Well, we didn’t believe the pilot was drunk. No tale-tale signs of alcohol anyway.
However, he did seem “odd”….But, what’s odd here (other than taking off again after a gear-up prop strike)? I’d never met the guy before so I had no baseline. Was he just shaken up? Scared? Dunno.
But for us witnessing this, we just couldn’t figure out why. Do we just let this guy go on his merry way? Did he experience some sort of medical condition? So, we have a LifeFlight based on field and asked him if he’d like to go over to get checked out. He said “sure” so we walked over and explained what happened to the folks on duty. They had a look at him and said, “he’s fine”….so on his merry way he went.
If I was the guy in the Arrow I would have told the Cirrus to back off. Last thing you want is some “wanna-be-hero”, offering unsolicited advice when managing an emergency. Now if I believed I had exhausted all options, and asked for help, that would have been different. The guy flying the Arrow seemed as though he had the situation under control.
After having built a Murphy Moose, I can truly say that Murphy Aircraft under Darryl Murphy represents the worst of kit building companies. Factory support is zero. Known defective parts are available. Design problems abound. The manual is a total mess. Believe me, there are lots of better back country kit companies than Murphy.