A little engine trouble

I hesitated to even bother writing about this, since so far it seems like
pretty much a non-event. But then I figured, what the heck...hardly anyone
ever actually writes about actual flying, however mundane, in this
newsgroup, so here you go...

The plan was for me to follow a friend down to his mechanic's shop at Tacoma
Narrows (TIW) airport in Washington State. We're both based at Paine Field
(PAE) in Everett, WA, and in fact he ties his airplane down just outside my
hangar. We often trade rides, since neither of us have our airplanes
maintained at Paine Field.

The flight down was uneventful. He flew down in his airplane, while his
wife and I flew down in mine. We got to TIW, picked him up, and headed back
out. Cleared for a northbound, left downwind departure from runway 17, we
took off.

Well, we'd only climbed a few hundred feet when something in the airplane
started making a very strange noise. My friend's wife heard it too. It was
sort of a rapid "growling" sound, lasting a second or two at a time, with
maybe five or ten seconds between. It seemed most likely to be coming from
the engine, but it was subtle enough I couldn't rule out some sort of
airframe flutter. It might have been my imagination, but it seemed like
whenever I heard the sound, there was a little deceleration from the
airplane.

I've owned the airplane ten years now, and have never heard anything like
that out of it. That was enough for me, having read plenty of the "I
Learned About Flying From That" stories in which a pilot ignored a seemingly
minor symptom that quickly turned into something major. So I got a landing
clearance back at TIW, continuing to climb until I was in a position to make
a normal power-off landing, and then of course landed. Once the power was
pulled back, I did not notice the sound again.

The whole situation is very inconvenient. My airplane is now sitting at my
friend's mechanic's shop, where his airplane *should* be sitting (waiting
for its annual inspection). I spent half the day driving back and forth, so
that we could leave his plane there as well (he flew us back to Paine, where
I picked up my car and drove back down to get him). And his airplane is
tied down in transient parking at TIW, because there wasn't a spare spot for
my airplane so I took his (we actually had expected a spot to clear before
he got back, but it didn't).

But somehow, it still seems like the right thing to have done. I haven't
had a chance to get any mechanic (mine or my friend's) to take a look at the
airplane yet. Even though this year's annual was surprisingly expensive
(and that's among some years of some pretty surprisingly expensive annuals),
I secretly hope that something serious is found wrong with the airplane so
as to justify my aborting the flight. But even if the source of the noise
turns out to be something entirely benign, I'm still comfortable in my
decision, and would do it exactly the same again.

Bottom line: another word for "inconvenience" is "adventure". And that's a
much more desirable kind of adventure than the other synonym for the word,
"engine failure". More importantly, I always wondered if I would have
the courage to ignore my desire to get back home and abort a flight when
things didn't seem right. Now I know that I would, and did.

Funny thing though: I've now been stranded three times with this plane over
the years (the other two times were both engine starting problems: once a
dead battery, another time a problem with the "shower-of-sparks" ignition
system). Two of those three times happened at TIW, and it's not like I
actually fly there all *that* often. Spooky...

Pete

p.s. I couldn't help think about how this situation would have affected a
renter. From past threads here, it's clear that depending on the FBO, I
could either have gotten the four-star treatment, with an FBO pilot coming
to get me, or I could have gotten the shaft, being required not only to find
my own transportation back home, but being required to recover the airplane
once it had finally been repaired. I find it odd that the latter sort of
FBO manages to stay in business.