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Message: <blockquote data-quote="wjschmaltz" data-source="post: 263538" data-attributes="member: 6150">I try not to think of all the times I should have died in High School/College.  Some of them events creep into my head every now and then and I've literally got sick to my stomach.  We went a little harder than most I think.One recent bad one I had was a couple years ago on the first day of a moose hunt.  We were flying rivers on day one in NW Alaska deciding where to hunt.  My very good friend was flying and I was in the co-pilot seat.  He has 20,000+ logged hours flying commercially in Alaska so I'm very comfortable with him.  His Citabria had a wind damage insurance claim and wasn't ready for the hunt, so we had his neighbor's Cessna 170 as a loner that we both were familiar with.  Anyways, we stopped mid-morning in Kiana to throw in some more fuel and stretch our legs.  We put 10 gallons of unleaded into each wing and off we went.  We got about 5 minutes out of town and we were losing power.  Pulled a little more throttle and a minute later we would lose power.  So we climbed to about 7,000 feet and started heading back to the gravel strip in Kiana - repeating the process to eventually full throttle and losing power the whole way.  We got over the run way and my buddy dropped the wing and started to slip us in for an emergency landing.  Free falling sideways in an airplane is a sickening feeling that makes a passenger feel absolutely helpless.  We finally got to a good elevation where we could make our final approach.  We were about 200 yards from the air strip in our short final and we completely lost power.  It was only about 5 seconds that we soared over the tundra praying we make the strip; but it seemed likes minutes.  We made the strip by about 50 feet in a bumpy ass landing and hopped out to clear the run way for another plane trying to land.  We basically sat there on the ground in a mixture of silence and cussing for about 10 minutes.  Started ripping into the plane and I noticed the sight glass for the carburetor filter was about 1/3 full of water.  We ended up pulling close to a gallon of water out of each wing.  Most will say that a good pilot would have completed a proper pre-flight and sumped the tanks and filled through a mr. funnel - but that really isn't the norm in bush flying.   Lesson learned and it is for both of us now.  But, most pilots would not have turned around when he did and most pilots would not have been able to slip us in for a landing the way he did.  Those seconds that he saved by doing that kamikaze slip basically saved us.  We had a very successful hunt and I'm ready to go again with him in September![ATTACH]35938[/ATTACH]</blockquote>

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