If you've read any NTSB reports of airplane crashes and incidents, a good percentage of the accidents occurred because of a series of events. One major catastrophic event is not what causes most crashes. It's the pilot's unwillingness to call off a flight or land ASAP after a series of red flags have presented themselves that can lead to a fatal outcome. This is at least what I remember from an article I read in an aviation magazine a while ago. The idea has always stuck with me and it has helped me to just say no some days when things just aren't adding up.
This all brings me to today. Today was a beautiful clear day with the promise of an abnormally warm winter day, even for Texas. My goal was to fly our Cessna 170, daughter, some luggage, and myself home to Mississippi after a number of months in Texas. The ceiling in Mississippi was the only thing concerning me since this airplane is VFR only, but it looked like it was supposed to lift. So I pressed forward.
After loading everything and everyone up, I hopped in the airplane and started up. I taxied away from the hangar and decided to do a run-up before calling ground. Everything was looking great until the magneto check. The right mag dropped much farther than normal and more than the left however it was still within limitations. It was the roughness that really caught my attention. So I pushed the power up, leaned the mixture, and let it run for a minute. Then I reset the power and mixture and checked the right mag it didn't drop as much but still slightly rough. So I repeated the procedure and checked the mags now they seemed ok. I decided to continue with my flight, but I would recheck the mags when I got to the hold short line. When I got there the mags seemed to be working correctly. So I called tower and received my clearance to take off and head home.
Take off was uneventful, which is fine by me! I climbed out turning towards the northeast. After leaving the tower's airspace I switched to approach to request flight following. In a short amount of time I switched between three controllers. As I checked in with the third one, I looked down at my oil temperature as I was climbing through 4,500 feet and it was painting an ugly picture. The oil temperature was one needle width away from redline. The air temperature was probably around 70 - 75 degrees so not super hot. I had flown this airplane in the middle of the southern summer and never seen an oil temperature reading like that. Plus when I was working on my rating here in Texas we never saw that on warm days when we climbed up to practice steep spirals. I reduced my climb rate and even tried a level off with power reduction to see what happened but the needle was slowly moving to that redline. So I made the call as I checked in with the controller to turn back to the airport. He tried to have me call up another approach but I told him no. At this point I wanted to fly the airplane and not mess with switching frequencies and then waiting forever for the new controller to respond to me. If something did happen to my engine I wanted to be ready to react as quickly as possible and not be distracted by a frequency change. This wasn't the time to mess with it. So the current controller kept me on frequency and made me keep my squawk code. I started a very slow descent back to my departure airport. I knew this area well and had multiple airports and fields I could use. I was about 10 miles from the airport. As I started to descend the oil temperature began to cool down. This, of course, started the damn second guessing of my decision. But my mind flipped back to that article I mentioned earlier and I told myself to stop and keep heading back. As my climbing guide once said, "The mountain will always be there." And I will add the sky will always be there too. I stayed higher than normal. I was trying to give myself as much sky between me and the ground as I could before I absolutely had to get near it to land.*
We safely landed and I taxied the airplane to parking. As my 2 year old daughter and I walked to talk to the mechanics she looked up at me and said, "That was a really nice flight, Mommy!" She repeated it until we walked into the mechanic's hangar. And the truth was, it was a really nice flight! I at least knew in that moment I had made the correct decision to call off our 6 hour cross country flight because the sky will always be there. And the weather will eventually be clear so I can fly us home another day.
* Note: I also kept my airspeed up. I didn't reduce my airspeed to my normal approach speed until short final. I did start a gradual reduction as I got closer to the runway with the higher altitude and airspeed I had more energy to play with to get me to the runway should the airplane have turned into a glider.