I Learned About Flying From That: It Couldn’t Happen to Me

Bob Tymczyszyn

Tuesday, July 02, 2013 at 10:12 PM ET

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Key Takeaways:

An highly experienced pilot nearly crashed his antique 1931 Buhl Bull Pup during a public landing, attributing the incident to complacency and a series of compounding small errors.
The near-disaster was caused by over-controlling the Buhl's sensitive rudder and improperly using its grabby heel brakes, exacerbated by conflicting muscle memory developed from recent helicopter training.
The pilot emphasizes that despite 43 years of flying experience and extensive ratings, he succumbed to overconfidence and ignored critical warning signs, underscoring the universal need for recent practice and vigilance in aviation.

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My family has owned a 1931 Buhl Bull Pup single-place, open-cockpit “flying bathtub” since 1969. I was 16 when I won the youngest-pilot award at Merced’s Antique Fly-In in 1970.

I’ve been flying this little antique airplane all my life. A few weekends ago, I came as close as you can to rolling it (and myself) up into a ball right in front of about 2,000 people (and 2,000 cameras) at the FlaBob Flying Circus — as close as you can come, that is, without finally doing so. The little Buhl, thankfully, is unscathed. Not so my ego.