First emergency

I thought you might all find this story interesting.

Me, I'm 53 and have been flying since 1988 with about 1000 hrs. My
partner is a CFI and we've been in a Cherokee 140 partnership for about
12 years. We have a 1974 Cherokee Cruiser, which we normally keep well
maintained (!).

About a week ago my partner and I decided to fly after work. We are
still breaking in a new cylinder so we thought we'd fly local here in
Southern California. I flew left seat and we took off from Camarillo and
flew around Malibu, then I flew over to Santa Paula for a landing. We
had agreed we wanted to fly about 1.5 hrs, so as I was landing at Santa
Paula I was at about 45 minutes. After I landed I asked my partner if he
wanted to switch sides, but he said no, he'd fly from the right side.

We taxied back and he took off. At about 1500'agl he tapped me on the
shoulder (I was looking outside for traffic). He said "we have a
problem". There had been no apparent change in the flight so I thought
he might be joking. He pointed down at the throttle and he was moving it
full to idle and back, but it had no effect! We were still at full
throttle and obviously we had a broken cable or something similar.

So your mind goes rapidly over the situation. How bad is this? What are
the challenges? What are the options? We had a brief discussion and I
mentioned that although this didn't seem real bad, we had some risks and
I had read so many stories of pilots being reluctant to declare an
emergency. We were only about 5 miles from Camarillo, our home airport
which has a 5000' runway. We discussed and within about 20 seconds
agreed that I would fly the plane since I was left seat, he would handle
radio, and we would declare and emergency since we did not have throttle
control. We had decided that I would try to modulate power with the
mixture, but if necessary I could fly over the the airport and then just
kill the engine and we would glide down.

The weather was very clear and it was just about dusk. My partner called
Camarillo tower, reported our position (about 5 miles out) and indicated
we had a throttle problem and we needed to declare and emergency. The
tower immediately cleared us to land on runway 8 and cleared out one
other plane in the pattern. The runway in use was 26 but it was calm and
rwy 8 was the closer approach. I was at about 1700' and full power; I
leveled off and flew at about yellow line toward the airport. As I got
closer I started a dive to lose altitude and flew fast; I had not yet
adjusted the mixture.

I realized that I was going to be quite high - I was on a 1 mile base so
I began to pull the mixture back and the engine roughened as it slowed
down some more. Still flying fast, I descended. I realized I was still
pretty high so I overshot the centerline a bit before turning to about a
..5 mile final to lose some more altitude. I leaned the mixture more
aggressively and the engine ran really rough with some backfiring.

As we came in a bit high on final and I knew the runway was assured I
asked my partner for flaps. I leaned more aggressively and the engine
was really choking now. As we came over the threshold a bit high I told
my partner I was going to kill the engine. I didn't want to be trying to
modulate a full throttle enging with mixture once I was on the runway.

About 20 feet or so I pulled to idle cutoff and it was weird to see a
prop stopped as I flared for a nice landing. I rolled out and used
residual speed to pull off on a turnoff and coast to a stop.

Airport security showed up and the guy didn't quite know what to do. We
told him we just needed a tow into our tiedown spot. He took our names
and certificate numbers and a brief statement of what had happened.

In discussion with my partner, we felt we did almost everything
correctly. We did not panic, we did not hesitate to declare the
emergency, we quickly agreed on roles and everything went smoothly. We
never really felt scared about the situation (a power failure might have
felt different!). When the situation first presented itself I thought
about flying to over the airport and cutting power, but I felt it would
be better not to have a guaranteed engine failure. We both felt this was
the less-risky way to handle the situation. We sort of stood there
saying to ourselves "we can't believe we just had an emergency!". It was
the first one for both of us in more than 20 years of flying each.

The plane is in the shop to get its cable replaced, apparently it broke
somewhere between the throttle quadrant and the carburetor, not at
either end.

Event Horizon