A problem that has yet to arise...

I guess it was somewhat naive to concern myself with how I was going to fill my time once the airplane was done, at least with regards to weekends. They seem to be filling up quite nicely on their own, thank you.  For example, all I had planned for this weekend was a flight to Muncie, Indiana for lunch and to give an RV-12 ride to a flying buddy. As it turns out, that is pretty much the only thing I won't do this weekend.

First of all, it was been a wet summer, which means that I won't be getting the normal two month hiatus on lawn mowing. Add to that the landscaping and tree pruning that we had done to spruce (heh - see what I did there?) up the grounds of the Gamble Home for Over-Privileged Children and Domesticated Animals which, while complete in nearly every way, still required a little effort ('little' to the tune of hauling 500 pounds of marble rock) to fill in a few areas with decorative stone.

Lawn work aside, a couple of days ago I received a phone call from a guy that I know from the airport asking if I could fill in for him at an event on Saturday morning. The event had to do with a visit from the touring EAA Ford Trimotor. Just as with the travelling B-17 that comes into Bolton every year, the Trimotor was going to be here to sell rides to people that want to absorb a little piece of aviation history first-hand. While they charge for the rides, that's mostly to defray the cost of the 80 gallons per hour they burn just in order to fly at sedate 95 mph. Any extra more than likely finds its way back to the EAA.

My volunteer work would consist primarily of safety-related work: it is very poor PR indeed to have a passenger walk into a moving propeller. They try to always have a few volunteer ground crew around to keep people from wandering into dangerous areas/items. Easy enough, plus I would get to wear an orange vest, which the training video had promised would give me "an aura of authority."

Ooohhhh, would that something like that worked at home!

And so it transpired that I arrived at Don Scott Airport at 0830 on Saturday morning, only to find that the person that I was intended to replace had actually been able to get there after all. I decided to hang around for awhile in case he got called away, though. In preparation, all of the ground crew were shown a 20 minute video presentation that detailed how each of the jobs was to be safely performed.

With everyone all trained up and ready to go, they were ready to board the first group of passengers. There were only seven of them, and the airplane carries ten. With open seats available, the call went out to the volunteers to see if anyone wanted to ride along, gratis. Being as my volunteer status was at the time somewhat questionable, I waited for others to speak up. I didn't wait long, mind you - just long enough to be polite. And so it was that I scored a free ride in a 1929 Ford Trimotor.

The Ford Trimotor (also called the "Tri-Motor", and nicknamed "The Tin Goose") was an American three-engined transport aircraft that was first produced in 1925 by the companies of Henry Ford and that continued to be produced until June 7, 1933. Throughout its time in production, a total of 199 Ford Trimotors were produced. It was designed for the civil aviation market, and was also used by military units and sold all over the world. As of 2012, there are 18 Ford Trimotors in existence, eight of which have current FAA Airworthy Certificates

It was certainly an interesting and thought-provoking ride, but there isn't much about it that I can put into words; there is something visceral about the deep-throated rumble of the engines and the bouquet of scents that come from hot oil and the combustion of leaded fuel, but those have to be directly experienced to be fully understood. Instead, I will just share a gob of pictures:

And here is a raw, unedited ten minute video (which will seem like 20 minutes if you sit all the way through it)  that gives you a taste:

The remainder of Saturday was spent on odd jobs, including cleaning out the non-redundant second hangar formerly inhabited by Papa Golf.

Rather than fly to Muncie on Sunday as planned, I would be giving a ride arranged for by the co-owner. Don't get me wrong, it was no burden whatsoever. I only mention it to point out how easily a weekend gets filled to standing room only.  It wouldn't take as long as the Muncie trip, which also worked in its favor, given that I still have two game reviews to write sometime this weekend.

This ride would be interesting in that the passenger would be the largest person yet to attempt to fit into the tiny little RV-12. He is, in fact, only four pounds shy of the maximum that I can legally carry, at least with the fuel tank full. The little plane swallowed him whole, and even at gross weight was able to manage a 500 foot-per-minute climb. That's not nuthin' on a hot day - pretty impressive, really.

Big Al is one of those guys that has an undying desire to fly, but doesn't really know how to get started. These are, of course, my absolute favorite passengers. With these guys (or, and very much to my preference, gals), we don't just jump in the plane and go. With the ones that I know have an interest in getting more into it at some point, I pull out a chart and show them where we are and where we're going. I show them the difference between controlled and uncontrolled airports, special use airspace, etc.  This trip would be just as far as Urbana, so there wasn't a great deal to talk about.  With that done, I have them join me on the preflight. That gives me the chance to show them all of the flight controls and describe what each does.

Once we're in the plane, I describe what all of the knobs and switches do. I also explain what they're about to hear on the radio once I get the engine started and begin talking to the control tower.  With the weather being warm, it didn't take but a minute or two for the oil to come up to temp. Off we went to the end of runway 4!

As I mentioned, this would be the heaviest the plane has ever been, and it was sure apparent during the takeoff that the extra weight matters.  We were still off the ground in only a thousand feet or so, but it was nothing like a the solo takeoffs that I've grown accustomed to. I climbed us up to 3,000' and then let Al fly us to Urbana.  The pattern wasn't super crowded, but even so I thought it best to take the stick back about three miles outside of the traffic pattern. From there I could see one plane on the runway, one turning final, and a third in front of us on downwind.  The landing wasn't terrible, but my recent flying experience in the RV-6 had allowed my feet to forget how to minimize the runway swerving I get with the 12.

Flying back, we stopped to fill up the tanks at Madison county. With the winds shifting around the way they were, we ended up landing with a slight tailwind component. Man, did that ever make the runway seem like it was coming towards us like a runaway freight train!

With 72 more pounds of weight to carry, I made doubly sure that we were facing into the wind as much as possible on the ensuing takeoff.

As we were mid-way between MacCo and Bolton, the Dynon showed some traffic 2 to 3 miles away, same altitude, heading away. As I was looking at on the Dynon, I said something to Al like "Eh, he's going to be hard to see," which turned out to starkly untrue. It was quite easy to see, what with it being as big as a B-17 bomber. In fact, I am 100% sure that the seemingly arbitrary size comparison to a B-17 bomber is extremely accurate, more than a little because it actually was a B-17 bomber.

You don't see that every day.

Two in three-hundred and sixty-five, yes. The rest of the year, no.

And potentially even less than that, if you don't live next door to Bolton Field.

Taxiing back in after landing (watch for at least 32 seconds):

Signed, Sealed, Delivered

Signed, Sealed, Delivered, but not necessarily in that order, and most assuredly not without periods fraught with angst.

I would say it all started with the aforementioned problem with applying map updates to the Garmin GPS, but in reality it has been a steady stream of stressful and frustrating events spread across two-plus years of trying to sell the RV-6. But just for the sake of brevity, at least to the degree that I am ever able to achieve such a thing, we will continue where we left off with the GPS.

This ended up being quite the fiasco. When last we met, I had attached the GPS to my home computer and navigated to Garmin.com. This is the way I update the Garmin GPS that I use in my car. What happens when I open Garmin.com with a GPS attached to the computer is that the Garmin site signifies that it "sees" the GPS by identifying it by model number. In this case, I was welcomed with open arms under the name 'Garmin GPS 396'.  

Perfect - that is precisely what is emblazoned on the face of the GPS itself. As you may recall, it also informed me that no map updates were required -- "...all is as it should be, My Good Man," was the gist of the message.

To which I said, "Nay. On this I must beg to differ, for it has been lo this half decade since last the sweet ambrosia of fresh data has passed these thirsty lips."  Or words to that effect, anyway. As I reflect more deeply upon the moment, I think what I actually said had more to do with an expletive associated in some manner with bovine digestive byproducts, but that's just quibbling over semantics.

I wasn't going to be refused, but no amount or manner of poking around on the web site could convince it to provide me with the updates, though, so I resorted to my personal oracle of choice: I Googled it. And, not surprisingly, others had encountered the same recalcitrant, obstructive attitude. The answer, as it turns out, is to not go to Garmin.com in the first place; what you're really looking for is Fly.Garmin.com. And while I was grateful to learn this helpful fact, I don't think it to be churlish on my part to be somewhat resentful of the web designer that felt that a seemingly warm, yet actually insincere, welcome to Garmin.com was somehow better than a polite "Wrong room. You actually want to go a little further down the hall, third door on the left. It will say 'Fly.Garmin.Com' on the door."  

Would that have been so hard? Would my feelings have been hurt? I say no, not only would my feelings not have been hurt, but I also would have very likely been grateful for the assistance.

So, confidence in the entire process more or less restored, off I went. I confidently plunked down the $50 for the map update, confidently answered the proffered questions, confidently pushed all the right buttons, and was confidently rewarded with... abject failure. 

Despite (or, possibly, because of) repeated efforts, the map updates consistently (and confidently) failed. But at least the error message provided useful and topical advice as to what recourse I should pursue. I believe the message quite specifically referred to the cause of my technical difficulties as "Unknown."  Not very helpful, I have to say. As much as misery loves company, in this case I was really looking for someone to provide useful information, not simply to join me in my ignorance. 

There was but one path left open to me, and it was the path the I dislike the most: I would have to call the customer service line. Long hold times, surly and/or condescending help desk agents, indecipherable foreign accents - you know the drill. I abhor it.

I was pleasantly surprised. I waited on hold for no more than three or four minutes before I was greeted by a patient and helpful service agent. He walked me through the process step by step, guiding me deep into the nether regions of the GPS's menu system. We put the GPS into something called 'Simulation Mode', his thinking being that this would somehow make the unit more receptive to having data crammed down its throat. And he was right! Before too very long, the process was complete.

That was pretty much the final technical hurdle preventing the delivery of the airplane to Virginia for its pre-buy inspection. All that was left to do was piloting stuff like planning the route, waiting for a day upon which both the presumptive buyer (hereafter referred to as 'Capt. Byer') and his mechanic were available to have the inspection performed, and flying the plane to Culpeper, VA. 

That last item being, as I am sure you are aware, very heavily weather dependent. The idea of just staying low to the ground and scudding along under the clouds in the way I did to make the trip to Ross Co. to get the transponder work done would not work for this trip for the simple reason that there are mountains in the way. Not mountains in the meaningful sense of something like the Rockies, mind you, but little bitty mountains like these are just as painful to run into as the big ones, so it is very definitely something to be avoided. I would need ceilings in the 6,000' plus neighborhood to allow enough space between me and the tops of the 4,000' mountains.

Unless, that is, I simply went around them. I plotted both options on the chart.

The crappy weather that had been oppressively sitting on us for at least a couple of weeks had shown no intentions of moving on, so I figured it would be days, if not weeks, before all of the required elements aligned. The first weather-agnostic opportunity would be Monday. I considered that to be viable as related to my work schedule - I would simply extend my vacation by one day. This would be possible, although it would not be popular with one of the fellows at the day job who was growing impatient with the delays in my fixing of something that I had broken just before leaving for a week.  I felt bad about potentially forcing him to wait yet another day, but sometimes you just have to be selfish. And it was doubtful that the weather would cooperate anyway.

I fired off an email to Capt. Byer to notify him that I was okay with planning for that day, but the current odds were against it. The weather had been far too spotty to make even the slightest commitment. Not too long after sending it, another email from Capt. Byer arrived. The email suggested that should Sunday appear to have adequate conditions, I would be welcome to fly to Culpeper a day early and spend the night in his home. One of the kids is away at college and  her room is available for guests. 

Well, that could work!

Thus it was that I found myself in front of my computer again early Sunday morning. The forecast for the Zanesville area, about 40 miles east of home base, was for horridly bad weather occurring by 9:00 am and not improving a whit throughout the remainder of the day. The weather in eastern Virginia, on the other hand, was stellar. Shame about all that crud between us, though.

But.... if I were to leave RIGHT NOW, I would be able to get to the east of the bad weather before it got bad enough to preclude flying. 

In theory, anyway.

Worth a look, I figured. 

I commenced to running around the house gathering up clothes, maps, electronics, various sundries required for morning ablutions, the Bill of Sale paperwork that I had thoughtfully had the co-owner sign in advance, and sped to the airport. By 7:45, I was loaded up and ready to go!

The weather at Bolton was fine, although even early in the climb it was apparent that heading towards the east was going to involve quite a bit of weather management.

All of that weather avoidance stuff would have to come later, though. Before that, I had a major problem to solve. For you see, I was pretty doggone certain that I was headed in a southerly direction as we climbed out of Bolton, and maybe even had a little eastward component in there as well, but the GPS was quite stridently insisting that my direction was due north.  Additionally, I was reportedly heading due north at the incredible rate of precisely zero miles per hour. It doesn't take a Mensa membership to realize that zero miles per hour is a physical impossibility in anything but a helicopter, and the fact that scenery was passing under my wings attested to the same ineluctable finding:

The GPS was not working.

Befuddlement.

Flash of memory: "Simulation Mode."

In English, that means "Not at all useful for anything other than playing with the buttons to see how the gadget works."

But here's the deal: it is a fundamental fact of life that successfully diagnosing a problem is a necessary yet insufficient portion of solving a problem. I would have to try to remember the incantations the Garmin wizard had used to get the GPS into this mode, and hope that the spell for resetting it back to "Real Live Piece of Navigation Equipment Mode" was similar.

Long story short (ha ha - too late for that!), I managed to get it working. It wasn't quite as easy as just getting it back into the correct mode, though. No, the poor little critter was lost. It thought it knew where in the sky to look for the satellites based on its last known position on the ground, but because it was now miles from the point at which it was last sentient, and moving further away by the second, it had to spend what seemed like quite a bit of time figuring out where we were.

Eventually it did.

As an aside, I noted that this was very likely the last time that I would ever see a 161 knot (185 mph) ground speed in an airplane that I own. I'm gonna miss that!

With the technical problems all fixed (or, at least, those that I was aware of), we pressed on towards the east. As I said before, it was already apparent that cloud layers were going to have a say in how the rest of my day went.

At least they're cute when they're young:

They don't stay that way:

It wasn't too far from Zanesville when I ran into what I call Visa(tm) clouds: they were everywhere that I wanted to be.  I had to choose: stay under them and risk getting caught below them as their height above the ground possibly decreased, or climb over them and risk getting caught on top with no way back down through.

Working in favor of an "on top" decision was the fact that I knew I could simply reverse my course to go back to known good weather if I needed to, and the fact that I had close to four hours worth of flying time in the fuel tanks.

I climbed.

Cruising along between two layers wasn't too bad. As long as I can see a horizon and some light at the end of the tunnel, everything is fine. Eventually we ended up flying through some fairly heavy rain, but that's not really a problem as long as I can still see what's out in front. It was a good half hour of flying through the rain and hoping to see improving weather soon before it finally happened.

There it was! Light at the end of the tunnel!

It just got better and better the further east we went.

And then we reached the mountains.

Because I had taken the northerly route, there really wasn't much to see.

Just shy of two hours after leaving Bolton, we were at Culpeper, where I made my last landing in my RV-6. Luckily, it was a fairly good one.

I had left Columbus too early in the morning to notify Capt. Byer that I was coming, so there was no one to meet me at the airport.  It would be almost an hour and a half before he could get to the airport. I had left without eating, so I was pretty hungry. This is the kind of scenario that is the very reason behind airport courtesy cars (free to use for short periods of time - all they ask is that you put a few gallons of gas in it) and IHOP restaurants.

After breakfast, I met up with Capt. Byer and we spent a few hours at the airport getting the plane at least partially ready for the following day's inspection, then headed back to his house for the night. He was an excellent host - we stopped and bought food for the grill, and he already had plenty of compellingly-named beer on hand. There was even a pool table in the basement. I'm horrible at pool, but he very graciously missed a few very make-able shots now and then so I could win a couple of games.

Monday morning found Papa all torn apart again, ready to undergo yet another session of poking and prodding. This one would be different, though, This would be the one that decided her fate.

The mechanics had not yet arrived, so I wandered around the hangar, as is my wont.

This is a Yak 11, a military trainer from Russia. Clearly something untoward had happened to the cowls.

Someone has fully Americanized the instruments.  Also note how robust the airframe must be: 400  mph Never Exceed speed! Yow!

From right to left, these are the mixture, prop, and throttle controls. I don't have any idea what lever 'B' does.

While I was sightseeing, the Captain continued disassembly operations.

The mechanics arrived and did the engine compression test. This was the one, solitary test that I was sure we would pass with flying colors. Sure enough, these are the best results I've ever seen.

There were a few scares, though, and at one point I decided that I needed to walk away. There were three mechanics crawling around and some of the things that they were commenting on ("This rivet isn't loose yet, but it could be some day") I found to be unnecessarily picky (and yes, I recognize that my bias was a contributor to this, as was my stress level).

I thought it best to distance myself from the ordeal.

The big scare began with, "Hey, you ought to come look at this too."

They had found what was either a crack in the paint or a crack in one of the welds where the landing gear is supported by the engine mount. A crack in a weld is orders of magnitude worse than a crack the paint. In fact, a crack in the weld would have very likely been a show-stopper. Repairing it would require the complete removal of the engine and mount to repair the weld, which means hours and hours and hours of labor.

And that, my friends, got me very tensed up, very quickly.  It was twenty minutes before the verdict came in:

A crack in the paint.

Phew!!

There were a few other faults, but they were easily rectified with money.

It was finally time for the final signing of the Bill of Sale!!

While I was relieved that the sale was finally final, there was also a bit of sadness at our final parting. I posed for one last picture.

We didn't have a lot of time for long goodbyes, though. We needed to get to the airport in time for the 3:30 flight back to Columbus. There were any number of things that could make us late, including traffic and massive lines at the TSA checkpoint. The traffic wasn't bad, but the line at the TSA barriers was huge! As I was joining the queue, one of the TSA agents waved me over to a new line that they were just opening. I went from last to first in one swoop. It was so fast, in fact, that I wasn't ready with my credentials!

And that was the last good thing that happened that day.

In the naivete of a person that has never flown with anything other than a full-blown ticket, I hadn't realized the full implications of my return flight ticket being a "guest pass." In the vernacular of an airline, it seems that the words "guest pass" translate to "the lowest priority stand-by ticket possible. Pet rabbits will fly before you do."

I never had a chance at the 3:30 flight. There were at least five people above me on the list, and not a single one below.

The next chance was the 7:30 flight. When I checked in at the gate, the agent told me that I needed one person to not show up.

I asked her to point him out to me using the pitch-perfect tone and precise timing required to convey the implication that said passenger might meet with some unfortunate bad luck that would preclude his arrival at the gate in time to make the flight.

I guess I should have known this intuitively: there is no humor at the departure gate.

I sat down to wait out the suspense. After five "this is your last chance before we give away your seat" calls over the PA, which I assumed to mean that at least one passenger was missing, I thought my odds were looking better and better.

Until...

At the last possible minute, a slovenly dressed guy picked himself up from his seat at the nearby bar, strolled cavalierly to the gate, retrieved a wadded-up boarding pass from his pocket, and strolled down the jet way.

And there went the 7:30 flight.

It would have to be the 10:30 flight or nothing.

We had been told earlier that the 10:30 flight looked like a sure thing, but right around 8:00 I got a call from the Captain.  He had been at home monitoring the numbers on a web site made available to employees of the airline and it was starting to look questionable as to whether I would get on the plane or not. He decided not to take a chance; he suited up in his pilot's uniform, cancelled my guest pass, and made a reservation for himself as a "non-rev," which is airline speak for "crew member travelling to work," and a new reservation for me that indicated that we were travelling together. The non-revs get the highest priority, and anyone flying with them goes to the top of the non-non-rev stand-by list.  The plan was for him to fly to Columbus with me if that's what it took to get me on the flight. If it appeared that I would still go even if returned to the bottom of the stand-by list, he would just go home.

I gotta say, that was a very classy thing to do.

Naturally, the 10:30 flight was delayed. That late in the day, weather problems and other little impediments throughout the earlier part of the day can (and usually do) sum up to delays for the later flights. The flight went from a 10:30 departure to 11:07, and from there to 11:17. They made an announcement stating that they wouldn't even have a crew until after 11:00, which made an 11:17 departure nearly impossible. I had no sooner texted "there will be a little more delay" home to the (former) Co-owner when they announced that we could commence with boarding the flight. The numbers worked out such that the Captain did not need to fly out with me, so we parted ways.

"Boarding" can mean multiple things. When it comes to the little bitty airplanes that they use for flights that can be just as easily made in an RV-6, it sometimes means getting in a shuttle bus and riding out to the airplane. I was surprised that we were boarding so early given the lack of a crew, and it so transpired that my cynical belief that the gate agents just wanted to get us out of the gate area so they could go home had some validity to it.

We arrived at a cold, empty, and sealed airplane, with no crew in sight. About ten minutes later, the crew strolled out and started getting the plane ready to fly.

It was only an hour long flight, but the bad weather over Zanesville was still there. It was a pretty rough ride, but it included calming things like lightening blasting just outside the windows and stomach-churning drops in altitude to make up for it. The woman seated behind me was sobbing for the last part of the approach into Columbus. We landed safely, I was promptly picked up by the (former) Co-owner, and I crossed the threshold of the palatial manor at 1:30 am. Home at last!

A trip that took me two hours in my airplane took eleven hours to go by airline.

I got up at 5:00 this morning to go to work. I hope the guy that wanted his problem fixed appreciates the effort that took,

Even after all of that, it's good to finally be back to owning only one airplane. While I am sure that I will, at times, miss the RV-6, I have a wonderful new RV-12 to fly around in, and I am secure in the knowledge that the older plane has gone to a good home.

The Gremlins of Betrayal

Jeff, one of those great people that you meet at Oshkosh and wished they lived closer to your home, once told me that you should never anthropomorphize airplanes because "they really hate that."  I get his point (and, of course, the embedded joke), but at times it can be very difficult not to ascribe human behaviors to them.  It's the same with cars, actually.  And one thing that they hate, hate, hate is being sold.

Witness the behavior of my beloved Miata: I decided to sell her when the airbag warning light came on and stayed on. Arguably, she betrayed me first, but that didn't stop her from vindictively starting to leak antifreeze from her head gasket on the very day that I sold her. I was just lucky that the buyer was a "car guy" and happened to be looking for a project car. I got Blue Book, and I can't complain.

RV-6 Papa Golf has also realized that she is being sold. The tell-tale signs are everywhere. I'm 100% certain that she is going to a good home and will be flown by a highly competent owner, but she too is showing signs of a deep reluctance to go.  The presumptive buyer came into town yesterday morning to look her over and go for a test flight. He started by poking & prodding her for what must have been close to an hour (and I'm here to tell you, it was a lot more stressful inspection for me than even the FAA inspection of the RV-12 had been!) and found a few quibbles, but nothing major. Time for the test flight!

I have always been proud of the alacrity Papa Golf shows when starting the engine, and yesterday was no exception. Two or three blades and VROOOM!  We were just about ready to go when I had the buyer put on his headset.

He couldn't hear a thing.

Huh??  That's never happened before!

I unplugged my headset and plugged it into the jacks on his side to make sure that the problem wasn't with his headset. Sure enough, a blaring blast of nothing greeted my anxious ears.

Argh.

We tried various form of wiggling, followed by jiggling. We even tried mixing up the order by jiggling and then wiggling, all to no avail.

I shut down the engine.  We weren't going anywhere without working headsets.

Fortunately, I have some recent experience in aircraft construction under my belt and I am no longer afraid to  dive in where others fear to tread. I went and got a wrench and a can of Brasso that I keep around for removing the tarnish from the brass plugs of the headsets, my theory being that having gone a couple of years without the loving caress of a headset plug, the contact in the jack may itself have been covered in a patina of neglect.

And such proved to be the case!  We climbed back aboard, the engine jumped to life again, and we were on our way!

Sadly, the weather was lousy. We headed off to the west towards MadCo with the intention of filling the fuel tanks, but as we got closer to the airport the clouds seemed to be getting lower and lower. Despite the goodness-knows-how-many-thousands-of-flying-hours airline captain in the seat next to me, I unilaterally made a command decision: we were turning around, putting our collective tails between our legs, and scampering for home!

Upon arrival back at Bolton, from which we had departed on runway 4, I expected to hear "report two mile left base for runway 4."  Instead I heard "report midfield right downwind for runway 4," which is nonsensical.   I incredulously asked for confirmation of those silly instructions. Unfortunately, as it turns out, what I had "heard" was not what had been said.

"Report. midfield. right. downwind. runway. TWO. TWO."

As if to a child.

Oops.  They had changed runways in the ten minutes we had been gone. I contritely apologized and professed my staunch dedication to reporting midfield right downwind, runway two-two. SIR!

Which I did.

Only to hear, " Six Papa Golf, cleared to land runway four."

Wait, what??  It's four again??

"Uh, cleared to land four, or two-two," I asked.

"Cleared to land runway two-two," was the reply.

"Four Papa Golf, cleared to land runway two-two," I responded. And the second I released the push-to-talk button, I concatenated "and now we're even."

Just.... because.

So, having ham-handed my way through what should have been the simplest of interactions with the tower in front (well, it's an RV-6, so 'alongside') of an actual big-metal airline pilot, I could only console myself with the thought that the previous night's landings had all been good. A nice, smooth landing would provide sweet, sweet redemption.

I flared high. Dumped it in from at least a foot up.

Curses!!!

None of this dissuaded the buyer (well, at least not to a critical point) -- we agreed to a price and sat down to work on a contract. There are things left to be done on the airplane that needed to be recorded for posterity and the buyer's self-protection before money changed hands, chief amongst them being the completion of the two year transponder check.  No big deal, that - she passed it with flying colors two years ago, and she's only seen light duty since then, so what could go wrong?

Well.....

I already had an appointment for this morning to get the check done. I was going to have to fly to a new place to get it done because the guy that made a house call to do it two years ago seems to be out of business, and the place I used to fly to before that got into some trouble with the law and are consequently also out of business. No problem, really, since the new place is only a twenty minute flight away, but the cruddy weather from yesterday was still hanging around. After waiting around for the clouds to lift to the bare minimum altitude that would allow for a safe flight to the avionics shop, I ended up arriving while the avionics guys were out to lunch.  I spent the time waiting walking around their hangar where I found a couple of interesting things.

If you've ever been in a pawn shop, you will know that the most abandoned thing in the world is guitars. Running a close second:

I should have stopped there, but I didn't. I soon found a penny.

Heads down.

Tails up.

No matter how you say it, bad luck. And sure enough, the combination of a bad luck penny and a betrayed airplane ended up costing me dear.

The transponder encoder, which is the small electronic device that acts like an altimeter that sends an electronic altitude signal to the transponder instead of displaying an indication like the mechanical altimeter does, was taking too long to heat up.  The altitude signal that the encoder sends to the transponder is the altitude value that Air Traffic Control will see on their radar screens, so this is not an insignificant problem. We could, I suppose, have continued to wait in hopes that it would eventually get warmed up enough to work, but after ten minutes I decided enough is enough. That's simply too long, especially for an airplane that is moving to some of the most crowded and security intensive airspace in the country.

I had to buy a new encoder. The new style that doesn't need to warm up at all.

$250, plus I still had to pay the cost of the certification.

I'm keeping that blasted penny.

I sure hope Papa Golf is done being mad at me - we have to fly to eastern Virginia on Monday.

UPDATE: No such luck. I brought the GPS home to update the map database, but it refuses to accept the newest software version, and without that, the Garmin website is convinced that the maps already on the device are already up to date. And that is patently impossible.

Sigh.

Flying because you have to

I've long said (to anyone that would listen, so 'long said' does not necessarily mean 'often said') that one of the secrets to staying alive in an airplane is to never put yourself in a situation where you have to fly. This primarily refers to weather; flying into bad weather is a leading cause of bad things happening to pilots.

Yesterday, I had to fly.

As is common with this kind of thing, there is a chain of events leading up to the situation. In this case, it started a couple of years ago when I decided to put the RV-6 up for sale. Once it appeared that I would be capable of finishing the RV-12, the writing was plainly legible on the wall: one of the planes must go. I'm not Harrison Ford, after all - I can't afford to keep a flock of these things. Market interest was spotty at best for a couple of years while the country hunkered down into recession survival mode, but now that it appears that a flat economy is the new normal and people are starting to adapt to it, there has been sudden interest in buying RV-6s. Or so it would seem. I have been juggling prospective buyers for a month now.

The timing was, as can be expected, horrible. Yes, good problem to have, but stressful nonetheless. Just as a quartet of interested parties started asking questions and wanting to see the plane, the annual inspection came due. My overseers at the day job also decided that my presence was required in Chicago for a few days. My annuals are multi-day affairs due to the fact that my chosen mechanic/inspector has a day job of his own, and this year's event was further complicated by the need to apply some paint to various fiberglass parts, which is work that I have no aptitude for.

The annual was finally signed off yesterday and a prospect is flying in this morning for a test flight. I don't/won't fly anybody in the plane after an annual inspection until I have had a chance to test fly it myself, so I needed to get that done. Additionally, it would have been 92 days since my last time flying it, so in the eyes of the FAA I would not be qualified to carry a passenger until I had accomplished three takeoffs and landings. So, I had to fly the RV-6.

But... I had another requirement. The FAA mandates a flight review with a certified flight instructor every two years to ensure that we haven't picked up any bad flying habits, and mine was due.  So, I had to fly twice. The weather made it questionable as to whether I would be able to do that or not. Slow-moving isolated rain clouds had been loafing around all day, so the weather was likely to change significantly every half hour or so. It looked good out to the west, though, so I called my CFI and asked if he could fit a flight review into his Sunday afternoon.

He arrived at 4:00 and we pulled the RV-12 out of the hangar. The weather still looked great out to the west, but it was a little dark to the south. We would be staying in the local area and the visibility was fine, so we figured that bad weather would be easy to see and would not sneak up on us. That proved to be true.

Heading out to the west, I showed the instructor some of the fancy features of the new plane and let him take the stick for awhile as we climbed up high enough to do a couple of stalls. Stalls are one of the things the FAA likes to know that you can recover from, but they seldom if ever happen at an altitude from which recovery is possible. They're most common in the landing phase, but practicing recoveries under the most likely conditions to actually need to recover is essentially suicide. Stalls are benign and easy to recover from at 3,500', so that's where we went. As is the norm, it was easy as could be to satisfy that requirement.

I had no sooner recovered from a stall when the instructor reached out and pulled the throttle to idle to simulate and engine out condition. This is not entirely unexpected. That said, the situation was somewhat complicated due to the close proximity of the runway at MadCo and the wealth of altitude I had in the bank. Again, great problem to have, but not without its own complexities.

I was faced with a choice: I could dump the flaps and go into a full slip (rudder hard to the right, ailerons to the left -- this puts the side of the fuselage into the wind and creates a great deal of drag which allows for a good descent rate without picking up a lot of speed) and land straight in to runway 27, or I could fly a normal landing pattern in order to circle around to runway 9. With the altitude I had, 27 was a sure thing, and 9 was fairly likely, but not a given. Fate favors the bold balanced against a bird in the hand and only a moment to think about it -- I decided on 27. In retrospect, that was a mistake.

Knowing that I would need to get down in a hurry, I slowed down enough to get the flaps out and put us into a slip. I figured if the slip wasn't enough, I could make some S-turns on the way down. Then I heard it:

"Madison County traffic, Diamond yada-yada-yada is on a three mile final to runway 27."

Crap! What are the odds that someone else would be out here?  I told Tony we were going to have to ditch this until we could find the other plane. Nothing was showing on the traffic display, so it was going to take eyeballs to find it.

"No, that's us! I made that call," he said.

"Oh. Well, you aren't in the Diamond that you normally fly, dang it!"

Is what I thought. Only I didn't think 'dang'.

Even in a full slip with the flaps down, it looked like we were still going to be high on the approach. We must have been closer to the airport than I had originally thought.  I slowed us down a little bit more, although doing so did bring the thoughts of a stall closer to front-of-mind. A look at the screen showed a healthy 65 knots, though, so we were good on airspeed.

The slip got us down to where we needed to be and I reverted to a normal straight-in approach. It was the landing flare when I realized that perhaps chancing the pattern to runway 9 might have been the better decision. What  I had thought was going to be a pure crosswind turned out to have a quite notable tailwind component. The runway was just flying by beneath the wheels. We arrived with something of a bang, I got the flaps up without delay, and got on the brakes.

There are many things an RV-12 does well, and braking to a stop is one of them. We easily made the mid-length taxiway. We taxied to runway 9 for takeoff.

We headed back to Bolton for a few more touch and go landings, although the last landing was converted into a full stop as it appeared that the dark rain cloud we had seen down to the south was soon going to cross right over the airport.  And in fact, it did, but we had gotten the plane returned to its hangar before the big drops started to fall.

So, having the checkride done left me with one more task: I still needed three takeoffs and landings in the other plane. That had to wait until a little after 8:00 when the rain finally moved off. This meant wet taxiways and runway which while safe to fly on, results in a very messy airplane. That's not what you want when a buyer is coming to visit, so I resigned myself to the fact that I would be cleaning the bottom of the wing once the flying was done.

The flying itself was no problem at all, although it does take some time to re-familiarize myself with the different operational aspects of the more complicated RV-6. And, as with every time I fly it now, I am reminded of how much I will miss this airplane. The RV-12 is better suited to my current and future flying needs, but the RV-6 is still a blast to fly. While the 12 can be compared to a small, light sports car (say, a Miata), the RV-6 has a nice, deep rumble in the engine that exudes a feeling of power that the almost-electric sounding Rotax will never replace. It also has a sturdier, firmer feel to it in flight as opposed to the kite-like feeling of the very-light RV-12. It has a feel more comparable to a sturdy, powerful roadster like, say, a Mercedes SLK.

The decision between which of the two to keep seems eerily familiar.

Almost deja vu-ish.

So, despite the time pressures and the fickle weather, I made it through the "have to fly" day just fine. The secret was in re-defining "have to" as "need to" -- had the weather not improved, I would have just waited for this morning to fly the RV-6. The buyer would have just sat in the terminal reading through the engine and airframe logbooks while I did my required takeoffs and landings.  Still, it's nice to have it done.