Human Ballast

As the idiom goes, "March: in like a lion, out like a.... well, like an ill-tempered grizzly bear with bursitis." At least that's how it has seemed this year, anyway. But into every rainy, windy, snowy month, a day or two of decent weather may crop up now and then, albeit most typically on a work day. Today, however, was one of those rare gems we luck into every now and then. A little cold early, but forecast to warm up to a bearably temperate afternoon. Light winds under gray clouds, those too expected to diminish throughout the day and allow us to enjoy some cyan in the palette.  And best of all, no competing demands on my time. 

Flying weather.

But where to go? The thing about being surprised at having the opportunity to fly is that quite unsurprisingly, no plans are in place. Through the miracle of modern telephony, though, a 9:30 breakfast rendezvous with The Jackson Two was arranged for an airport diner down in the southern reaches of Ohio. I arrived at the hangar in plenty of time for an on-time departure which one would expect to be able to parlay into the symmetrical on-time arrival, but I had forgotten that I had left the fuel tank endowed with an insufficient amount of juice to make the trip. Reluctant to pay the unconscionable $6.70 per gallon being demanded by my domicile, I decided that I would have to suffer the indignity of being late for breakfast so that I could hop over to nearby Madison County to procure the requisite petroleum for the equally unconscionable yet slightly more palatable rate of $5.53 per.  

Once tanked up, I headed south towards Portsmouth. The Skyview, having taken into account each and every minute facet of the operation, proudly proclaimed that we would arrive at 9:35, a mere five minutes late. While it would have meant a chillier day, a little wind out of the north might have rectified the problem of my impending tardiness, but it was not to be. The nearly straight up plumes of the power plant that I flew over confirmed what the Mighty Skyview had already postulated: little to no wind to be found.

With no prevailing wind to determine which direction to land, one would think that my southward flight would culminate in a landing on the southerly-facing runway, but to think that would be to ignore the hyper-judgmental nature of pilots. Landing in the most efficient way possible would fly in the face of one of the nonsensical bugaboos of airport etiquette: I would be tried and sentenced in the court of aviator obsessive-compulsiveness and ineluctably found guilty of performing the despicable straight-in approach.  No, it would be better to brave the intimidatingly large hills on the west side of the runway and fly a left downwind to a landing facing to the north, the very direction from which I had come.

You may think I'm joking about the potential ramifications of flying the despised straight-in approach, but consider, if you will, the rather deadly piece of hardware placed on the airport grounds to prevent any such malfeasance.  See it right over there by the flag? yeah, not to be trifled with, that.

Yeah, rub it in: my canopy doesn't lock. Providing a lock would have added $1.82 to the cost of the kit -- can't have that!

One passingly decent breakfast delivered by a more than passingly cute young waitress later, it was back to the end of the north-facing runway for to commence my journey back... north. Oddly enough, the straight-out departure is perfectly acceptable, and admittedly made somewhat safer by the fact that the risk of ostracization and/or anti-aircraft fire precludes most fliers from arriving directly into departing northbound aircraft such as my own.

Funny how that all works out, isn't it?

I was no sooner home than I realized that weather Karma was hunkered down in the tundra waiting to pounce on me like a March lion on an April gazelle: the forecast for Sunday was abysmal. I've heard that Eskimos have some unbelievable number of words to describe the various and sundry types of frozen precipitation they encounter up there in their frozen wasteland -- we're slated to receive no less that half of them all at once in the next 24 - 48 hours. Rather than idle away the afternoon sitting at home, I thought, perhaps I ought to go back to the airport and fly some more. This naturally presented a bit of a quandary: what possible reason could I come up with to justify flying twice in the same day??

Where there's a will, there's... a scheming homicidal relative, if old 50's era mysteries are to be believed.

Oops, no, another malformed trope.

What I meant to say is that where there's a will, there's a way.  (See also: Where there's a curd, there's a whey) After a little thought, I came up with the perfect plan: I would contact Co-pilot Rick, my companion on many, many flights back in my taildragger days. If he turned out to be amenable to a ride in a semi-proven airplane, I could kill a number of birds with, uh, poor choice of words accomplish a number of goals. To wit, I could see how the airplane behaves with an additional [redacted] pounds of human ballast on board, I could hop back over to MadCo to avail myself of the shiny new compass rose painted on the parking apron to improve the accuracy of the Skyview's determination of magnetic compass direction (the previous somewhat deficient calibration having been performed with my iPad sitting in the pilot's seat while Pete and I pushed the plane around through the four cardinal headings), and I could refill the fuel reservoir to prevent future tardiness.

Being of a kind and generous nature (to a fault, I tell ya, A FAULT!), I let Rick fly around for awhile to get a feel for the new plane. As he is considering building one himself some day, I thought he should do what I didn't do: try flying one before leaping into building one. I took over for the landing, of course.  My generosity has limits.

So, for the second time in one day I found myself pouring liquid gold into the tank.

The new compass rose was provided courtesy of a local high school, Class of 2012, or so I infer from the signature painted in the central circle. I ought to send a thank-you note -- compass roses are hard to find these days, but eminently useful. Having one nearby has benefited me a number of times.

All in all, it was a pretty good day, the glow of which I currently find myself basking in. Which is good, because the next few are going to be fairly rotten if the forecasts are even remotely accurate.

Returning to Urbana

There was a time back when I was still regularly flying the RV-6 when it seemed almost a weekly ritual to fly over to Urbana for breakfast. It wasn't that often, or course, but it was pretty frequent. With the the requisite five hours of probation nearly finished and nice weather in the forecast, it seemed that perhaps the time was ripe to reinvigorate the routine. 

The temps were in the 30's as we climbed out of Bolton, as was the ambient atmospheric pressure. Low temps and high pressure are the recipe for good engine and wing performance and this morning was a case in point: I'd swear I saw 1,700 fpm indicated on the Skyview.

It was a smooth ride at 3,500', so I let the autopilot practice its skills while I did some sightseeing. Nothing much to see, really, other than flat brown fields hiding under a dusting of snow.

Back when I was a regular at the airport diner, I used to like to park over in the corner between the restaurant and the maintenance shop. That practice is now apparently verboten. Fortunately Delta Golf and I were the first to arrive (at least via airplane) and there was no shortage of parking spots out on the ramp.

The Jackson Two arrived about a half hour later as I was well into my third cup of coffee. Well, the fourth if you count the one I had before leaving the house.  We had a nice breakfast before walking over to the hangar where a B-17 bomber is being restored. While the primary purpose of the hangar is to house the B-17 project, there are a few other planes parked in there as well. The first to be encountered is a DC-3.

It's in somewhat rough condition - I think it spent its last productive years hauling cargo. Most of the avionics have been either removed or eaten by mice. It's hard to tell which.

I always thought a neat vacation would be to go somewhere to earn the type rating required to fly as a co-pilot in a DC-3. If it ever happens, it won't be this year. We spent this year's vacation budget last year.

Still, I like sitting in the front seats.

You have to wonder how many sets of hands have held onto those controls over the years.

I was not surprised to see the ashtray, but I'm not sure what the other two thingys do. My theory is that the engine starting cartridges (have you ever seen Flight of the Phoenix?) go in there, but I can't prove it.

UPDATE:

After an hour of Google hunting, I found the answer:

They control the cowl flaps (or "gills"):

I wonder why one needle is shaped differently than the other.

Moving over to the B-17, I found that I look at things differently now that I have built an airplane. When I first saw these numbers, it reminded me of some of the odd fractions Van's likes to put in the plans. 35 feet, 315/16ths? Now that's odd. Having looked at it again, though, I think it is actually 25 feet, 3 and 15/16 inches.

Last time I was there, they were building the jigs to form new engine nacelles. It would appear that the jigs are done and are now in use for building the nacelles. Note the supercharger embedded in the frame.

I've never been able to figure out how the throttle quadrant works on the B-17. There are four engines, but six throttle controls. My guess is that a pilot would manipulate engines 1 and 4 (the furthest outboard on each wing) using the top handles, engines 2 and 3 using the bottom handles, and all four using the middle handles.

These are the control handles that the bombardier would have used to open the bomb bay doors and drop the bombs. Well, maybe not to drop the bombs, maybe just to configure how the bombs would be dropped and/or which bombs would be dropped. The bomb release itself was probably an electrical switch somewhere in the vicinity of the Norden bomb sight.

Norden bomb sight (a fascinating piece of equipment):

Decorative stuff:

This is the oxygen control panel for the bombardier.

This is a WWII B-24 veteran that survived thirty missions over Europe. He told us a story about how his B-24 was hit with a dud 88mm anti-aircraft round. He attributes the failure of the round to explode to it having been manufactured with slave labor.I guess it was as true then as it is now: you just can't enslave good help anymore.

This is, I believe, a firewall waiting to be restored or sacrificed for parts.

I understood that a B-17G carried a crew of ten. If that is the case, it must have been hellishly hard to find ten guys that averaged 120 pounds each.

There is also one of my fave planes EVER hangared there - this is a B-25:

It seems to be in for its annual inspection. Do you think the spark plug budget is significantly expensive? These are from just one of the two engines!

Back at the DC-3, I was still in rivet-looking mode. Through some strange accident of design, they had to do some modification of the manufactured heads to get these to fit.

People often wonder how they got pilots to fly these old buckets. I think it has to do with the on-board cocktail mixers.

Working under the theory that wartime planes needed to be easily disassemble for shipping overseas, I think that's why they had this row of bolts holding the outer wing panels together with the wing roots.

Walking back to our planes, we came across a cute little Luscombe.

My departure from Urbana was interesting, to say the least. I think it was my first takeoff with a crosswind, and I didn't like it. Before the rudder has a chance to become powerful enough to correct the forward path against a blustery wind, the brakes are the only way to do it. But applying the brakes during takeoff seems counter-productive. In short, it was the sloppiest takeoff I've made yet.

Once we were away from the airport, I slowed down a bit to let The Jackson Two catch up.



Somewhere lost in the haze out there is downtown Columbus.

And there's home base, right in front of my nose.

Today was one of the first really nice flying days that has fallen on a weekend. As such, the airport environment was somewhat crowded. Five targets in the air, and there was a sixth climbing off of the runway.

Left downwind to runway four took me right over my neighborhood.

The landing went well (in fact, both of today's landings were okay now that I'm not resting my feet on the brake pedals - I think the dragging brakes were causing the problem I had with thumping the nose wheel down) and I parked in front of the hangar having completed my five hour probationary period. No more 50 mile limit, and whenever I feel ready for it, I can carry a passenger!

An emerging pattern

I don't care if Monday's blue
Tuesday's grey and Wednesday too
Thursday I don't care about you
It's Friday, I'm in love...

Those were the words I heard on the car radio as I made my way down the dark, cold driveway last Wednesday at the commencement of my early morning commute across town. Those lyrics are from an old song that I've heard so many times that I barely register when it comes on the radio, but they opening lines broke through my pre-5 am funkitude due to the fact that they perfectly described our local situation. You might remember that I was able to finally get some more hours on the airplane on Monday of last week due to some well-needed yet unseasonably nice weather. Karma being what it is, we paid for that nice weather with two very ugly, grey days for Tuesday and Wednesday.

History repeats, or some-such, because we had another nice Monday this week, but the forecast for Tuesday/Wednesday can basically be described as late-season snowmageddon.  Six to eight inches, starting right around the time I start my way back across town on the homeward bound trek.

Cabot is preparing:



Well, no, not really. But he would if he was as smart as the brilliant hound above!

Anxious to build more time and to see if I can get a little better at holding the nose wheel off of the runway after landing to better protect it, I made my way to the hangar right after stopping at the house just long enough to grab an FAA-mandated prescriptive vision correction device.  Yes, my Class III medical now stipulates that I must wear glasses while flying.

The mid-40s temperature helped to get the oil warmed up fairly quickly -- that was nice, because the winds were favoring runway 22, which is a much short taxi than it's opposite end. There wouldn't be a great deal of time for oil heating to occur during taxi. As I was leaving the hangar area, a Beech Bonanza got in line behind me so it was a good thing that I hadn't planned on sitting at the end of the runway waiting for the oil to be ready -- he would have been stuck behind me waiting needlessly.

I was heading down south to Ross Co. airport for a brief meet-up with The Jackson Two. Kyle, the Chief Pilot and Tool Crib Manager had a couple of things to return to me, while I had a crimper of their's that I had been holding onto for so long that it was only a week or two from becoming mine by virtue of squatter's rights and/or common law marriage. Plus, the route TZR -> RZT -> TZR would look funny in my logbook.  I set a direct-to for KRZT, pre-set the desired altitude at 3,500', and set the vertical speed bug at 700 fpm, having decided that the default 500 fpm wasn't ambitious enough given the high amibient pressure and low-ish temps. The plane would want to climb so much faster than 500 fpm that I would likely run out of nose down trim.

As I was blithely riding along letting the autopilot do the yeoman's work of flying the plane, I noticed a sudden addition to the screen: a TRAFFIC alert had popped up seemingly out of nowhere, and it was at my altitude and basically right in front of me.

I took a look in the direction depicted on the display, and sure enough:

Ain't magic grand??!?

We're still in our brown months here in Ohio, but it shouldn't be too much longer before the trees start growing leaves and the grass/weeds start to green. There will be quite a bit of very dark brown lands soon too, as the farmers start to plow for their spring planting.

Here are the two RV-12s meeting for the first time:

I managed to get seven landings in before The Jackson Two arrived. I'm still having trouble keeping the nose up while rolling out after landing, but I think I have a theory. My previous theory was that I was landing too slowly (an RV-6 habit - landing with too much speed in the 6 was the recipe for bouncing on the runway) and I think that theory had merit - I was able to hold the nose up for a brief period if I managed to get full back stick in just after touching down, but it still seemed to really, really want to plant itself. My new theory is that my feet are on the brakes and the gripping of the tires on the runway is causing the nose to 'pivot' down onto the runway. The reason I think this is happening is that I'm not fully comfortable with the non-steerable nose wheel yet. As I'm turning base or final, I'm getting my feet way up high on the rudder pedals to ensure that I will be able to use the brakes for steering if necessary. I think I must be putting enough pressure on the pedals to at least partially engage the brakes.

I'll test that theory next time I get good enough weather to fly. Maybe next Monday, if current patterns hold.