“There I was, 10 minutes after takeoff from Omaha in the [Cessna Citation] CJ1+ and the avionics strapping unit fails,” said Charles J. Precourt, a retired NASA astronaut with more than 12,000 hours of flight time in over 90 models of military and civilian aircraft. Now a consultant, but recently retired as vice president of propulsion systems at Northrop Grumman Space Systems in Ogden, Utah, Precourt was on the second leg of his homebound journey from Washington, D.C., to Ogden when the emergency occurred.
“All of a sudden, I had a lot of missing information on my displays and the autopilot disconnected,” Precourt said. “We train for a variety of avionics malfunctions, but this particular failure affects many avionic systems at once. I transferred the autopilot to the copilot side and got some of my information back, but it didn’t give me the autopilot. So, I had to hand-fly the arrival to Denver Centennial [airport]. That was my best option since I couldn’t fly it into RVSM airspace with the autopilot out.”
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