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Dan:  

Glad to hear you telling the story vs an NTSB report.  For everyone's
benefit,  I had the misfortune (?) of flying right seat in a 235 years ago to
give a gent some recurrent time in his airplane since he hadn't flown for
several months (after bending the nose strut on a porpoised landing).  There
were no rudder pedals in the right seat.  After a few landings he was doing
well, untill he said someting like " I can't hold it, you've got it"  and all
hell broke loose.  We were on downwind leg, and I found myself holding full
left aileron to keep the airplane somewhat level.  I kept telling him what to
do with the rudders to help, which was mostly cross-controlling to counter
whatever caused the problem.  I looked out quickly and all I could see was
that the ailerons were attached and at full deflection and minimum flaps were
down ( right side only, the left is not visible from the right seat).  We
were able to declare the big "E" and skid the airplane to final where we were
able to find the runway, and made several attempts to land before getting
everything aligned and planted it on the runway edge, all with full aileron
deflection against the roll.  All this happened within the span of maybe 45
seconds.

Post flight inspection revealed that when he deployed the flaps, the right
flap hung up on a screw head, that was holding an end plate, fixed on the
wing fillet.  The left flap (the one I couldn't see) was down approximately
1/2 travel.  I wasn't watching everything he was doing , and didn't have time
to analyze what caused the assymetry.  When he gave me the airplane we were
already in trouble.  Had either of us realized the cause, we could have
easily raised the flaps and continued uneventfully to the hangar and
discussed the down side of having a control surface passing through anything
that can jamb it.  Lower, slower or more flap travel on the left side would
have resulted in us being in the NTSB files, no question about it.  

I'm glad this incident happened with Dan, because he was smart enough to
realize that something wasn't normal and stopped immediately to analyze the
feeling.  Would you have reacted the same ???  When was the last time you
really looked at all those wiggly things on the airplane and thought about
losing control of one ???

Mike DeHate
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