Blame for emergency landing flies back and forth

A flight instructor and an airplane manufacturer are pointing fingers at each other about who, or what, is to blame for an emergency landing in a field at the Fountain Valley School last month.

Al Uhalt said a faulty gas gauge was the reason the Aviat Husky airplane he was flying ran low on fuel May 28. Stuart Horn, president of Aviat Aircraft, blamed Uhalt.

According to Uhalt, the amount of gas displayed on the gauge while the plane was on the ground differed from the amount displayed in the air. He was giving a lesson to a flight student and landed on a field outside the school after the engine surged twice.

"I would not have made that flight if I had known how much was really in the tank," he said. "That would have been really dumb if I had done that, but I didn't do that."

Uhalt said that before the flight, the fuel gauge read about 17 gallons. After examining the gauge when he returned to the airport, however, he figured he had only about 13 gallons when he took off.

Horn said there have been no complaints about the gauge.

"It's very popular nowadays for people to make someone else responsible for their mistakes," said Horn, whose company is based in Afton, Wyo. "I believe that's what happened here. Most pilots don't want to admit a foolish mistake."

"There's hundreds of thousands of flying hours in this airplane," Horn said. "I can count on my fingertips the guys that have run out of fuel over the last 20 years."

Uhalt insists the problem lies in how the gauge is situated on the plane.

"Regardless of what they say, that airplane has a problem," Uhalt said. "It's unsafe if you don't know about it."

On the day of the flight, everything went as expected until they were returning to the airport. When he noticed fuel was low, Uhalt decided to land in the field instead of trying to fly over the Security neighborhood toward the airport.

"I didn't want to take a chance of landing in the residential area," he said. "I could damage private property, hurt some people or even us."

No one was hurt and the plane was undamaged, but the safety of the gauge worried Uhalt.

He said he has been trying to talk to Aviat about the problem, but said company officials have not returned his phone calls.

He has taken the plane up a few times since then and encountered no problems. Still, he's not taking any chances.

"We fill it all the way up just to make sure," he said.

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