Posted Thursday, June 30, 2022
Well, what an update I have for you! As you've no doubt noticed, it's been several days, and I have posted nary a word. I've been too busy, but I'll try to summarize it all.
The day of departure arrived far too early, with the alarm ringing at 3:45 in the OMG-what-time-is-it morning. I did my last minute packing and arranging, having called a cab for 4:45. They couldn't guarantee a 5:00 departure, so their compromise was a 4:45-5:00 window. Of course the taxi showed up at 4:44. Ah well. I managed to get all my stuff sorted out, and I'd had everything packed for days, so it worked out. We got to the airport in plenty of time, and I had most of an hour to sit and write that morning. Alas, I seem to have left the tablet in the plane for the night, so that will have to wait for later.
The flight itself was unremarkable. I sat next to an almost painfully quiet man, and a woman who was talkativeness personified, which made for an odd combination. She told endless stories, most of which starred her husband, a spy and captain in the Navy, later a JAG. If even a quarter of what she said is true, he lived one hell of an adventureful life. But I spent a good part of the flight napping, and between the earplugs I usually wear in a plane and the N95 mask I had on my face, I wasn't feeling particularly talkative.
Once in Tampa, I collected my baggage from the carousel too late, so it had already been assembled onto a cart, and the attendant at the luggage office sharply asked me for ID when I tried to grab my bags off the cart. Fortunately everything arrived intact. I'd had vague visions of one of my two bags going to Saksaktchewan, and losing either of them would be at least a pain, and at worst a daily-medication disaster.
Then it was off to the car rental place to pick up my car. The guy there (who turned out to be Croatian, and we had a brief moment talking about my visit there in 1991) then told me that I was at the wrong office. "Yeah, it looks like you're supposed to pick up your car at the office that's about ten miles north of here. But they close at 6 and it's 5:30, and I don't think you'll make it in time." Fearing the worst, I asked about alternatives, and fortunately he was able to cancel that reservation and give me a reservation through his system that sounded identical to me. Apparently when I signed up through Kayak, they didn't make a big deal out of the fact that the rental car office wasn't, you know, at the airport where I was arriving. sigh
Anyway, he got me in a car, which was great, and I was on my way. I got to Lakeland about an hour later after mildly annoying traffic on I-4. I stopped in with my Airbnb host first, who turned out to be a delightful woman who was renting a couple rooms in her house. I was the only one staying there, so it was just her and I, and her cute little dog Ivan, who took an immediate liking to me.
Once I'd gotten the rundown with her, I was off to meet Craig, the previous owner of the plane, who would let me into the hangar. I think I called him when I got there, and he biked up on his Rans recumbent bike (Rans makes both bicycles and kit planes, which is pretty cool) to let me in. We looked over the plane, and he dug out a battery charger to top up the battery, which was already looking weak after sitting for a few months. I'll have to keep an eye on that, I think there is some load on the system that's not shut off by the master switch -- certainly the starter relay clicks even when the master is off, which seems weird.
Anyway, all looked to be in order with the plane. I checked the fuel, and found the wing tanks around half full, and the main tank also around half full. The main tank holds 26 gallons, and the wing tanks hold 5 each, for a total of 36 gallons, or around 4 hours of flying time. Far longer than I will probably ever want to spend in the plane, but good to have in case I run into a particularly long stretch between fuel stops in Texas (a thing I've been warned about).
I headed back home, to tuck myself into bed: I would be meeting my new instructor Scott in the morning, and we would be starting at 8 am. I think it was after midnight by the time I went to bed.
Once again, the day started too early: the alarm went off at 6:30 (which would be, oh, let's see, 3:30 am by my body's west coast clock). But I got myself out of bed, and had a little breakfast, along with conversation with Leslie (the Airbnb host), as I prepared to head out. I'd told her the previous evening about my training and my cross-country plans, and she got very serious, and told me about several aviation deaths that had occurred around her in the recent past, which gave her some concern about my plan. I think that telling her about my safety consciousness was a good balm -- there are certainly any number of reckless pilots out there, so I definitely understand her concern.
I got myself on the road, and was at the hangar just in time to see Craig (the previous owner) driving away from his mission to unlock the door for me at 8 am. I got into the hangar, and preflighted the plane, while Scott was on his way in, having gotten a later start than he wanted. He was there by 8:30, so it wasn't an issue, and I had time to prep the plane, so it all worked out.
We talked about what training we wanted to do: I explained how the insurance company wanted me to have two hours of dual training in order to keep me on my toes while learning the initial workings of the plane. They trusted that I could fly the plane, they just didn't want me to get overwhelmed by the newness of it all. His job was really to help me out if I got behind the plane, otherwise to sit back and comment on how well or poorly I did.
One of the points of discussion was the fuel pump. Norbert doesn't have a fuel pump, so it's a new thing for me to get used to. I'd made myself a checklist to use with the plane, but I knew it would be a first draft, and indeed, there are a bunch of things I want to change on it. I may make a new checklist sooner than later. Not sure I want to wait until Seattle to have that in better shape. Regardless, we talked through techniques, and settled on using it for takeoffs and nothing else, and determining if it was necessary for takeoff while we were doing air work. His theory, which I like, is that the electric fuel pump is a backup for if the engine-driven pump fails. In that capacity, it needs to be tested every flight, but there's no need to run it unnecessarily and wear it out. I'd written a bunch of now-unnecessary fuel pump items into the checklist.
Having discussed the mission, we proceeded to the good stuff: we rolled the plane out of the hangar, and got it ready to go. We both climbed in, and I went through the start-up items on the checklist. The first decisive moment came: would the engine start? Indeed it did, fortunately for all. The battery had been topped up enough, and we were off.
My first task was to taxi away from Craig's hangar, to the runway. At South Lakeland (X49), runway 14-32 is a grass strip, in pretty good condition. There's a parallel taxiway on the northeast side of the runway, with a gradual ditch between the two, with a crossing at each end, and around midfield. There's also a ditch on the far side, though it's also a gradual slope covered in grass, not a sharp dropoff.
Those of you who've flown taildraggers before will have noticed my careful noting of the ditches on either side of the runway. You know what's coming next.
I did the runup without issue, and we taxied onto the runway and lined up. I got a few final words from Scott, and then there was nothing for it but to shove the throttle forward and hope my hundreds of Champ hours would stand me in good stead.
We quickly discovered that Scott's intercom mic was very noisy, and he develped the excellent habit of unplugging his mic cable except when he needed to say something. The front cockpit would definitely benefit from a push-to-talk button for the intercom. We knew this before we took off, though he didn't come up with the cable trick until after we were in the air.
So, I pushed the throttle all the way forward. The engine made a huge racket: it's an O-320, which was apparently measured at 175 HP when it was overhauled. A stock O-320 would only be 160 HP or so, making this a notable increase. The wind rushed past me, and we started bobbling along the slightly uneven grass. Scott had told me to get the tail up quickly, so we could see down the runway, and then fly the plane off and into ground effect to gather speed. So, that's what I did, or at least what I tried to do.
There's a vital thing in airplanes, which is called P-factor. I won't go into the full nitty-gritty of it, but suffice to say that to counteract P-factor, you have to add right rudder, particularly in certain conditions. Take-off is one of those conditions. Rotating from tail-down to tail-up is another one of those conditions. It's a constant refrain from instructors to young pilots: "add right rudder." Students are always forgetting to add right rudder, and they're usually so overwhelmed by everything else that they can't feel how things are off.
Well, in a taildragger, it's really really obvious when you don't have enough right rudder in, particularly on rotation. The plane slews violently to the left through a combiation of torque, differential thrust, and a couple other things, all of which are encompassed in the word P-factor.
I'm used to the Champ. The Champ has a 90 HP engine, and it doesn't develop that full power on take-off, due to the prop it has. So when I poured on the coals with this engine that was nearly 2x the power of the Champ, with a heavier prop, and a shorter wheelbase, and much more lively landing gear suspension, things happened.
It was all going well, until rotation. We rotated up, and before I knew what was happening, we were pointed right at that ditch to the left, and accelereating fast. Hoo boy.
Fortunately, X49 has quite a wide runway, and I had some leeway before things went really south. The plane yawed violently back and forth, as I tried to feel out the right amount of rudder to use. Fortunately again, it doesn't take much speed to get this plane off the ground, and even with two people in it, we were accelerating fast. I kept it away from the ditch, but it felt like we were pointed substantially away from the runway heading as we left the earth, and became creatures of the sky instead of creatures of the ground.
I somewhat shamefacedly checked in with Scott. He assured me that it wasn't as bad as it seemed (very kind of him), and we were off to do some airwork. This was mostly time for me to get used to the plane a little bit in the air, where the complications of the ground aren't in play. A plane like this one particularly is much more at home in the air than on the ground. Most planes are awkward ground vehicles at best, but a small biplane like this can be a handful if you're not paying attention. Once in the air, it becomes much more graceful.
And indeed, once in the air, my previously-established skill in the Champ came into play. My turns were nicely coordinated. My feel for the plane was excellent, and it became obvious that the fear I'd had that the Champ was hiding some clumsy flying on my part was largely unfounded.
I tried doing steep turns, to start with. This is just banking over to about 60° and flying in a circle, which isn't terribly difficult, but isn't as simple as it sounds. 60° is pretty steep, and a lot of the plane's lift gets redirected to going sideways, so you have to pull back on the elevator and feed in power to compensate. I did alright on the first one, but lost altitude. The second one was beter, as I added in more power.
Then I moved on to stalls, where the real action was (a stall in an airplane means that the wings transition from flying efficiently to flying very inefficiently, and they usually make this transition very suddenly; a stall usually occurs when you fly too slowly, though that's not the whole story). How a plane stalls is very important to know, and this was no exception. The first stall, a power-off stall, had a claer burble before it broke, and I was able to head it off nicely before it developed fully. For the next stall, I decided to do a power-off stall, but let it develop fully, and see if I could control it down for any length of time -- this is a trick I like to do in the Champ, and I can keep it up for as long as I want, though it can be a bit finicky at times.
Not so the Charger. I had about a second of the stall developing, maybe two. Then suddenly we were pitching over to the left, and clearly headed for a spin. This is no disaster, if you're up high like we were. You just let the controls back to netural, and pull out of the resulting dive once both wings are flying again. So, that's what I did, and it recovered perfectly. It was shocking how fast it dropped into the incipient spin, though. Very much unlike the Champ. I decided that was enough on stalls. We had the stall speed (around 45 mph, as advertised), and that's really all we needed from that exercise.
Then it was back to the grass strip to try a landing. This is what I was really nervous about. Needlessly nervous, and those nerves ended up serving me poorly later on, but that's where I was. I don't recall exactly how the first landing went, but it wasn't terrible. It was bouncy, and I think I flared too high (which would become a theme), allowing the plane to drop with a thud to the ground. Kind of embarrassing after the perfectly smooth landings I've gotten to on the Champ, but not unexpected on a new plane like this. I also had a habit of veering side-to-side, which is definitely not ideal, though it was never enough to be a problem.
With that first landing out of the way, and not knowing exactly how much fuel we might be burning, we decided to head over the Bartow (BOW) to gas up. We thought we might go on to another grass strip Scott knew off further east after that. But first, I had to land at Bartow, on the concrete runway.
Grass, as a runway surface, is extremely forgiving. Land a little sidways? No big deal. The grass gives and you can slide around on it, which is perfect for a landing plane. Paved runways, on the other hand, are much less forgiving. The tires grip really well, and any sidways movement (which can be deadly in a taildragger, where the center of gravity is behind the main wheels -- think of pushing a hand truck in front of you, and how you can't stop paying attention for a second before it starts going its own direction; now imagine that at 60 mph) can be deadly.
My first landing at Bartow was... an event. No damage, but I think I flared too high, so that we slammed down onto the runway, and we were too fast (another running theme), and we were a little bit sideways. The result was a good solid boingy-boingy ride, which included a bunch of hopping back and forth to different wheels as I overcompensated with the rudder. But we made it down, and came to a complete stop, rolling off to the fuel tank to refuel.
That's all I have time to write tonight. It's already past 10:30, and I have to be a functional human being by 6 am tomorrow. With any luck, I'll be passing Tallahassee (and missing my friend Mel, who's in the area, but our schedules won't align) tomorrow morning, and headed toward Arkansas, where I hope to meet up with someone I know via Twitter, but who I've never talked to in real life. An exciting side-effect of this trip is that I'll be meeting a number of people who I've only interacted with online. Here's hoping that goes well.
Now, to get this text uploaded (for I believe/hope I left my kneeboard, and thus my tablet computer, with the plane -- I'm vaguely afraid I left it somewhere foolish, though I'm pretty sure I'll find it on the floor of the cockpit, where I left it; a story for next time), and get my weather briefing, and get my butt into the shower and then in bed. It's been a hot, sweaty day, and I've had far too much sunscreen on my face, and still have a red nose. More soon, check back for updates. Now that I don't have a car, I will necessarily spend much less time driving around. That's what's delayed my posts here so badly.
More tomorrow!
PS: Check out the gallery of pictures from today. More coming later, too!
Copyright © 2022 by Ian Johnston.