When the engine stops in a single-engine aircraft in flight, it gets very quiet in the cockpit, as quiet as a mouse pissing on cotton, so the old saying goes. It’s the real sound of silence, although you may hear the sound of blood pounding in your head when you realize what’s happened.

When I was shot down over Laos on June 4, 1971, I had to get the helicopter on the ground before the controls locked up. I shoved the nose over until all I could see out the windshield was jungle below. At that moment, time seemed to stop. My life didn’t flash before my eyes, but I remember thinking quite clearly, “Is this what it’s like right before you die?”. Then time returned to normal speed, and I had to pull the aircraft out of the dive and land it. That was from 5,000 feet above the ground. Time doesn’t stop when you are at a low altitude in a small aircraft and all power is lost. If anything, time speeds up.

In my personal airplane, many years later, I glued a small red placard to the dash. It read, “In the event of an emergency, FLY THE AIRCRAFT” and that what I was doing each time the aircraft I was flying went silent. “Aviate, Navigate, Communicate” the cliché goes. So, that’s what I did all three times silence reigned: I flew the aircraft, and I navigated by flying the aircraft to a clear area for landing. There never was time for the communicate part.

Time. That’s what you don’t have when you are at a low altitude in any aircraft and the engine quits. Yet another fixed-wing aviation cliché is “In the event of an emergency the first thing you do is wind the clock”, meaning take time to evaluate the situation before you take action. However, that only applies in fixed-wing aircraft at high altitudes. It never applies in helicopters because the time you have to take action is about two seconds. Failure to react in those two seconds results in the loss of rotor RPM followed by loss of control when the rotor blades no longer produce enough lift to fly, followed by the inevitable crash.

My first two silent cockpits were in OH-13E bubble helicopters built in 1951; the same type aircraft used in the old television show M.A.S.H. When the engine stops in a helicopter, to land safely the pilot has two seconds to reduce the power control, the collective, to its lowest position to enter autorotation. Autorotation reverses the normal powered air flow from down through the rotors to produce lift to up through the rotors to continue producing lift, allowing the helicopter to remain under control but also resulting in an immediate rapid descent. The gliding helicopter is now trading altitude for lift to keep the rotor blades turning fast enough for the pilot to retain control. Sadly, helicopters can’t glide very far. If you look down through the lower part of the bubble that’s about as far as you are going to glide, so there had better be somewhere to land down there. From 1,000 feet it will be around 30 seconds before you are on the ground one way or another.

Lack of time also applies to fixed wing aircraft if you are at a low altitude when the engine fails.  I was 1,000 feet in my 1946 Ercoupe airplane when, after the engine sputtered a few times, things got quiet. While the Ercoupe will glide much farther than a helicopter, from 1,000 feet you will be on the ground in about a minute and a half after it gets quiet. In those 90 seconds you must recognize that you’ve had an engine failure, push the nose over to maintain airspeed lest you stall and lose control, pick a spot to land, and finally, set up for the landing.

When I was first learning to fly helicopters back during the Vietnam War my instructor would cut the throttle every time I over flew an area where I couldn’t complete an autorotation without crashing. Soon I was flying in a zigzag pattern, trying desperately to always have a safe landing area in sight. It soon became a habit that was so ingrained that I never had to think about it. Several years later, when my big Chinook helicopter was shot down over Laos, the aircraft was damaged so badly that I put it into a desperate dive, trying to get it on the ground before the flight controls locked. When the ground became close, I discovered that without thinking I had aimed for the only open area for miles and was able to land without further damage. There had been no conscious thought on my part in selecting that landing zone.

In 1969, two years before I was shot down, upon graduation from Army Flight School I was sent to Fort Campbell, Kentucky. I was the first of a large group of new pilots inbound so my boss decided that I would become an instructor pilot in OH-13Es. My job would be helping transition the other new pilots into that aircraft. “Take that helicopter and get 100 hours and we’ll train you to be an instructor”, my boss said. Having a helicopter to fly every day whenever I wanted meant I had died and gone to new pilot heaven. A month and half later I completed my instructor training and was teaching my first students.

A major part of the training was how to do a successful autorotation. I spent many hours in the autorotation area practicing and perfecting my skills. Using what I had been taught, I made sure that all my students learned how to perform all the steps necessary to autorotate successfully every time. Remembering my first instructor, I also taught them to always be looking for a clear area in case the engine quit. To that end I would cut the throttle at unexpected times, just to see what my student would do. One of my favorite places for a simulated engine failure was over a road leading to the back side of Fort Campbell. The road had large, flat, grassy fields on either side. When I cut the throttle, all the students had to do was turn left or right and they had a perfect autorotation area right in front of them.

On a cold January morning my student was a captain who had just returned from a combat tour in Vietnam where he flew big helicopters on many combat assaults. I had not yet been to the war and was more than slightly intimidated by my “student”. In my mind it should have been the other way around, but the mission is the mission, so I was doing my best to teach him to fly the old, two-seat helicopter. Over my favorite spot I chopped the engine. I was trying to be sneaky about it so that he wouldn’t have time to prepare, so I lit a cigarette and as I was putting my lighter up, I rolled the throttle to the idle position. My student did exactly the right thing and we were on our way down. When it was apparent that we would be able to safely make the field, I told him to recover. As he rolled the throttle back on, the engine gave a soft cough and went silent. My first engine failure.

I realized immediately that this was now a real engine failure, and we would have to complete the autorotation. I threw the lit cigarette in the captain’s direction and yelled “I’ve got the controls!” He let go of the controls, I took them, and completed the autorotation, softly landing squarely in the middle of the field and sliding the prescribed two-skid lengths before we stopped. All this happened in about 30 seconds.

Leaving my student with the aircraft, I headed out to the road to find someone to take me to a telephone so that I could call the maintenance officer and get someone to come and check out the helicopter. I was completely calm until I was about 50 feet away from the helicopter when my knees started to buckle. I paused for a moment, realizing that I had just walked away from a potential crash, and then continued out to the road where I caught a ride with a passing car to the nearest place with a telephone.

“Hello, Mr. Myers. It’s Bob Curtis. The engine quit and I landed in a field near the Rod & Gun Club. No, there’s no additional damage.” With that, the maintenance officer, a very senior pilot who received his wings long ago, was on his way.

Twenty minutes later, Chief Warrant Officer 4 Forrest Myers pulled up on the road next to the downed aircraft. His first words to me were, “At least you could have landed it closer to the damn road! I’m going to get my boots all muddy walking out there!” At first, I was hurt but then realized it was actually a compliment. He was saying that I had enough skill to put it down wherever I wanted.

Mr. Myers looked into the cockpit and asked me if I had moved any of the controls after I landed. I told him that I hadn’t. Mr. Myers snorted and said, “Carburetor ice. You didn’t turn on the carburetor heat and ice shut the engine down. Start it up and fly it home.” The problem wasn’t the aircraft. The problem was the pilot.

Two months later, I was planting grass seed from another OH-13E. This was done by removing the helicopter’s doors and laying a 50-pound bag of grass seed on lap of the passenger, and then cutting open the end of the bag. I would take off and at 50 feet slowly fly down the length of the paratrooper landing zone we were reseeding. When we were ready to start, I would kick the helicopter slightly sideways, and my passenger would begin to shake out the grass seed. It was fun – that is, until we were on the fourth run.

I had lifted off and started down the field when, un-commanded the nose of the helicopter swung hard to the left and then straightened out again. Odd, I thought. Then it did it again and I realized that the engine was cutting out and was about to stop. I told my passenger to throw out the bag and began a hard turn towards a clear area. About then it became very quiet again: my second engine failure. I completed the autorotation, again landing with no damage to the helicopter. Again, I called Mr. Myers to come look at the bird. It wasn’t carburetor ice this time. No, this time I had filled the air intake filter full of grass seed, thereby starving the engine of air and once again, it stopped. This time instead of giving me a hard time Mr. Myers just shook his head and called for someone to clean out the carb.

Over the next 50 years I mostly flew turbine engine helicopters, most of them multi-engine. There were no more engine failures for 53 years. Helicopters being too expensive for me to own and insure, I took up flying a 1946 Ercoupe airplane I named Beryl Markham, after the first pilot to cross the Atlantic east to west solo. Beryl was a pretty little airplane, blue and white, painted with feathers on her wings making her book like a bird in flight. She had fabric covered wings and an 85-horsepower engine. At 6’4”, I barely fitted into her. She cruised at 95 miles per hour and gave me much pleasure as I flew her around central Florida. After a while she began to develop a problem with carburetor ice. This time, at the first hint of ice, engine sputtering, I applied full carb heat to melt the ice, curing the problem.

The title of my first book is “Surprised at Being Alive”. Beryl gave me another opportunity to live out that title on February 5, 2024. I was at 1,000 feet over the small town of Ruskin, Florida, just cruising along solo, being an airborne tourist just enjoying flying. I had completed a couple of full-stop landings at my home airport to keep in practice and then had decided I would just fly around for another 30 minutes before I called it a day.

Then Beryl’s engine began to sputter. This had happened before and giving her full carb heat and full throttle always cured the problem. Not this time. The sputtering got worse, and I started to lose altitude at the rate of several hundred feet per minute. While I was setting airspeed for the best glide rate, without thinking about it I turned south towards some open fields just across the Little Manatee River. I had mentally marked them as I overflew them a few minutes before, as my first instructor had taught me all those years ago. About then the engine stopped altogether, making it very quiet. I set up for landing in one of the fields, making sure to avoid the power lines at one end.

I did a perfectly normal landing, stopping about 100 yards from the tree line at the far end of the field. As it turned out, I had picked the best possible place to land outside of an airport: Bay Breeze Turf Farm. The flat, smooth grass field was more than big enough for little Beryl. There was even a Mr. Myers equivalent for me to call, Bill Burton, a man who had done much maintenance on my Ercoupe. Bill picked me up and took me back to his hangar to wait out a rainstorm that was just arriving. Some phone calls later and I had arranged for a maintenance crew to come down, pull the wings, and trailer Beryl to their shop to fix whatever caused the engine to stop. So ended my third, and I hope my last, flight that ended in a “quiet” cockpit. At 75 years of age, I want only loud aircraft in the future. I am past the sounds of silence in flight now and besides, between those three engine failures, getting shot down, and various other aviation adventures, I have used up six of my nine lives. Better be careful with those last three.

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