PIREP Fuel 1c

"My first flight for Iditarod 2007 ends with a collapsed landing gear, one wrecked left engine and a scratch on my self-pride.

The flight was apparently uneventful right until touchdown on Skwentna's gravel airstrip but my intuition had warned me about something that might not be right. The aircraft was fully loaded with another load of fuel to service the Skwentna iditarod checkpoint. My mission was to land on the Yentna river ice and taxi to the post office but I was asked if I could carry a passenger. She's Mrs Allison, she lives on that farm right next to the Skwentna airport. And she's somewhat disabled so I offered to leave her right at the airport ramp. Then I'd take off and land on the ice to unload the fuel cargo.

Our departure from Stevens was a lengthy one due to a long taxi time (I hate that). Ready for take off we lined up, I set the required nose up trim but ready to move it to nose down in case it was too tail heavy. As we gathered speed I noticed it WAS tail heavy so I moved the trim wheel forward and finally the tail was raised from the ground. Now, you'll notice the checklist says "rotate @ 105 Kts". So I tried to! Past 80 knots the aircraft was already screaming to get into the air but I was forcing it to stay down, in case my tail-low moment didn't put me too close to a stall. After all the manual stated 105! Which impaired my judgement I guess. Well, as I didn't allow it to lift off... it did on its own. I must have hit a bump(?) on the runway because the aircraft suddenly jumped up. It was a kind of violent jump which I didn'tlike and I thought briefly "I hope this didn't mean bad news for the landing gear", but this thought quickly left my brain, which it shouldn't have.

The gear raised normally, every thing was absolutely normal, we flew at 2500 feet, perfect VFR, headed 300º, followed the Susitna river and the it's tributary the Yentna. With Skwentna in sight we elected to land on 27 and we made a regular straight in approach, full flaps, 70 knots - I wasn't following the manual speeds anymore. We touched down on main gear, maybe not as soft as we should, and as soon as we settled the left wing dropped and we started to veer left. I just kept on braking and praying to miss all those trees near the landing strip. We did. I shut everything down, we exited, my passenger was paler than ever, and that was it.

Now I need someone to pick me up. The fuel is still on the aircraft, which needs to be taken to the ramp where there's a mechanic workshop where I think it can be fixed.

Adventure, you always show up by surprise.

PANC-PASW: 00:50
Aircraft Beech D18S Tradewind Alaska Cargo"

Snowboss's reply:

"Wow Rui,

I am on my why to Skwentna with my Beech-18, lucky my bulk tanks are empty from my trip up there yesterday.

I am bringing our chief mechanic LeRoy Crosstread, and we have a gear assembly on board. One we get the fuel off they will try and get the Beech over by the hangar.

Be leaving in about 20-minutes.

Sandy"