October 8, 1994

Yolo County Airport, Davis CA

After a short, pleasant trip from Palo Alto I arrived rather abruptly at Yolo County airport.  While on short final I was a slightly concerned in that I was touching down a bit faster than I normally do.  I attributed it to having a slight tail wind and continued my approach.  I then noticed that I was sinking a bit lower than I normally do.  About when that thought went through my mind, the prop started to chew up the pavement and all sorts of grinding noises started to come from the underside of the plane.  I then realized that I had failed to put the gear down and loud invectives started to drowned out the grinding noises.  The plane slid almost directly down the center line, skewing about 70 degrees to the right as it came to a stop.

I very carefully shut everthing down and exited the plane.  There was no fuel leakage anywhere.  Grabbing my handheld radio on my way out, I made calls to let the aircraft in the pattern (mostly Twin Otters hauling sky divers) what I had done.  As I did my deed in the first couple of hundred feet, they were able to safely land long over the top of me.

It was an interesting experiance getting the plane off of the runway.  There was significant skydiving going on that day and I had basically shut down the whole operation.  In order to quickly reopen the airport, the skydiving operation drove down to where I was with two van loads of burly skydivers.  As I was fairly light on fuel,  they were able to physically *lift* the plane and *carry* it into the grass.

The damage to the plane was

• prop.  Blades curled nicely.  The hub and clamps were all fine.
• Engine.  Probably ok, but I certainly wasn't going to start it again without a tear down.  As the engine had about 700 hours (1200 tbo) I went ahead and overhauled it (CalWest at San Carlos, CA), upgrading it to a E-225 (extra 40 HP) in the processs.  The only traumatic damage found during the overhaul was that the gear that drives the vacuum pump had lost a tooth.

• Wings.  The only thing that was damaged in the wings at all was the inboard trailing edges of the flaps.  The flaps were down when we hit and the sliding down the runway was primarly on the flaps and the exhaust stacks.
• Belly.  The belly skin was torn up from the nose gear wheel well back past the the main carry-through.  Surprisingly the damage was mostly in the skin, and so we didn't have to replace too much in the way of formers or stringers.

• Physically. None.  Not a scratch, bruise or bump.  And N494B wasn't even equiped with shoulder belts.
• Certificate.  None.  I promptly notified the FAA and the NTSB.  As no one was hurt and there was very little property damage the NTSB didn't even bother looking into it.  The FAA sent someone out from the Sacramento FSDO to look at things, but after looking at the records (mine and the plane) they lost interest.  Not even a recommendation to get some remedial instruction (which I did anyway)
• Psychically.  Major.  I had flown this plane for not quite a year and had gotten pretty sentimental about it.  Bending it hurt.