In short: In this favorite story, Rod Machado recalls a Cessna 150 that ground-looped and lost its right wing, and the mechanic who later taxied it, still missing that wing, out for an engine runup. Rod and his stunned student watched from the runup area, and the exchange with the Orange County tower became a classic.
Video: “One Wing On One Wing Gone” by Rod Machado, from his YouTube channel.
What you’ll learn
- How an overloaded Cessna 150 ended up ground-looping and losing a wing
- Why a mechanic needed to run up the repaired engine before the wing was back on
- How the tower reacted to seeing half an airplane taxi past
- What Rod’s student saw from the runup area, and the final radio exchange
A ground loop and three big passengers
Rod opens with a simple truth: strange things happen at airports. Around 1978, a Cessna 150 landed, ran off the runway and ground-looped hard enough to tear off the right wing. When the doors popped open, three large men climbed out of an airplane designed for two, which Rod suggests explains a lot about the ground loop.
The airplane went into a maintenance hangar, where Rod’s friend Tim, a mechanic who was also a commercial instrument-rated pilot, got to work. The engine needed repair after the sudden stoppage, and the plan was to fix it first and reattach the right wing last.
Taxiing half an airplane
With the engine done, Tim needed a runup, and a proper runup belongs in the runup area. So early one Saturday morning he called the tower and taxied out in a Cessna 150 with only one wing. Rod says plenty of faces were pressed against the tower glass, and the controller asked, with dry humor, whether Tim was experiencing any difficulty.
Rod happened to be at the far end of the runup area with a student, who looked over, saw the one-winged Cessna and lost most of his vocabulary. Rod, trying hard to look like a cool, collected flight instructor, recognized his buddy right away.
The punchline
Tim finished his runup and then taxied up to the runway threshold and switched to tower, playing the joke all the way to the end. The controller’s comeback is the reason Rod counts this among his favorite stories. It’s pure airport humor, and a reminder that pilots and controllers often share a sense of fun.
Go deeper with Rod Machado
Rod’s lighter side runs through all of his training, including his eCourse on how to fly an airplane, where humor is used to make the fundamentals stick. Learn more in How to Fly an Airplane eCourse.
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