There and Back dedicated to Aviation, Airmanship and the Craft of Flying - by Owen Zupp & Robert Brus

The Big Bang

Living in a caravan, pre-dawn pre-flights, and a fast filling logbook. As a young commercial pilot in the Kimberleys life was pretty good, even when things didn’t go quite to plan. Kununurra was full of young pilots and the motto was, “Need a pilot? Shake a tree.”

Fortunately I was able to gain employment with one of the two main charter operators whose fleet consisted of all marques of Cessna singles, a 310, ‘push-pull’ 337 and a Piper Chieftain.

Unquestionably, the workhorses were our Cessna 210s and 206s that ranged far and wide across the outback.With less than 1000 hours I had been with the company about six weeks by May 1989 and already had flown about 100 hours in the company’s diverse operations.

The trip up was without event and after offloading the freight, I waved goodbye and taxied out empty for the short sector to Kununurra. Rather than a straight line home, we always tracked south to Fossil Head, across to Quoin Island and then directly to Kununurra.

The entire port side of the aircraft was coated in oil. I could now pretty much rule out a birdstrike!

Towed back to the hangar, the cowls were removed to show the cause of my drama. A cylinder head on the Continental IO-520 engine had separated.

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