Originally published in 1994
Disoriented, frightened and hopelessly lost after flying a crippled craft for hours, Dieudonne Tshinba of Paris, France knew the end was at hand when the final drop of fuel was gone and the engine stopped dead.
Nearly four hours after he had lifted off from Tyler on the return leg of a training flight which began at Fort Worth’s Meacham Field, Tshinba had encountered his fourth, and final, problem.
The first occurred when the electrical system on his aircraft went dead due to a loose wire to the alternator, which keeps the battery charged. Unfortunately, the electrical system is vital to the plane’s avionics, the gauges that tell a pilot where he’s going, and how the plane is doing.
Tshinba, a former French military pilot visiting the U.S. to earn a commercial pilot’s license, is certified to fly by instruments. But, because of the consequences of a loose wire, those skills were useless.
Flying by sight alone over unfamiliar terrain, his problems became much worse when darkness fell. With- out dashboard and cockpit lights he couldn’t see his map and compass. Then the radio went dead and he couldn’t call for help.
All of these problems then gave rise to a phenomenon called spatial disorientation. Pilots do not know if they are going up or down, left or right.
Tshinba, who has logged nearly 400 hours in the past three months while training, said the longer his ordeal wore on, the more powerful his fear became. After more than three hours lost in the darkness, Tshinba knew his fuel would soon be gone. Finally, it happened. The motor coughed and died, and the propeller stopped.
At that instant, he looked out the window and spotted a brilliant rotating beacon –installed just two months ago as part of a major overhaul of the airport in Atlanta, Texas. With only his senses to guide him, he estimated his altitude and speed. His plane floated out of the black sky, and gently settled upon the runway.
Bill Early and Keith Crow, Atlanta pilots, later determined that Atlanta’s was the first airport with a beacon Tshinba would have come across. “The next one was Texarkana, and there’s no way he would have made it there,” Early said. “The old beacon didn’t work all the time, and it wasn’t bright at all,” Crow said. “If we hadn’t had the new one installed he never would have found us.”
Excerpted from an article by William Owney, Citizens Journal, Cass County