Too bad I can’t fly a P-51 for my 51st birthday. :)
The folks around here didn’t know it was my birthday, until the evening when some of them got on Facebook and saw it there. lol. It was a warm day, in the 80s, and a little windy, and our plane was down. Spencer worked his butt off all day climbing up into the wheel well and firewall and on top of and all over that airplane trying to get the oil leaks fixed that had to be fixed before we could fly it again. We were hoping to be up by noon and giving rides afterwards, but neither happened. We were up by 3, though, and I took it on a post-maintenance test flight with Nathan, and bounced that landing all over the place, worst one I’ve ever made in there. I’d never bounced it, I’d only ever made really nice landings in it, from the very first one I ever made. Now I’m bobbling and bouncing most of them. I gotta instruct myself here and figure out what the heck has changed. The only thing I can think of is that I’m not as terrified as I was, so that’s probably it, I’m probably just not working as hard to touch down softly as I used to when I was afraid it would skirt out from under me at any second. I’ll try being more scared tomorrow when I have passengers and hope I make a better one than that. Ha
Then, since the stop was pretty dead from a crowd perspective, I went up with Matt and we did some flight training. Today we did the harder stuff. I shut the engine down all the way, fully feathered, and had him feather/unfeather it. We did a yaw demo of the loss of effectiveness of the rudders with full flaps down and a slow speed. I pulled his engine after takeoff and he had to do the pattern and landing single engine. That’s harder in a taildragger than in a tricycle. A go-around was called and executed. That kind of stuff. He did pretty well, he’s dialing in on the plane, and he made better landings than I did today, so hey, there is that.
Then we closed everything up, secured it, and Spencer left to go back to Indiana while Nathan and I left to go eat dinner. We ended up eating with Rocky and his wife Alma and their friend Lynn, and we had a nice time.
The rides people who WERE busy (T-6 and T-34 and a little the Stearman) were able to fly the passengers over to the NASA landing strip which is right next door. I’m going to see if I can do that tomorrow, if the TFR isn’t active again. You can do a low approach only, 500’ at the lowest, no touch-downs. I hope I get riders tomorrow. The airport was a ghost zone today. People would come out in a car, two of them, the husband would go for a ride, they’d leave. The next car would pull up. Not nearly enough people to get together 3-4 for a Twin Beach ride. Eye yi yi.
The B-24 and Gunfighter are going to fly tomorrow, and they have rides booked already, so I hope that we’re not the only plane that isn’t busy tomorrow. Ugh, I don’t like this part.
Well, I’ll finally get to bed at a reasonable hour after being able to catch up on my logbook, RallyPoint, and the blog for today. And email receipts and time sheets. I feel relatively accomplished.
Pictures from so far. Not a lot nor very interesting ones so far…and I have no idea why they’re all out of order. Oh well.
No comments:
Post a Comment