OK, so one day my family went climbing around on Mt Doom and I had a lesson in the local 206 on floats.
A day or two later the idea was that I (with the instructor) would fly them to have a look at where they'd been walking.
"OK, you can see the mountain, aim at it and climb to 10,000'" I was told.
Yeah, right. With very careful tuning of all the engine and propellor controls we could just about get to 9,500', not quite high enough to see into the crater, with all those people in the back. (Some people take a seat out of a 206 when they put it on floats, so that nobody is daft enough to try to put six people in it, but not this one.)
But the instructor had been here before. "Well, what we do now is try to gain the last 100' or so by ridge soaring along the crater edge." I wasn't sure I believed this, as a 206 on floats has got to be one of the least likely gliders ever, but we gave it a go. Without success.
At some point during this exercise the instructor had turned round to talk to my family in the back (the intercom didn't cover everyone), then there was a bump (well, fair enough, we were flying around in the wind that was swirling around a mountain top) ... and the engine note dropped substantially. That meant we were going down, like it or not, as it had been taking all available power to hold our height.
"We're going for the lake" said the instructor, taking control, putting the nose down, fiddling with the trim. I wasn't particuarly bothered, because from 9,500' we were easily outpacing the slope of the mountain so with some power left we had minutes and minutes to sort out and deal with the problem.
[The reaction of the kids in the back: one decided that they were never going in a light aircraft again, and hasn't; the other decided "well, there are two people up front who know what they're doing, and there isn't anything I can do anyway, so I might as well carry on looking out of the window" - that one has been flying with me since.]
So, as trained, I started working round the controls and instruments in an arc from bottom right round to bottom left. On spotting that the mixture knob appear to have been pulled out much further than either of us had pulled it deliberately I pointed at it and started speaking ... just as the instructor was reaching out and re-adjusting it, having spotted it half a second before me.
Power restored, carried on with the flight. The whole episode lasted no more than maybe ninety seconds, but it was real whilst it was happening!
Lesson learned: the training works. (Fly the aeroplane, then decide where you're going, then try to suss out what's wrong with the engine.)
So how did the mixture knob magically pull itself out a couple of inches? My theory is that the instructors knee was resting against it whilst he was turned round talking to the people in the back, and when we hit the bump of turbulence his knee pushed the knob outwards. This would only work, of course, if the friction device had failed or slipped, but it was a sufficiently old and tired aeroplane that that wouldn't surprise me in the least.
Chatting to some other floatplane pilot, in some other part of NZ, a week or so later, we get told:
"Ah yes, he rented that 206 in, because his own one is in the shop following the engine failure a few weeks ago. He put it down on the lake without any trouble."
My reaction: jolly good, we'd been flying with someone who was in very current practice at getting engine-less 206s down onto the water safely.
My wife's reaction: if we'd known this guy was in the habit of flying clapped-out old wrecks whose engines fail every five minutes we'd maybe not have gone flying with him.