effect again and
made the next attempt... Got stopped just shy of the grass at the end of the
the 7602 ft runway... At least I think we were landing on 12R... If it was
12L, it was 5148 ft... We had enough fuel to taxi back, but weren't even
sure we would make it that far... That silence of the engine quitting at
night is deafening...