August 24, 1998 

My father, Jess Chilcoat, passed away last night in his sleep. He was a former Army Air Corps pilot/instructor in WWII, an Air Force Pilot with SAC during Korea, and a long-time GA pilot. He logged well over 10,000 hours in a large number of military and civilian aircraft. He owned a Mooney Mite, a Luscombe (the only GA airplane he ever crashed), a Comanche, a 310B, a Twin Bonanza, and an S-35 Bonanza (his last airplane and the only one he ever bought new).

I grew up with aviation, and always loved to listen to Dad's flying stories. One of the best was the one about the student who flew through the brick silo. Please excuse the reminiscence, but I write this as a bit of a memorial.

Dad and another instructor were in a crude control tower on a remote grass field, having their students shoot night landings. It was a moonless night. As I recall the story, the aircraft (BT-13's) were stacked up in quadrants out beyond the corners of the field. As they were cleared to land, each student was supposed to enter the pattern at 1000 ft AGL, shoot a touch and go, and then return to their holding quadrant. They watched as one of these students descended a lot lower than 1000 ft, and disappeared. There was no fire or anything, the lights just disappeared at roughly where the horizon should have been, if they could have seen the horizon. After a few minutes, Dad climbed out of the tower to get into his own airplane so he could fly out and see if he could see any wreckage, while the other instructor began getting the students down. As Dad was getting into his plane, he was surprised to see a Cadet walking across the grass toward him, parachute slung over his shoulder, his paperwork under one arm, and a nasty cut over his eye.

When he asked the student what had happened, the student replied, "I don't know, Sir. I leveled off, there was a tremendous jolt, and then I was sitting in the night air on the ground. I could see the beacon on the tower, so I climbed out and walked over here."

Getting all the students home and completing all the paperwork took most of the rest of the night. Early next morning the other instructor and Dad got a jeep and drove out to the accident site to investigate further. What they found gave them renewed respect for the power of blind luck.

A farmer was standing next to his barn looking at a large pile of bricks that had been his silo. The wing tips of a BT-13 were protruding from under the edges of this pile. The roof of the silo was perched on top of the pile of bricks like a little hat. There was a fan shaped scattering of bricks beyond the pile, on either side of a perfectly straight groove cut in the grass leading out into a field beyond the pile. At the end of this groove was what was left of the fuselage of the BT-13, still perfectly in line with the groove and the center of the pile of bricks. It was completely naked. There was no skin, canopy or empennage left on it. It consisted of only the formers and longerons. Inside were the seats, the control panels, and the engine with the prop wrapped around it like a staple.

Apparently the student had misread his altimeter by a thousand feet, and had leveled off at ground level. Just as he got the wings level he hit the silo at about four feet AGL, dead center. If it hadn't been empty, or if he had hit it at an angle, he would have been killed instantly. Instead, the impact drove his face into the panel (where he got the cut over his eye), and got his head low enough that the bricks taking off the canopy above him didn't take his head off with it. The big Wright radial up front smashed a fuselage-sized hole in the bricks in front of him, and he and the fuselage just followed through the hole, stripping off the wings, skin and empennage in the process. As far as he was concerned, he was just flying along watching his instruments, there was a really loud noise, and then sudden (and just as loud) silence as he was left sitting out in the night breeze. A very, very lucky fellow.

That was the start of a bad two weeks for my father. He had had the best safety record of any squadron in the Air Corps for the preceding three weeks. Then, starting with the silo incident, his guys wrote off four airplanes over a two-week period. One of his students dragged a fence and flipped after landing short, and another ran up the back of a second student who had not turned off the runway when he was supposed to, and chewed his tail off almost to the back seat. Now, that'll soil your underwear if you're the one in front!

Dad's gone now, but his flying stories will live on in my brothers' and my memories. Thanks for letting me relate this one. Sorry it’s a bit off topic, but if no one objects too strongly, I might relate a few more some time.

Bob

Copyright Ó 1998 Robert T. Chilcoat

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