Planning the great escape

We are in the middle of snow-boarding season up here in flyover country. It's waterboarding, basically, with snow. Every day, we get about an inch of snow -- which doesn't melt -- and suddenly you look out the window and realize there's two feet of snow on the ground and we've not had a single big storm. It's like death by a thousand paper cuts and it only serves to make winter longer than it really is. It makes you confess to crimes you didn't commit, if only to make it stop.

The ice and snow around the hangar is preventing N614EF from getting outside. I'm still working on getting the wheelpants gussied up now that the intersection fairings have been strengthened and improved. The engine preheating system has been installed, although now I wonder if it was worth it if I can't get the plane out to fly, and what I believe was a bad #1 EGT probe from Grand Rapids Technology has now been replaced ($36), but I can't start the engine to see if it's fixed the problem.

I still need to get up in the air to take video of the Tru Trak wing leveler to send to TT to figure out why it won't track the flight plan in the Garmin 296, but apparently that will have to wait.

So what does an RV pilot do during these times? Plans an escape.

My son, Patrick, and I -- both big Cleveland Indians fans, are planning a trip to the Phoenix area to watch the Tribe play some spring baseball.

I've never flown a plane outside Minnesota. Come to think of it, I'm not sure I've ever flown a plane for more than 2 or 3 hours, so this is a big deal for us.

My pal, Darwin Barrie, has offered to put the plane up at his airpark in Chandler, so this week I gathered all the charts and books to begin planning the trip. It appears the first refueling stop will be in Lexington, Nebraska (on the Kansas border), the second will be in Dalhart, TX, and then we'll try to put some air underneath us to get up over the mountains, probably stopping for a load of fuel in Saint John's Industrial, about an hour outside of Phoenix.

Assuming good VFR weather, none of that bothers me too much -- except for the question of whether we'll have enough oxygen in the bottle . But Phoenix airspace? Man, it looks difficult.

First, you've got mountains to the East to get over, and then you've got to drop altitude -- a lot of altitude -- to get under the Class B. It's obviously doable, but should be a challenge, and I'm not sure all the examining of charts really prepares you as much as one should be prepared.

Here, for example, is the Phoenix VFR flyway map.



It doesn't look simple, but it looks manageable.

Here's what it looks like in real life:



It'd be a lot easier, Phoenix, if you'd paint a big blue stripe across yourself.

I'll be on the phone with Darwin this week looking for advice.

Maybe I don't really have an airplane

In the January 2013 issue of EAA's Sport Aviation magazine, Budd Davisson wrote a really nice piece about my struggle to build the RV-7A.



But in the process, a picture of the wrong airplane slipped through (I failed to catch it when Budd sent me a list of pictures they were considering for the article) and, instead, a picture of Gary Speketer's very nice RV-10 ran instead.

In this week's February issue, the problem was rectified by publishing yet another picture of Gary's airplane.



It's a good issue, though, as usual. Find it here. Just select February 2013.

Preventing RV intersection fairing calamity

A few days ago, I posted this picture:

The lower intersection fairing -- the back half -- on the right side had ripped away from the wheel pant fairing. It was a fairly violent destruction because further inspection revealed it didn't rip off along the bonded portion -- that is: a delamination -- it ripped clean across the fairing (these are the fairings sold by Cleaveland Tools).

What caused it? My RV friend, Ted Chang, figured it out and it makes perfect sense. The rear half sits up slightly from front half (it's pushed out a little by the shape of the gear leg fairing) and the 170 mph breeze caught it and ripped it. That makes perfect sense, though I'm surprised it didn't happen on the left side first because that side was set up worse than the right side.

See, the problem is you can't secure the fairing to the gear leg fairing. I'd actually put a nutplate in the gear leg fairing to screw the intersection fairing down to keep this from happening. But then I realized that the gear leg fairing needs to move inside the intersection fairing because the gear leg fairing is clamped at the top of the gear leg and with the flex of the leg on takeoffs and landings, attaching it at the bottom puts pressure on the top. So the clamp would either break the fairing or -- more likely -- it would pull down and chafe against the gear leg. The gear leg fairing has to be allowed to move.

What to do? Ted provided the perfect solution with this drawing he sent me on Facebook.

His "slot" will hold the front and back together.

So I've attached the wheel pants together, put some packing tape along the inside of the front part of the fairing, and laid up several layers of fiberglass.

When the epoxy cures (it cured enough to allow me to take the front half of the wheelpant off), I'll trim the "clip" (basically, a beveled edge, similar to how the wheelpants are held together) to about 1/4 to 1/2 inches. I don't think I'll need to do the same thing to the top of the fairing because (a) it mates much better as is and (b) the top of the fairing -- because it's shorter -- is much more rigid than the bottom.

RV crash cause determined: Bird avoidance

The National Transportation has released a probable cause of an accident that killed Randolph Flores of Palominas, Arizona in Jordan, UT in September 2011.

According to the NTSB, the RV-6A pilot was probably trying to avoid birds when he entered the traffic pattern to land.

While approaching the airport at the conclusion of a 4-hour flight, the pilot announced his intention over the common traffic frequency to join the traffic pattern. A short time later, an undiscernible distress transmission was made over the frequency. A few seconds later, the airplane was observed spiraling to the ground. Global positioning system data recovered from the airplane revealed that it was traveling at an appropriate airspeed for entry into the downwind leg of the traffic pattern with a sufficient margin above the stall speed to maintain flight. It then made an abrupt left turn, resulting in a spiral dive, which progressed into a spin. A postaccident examination of the airframe and engine revealed no evidence of mechanical malfunctions or failures that would have precluded normal operation.

No evidence of a bird-strike was found, and review of radar data did not reveal the presence of other aircraft in the vicinity just prior to the accident. However, radar data did reveal that the airplane passed through a cluster of primary targets (with no altitude information) at the time of the accident. Such primary targets could potentially be radar system anomalies, thermal air currents, or bird reflections. According to a bird mitigation specialist, large birds, or flocks of smaller birds, are often present at that time of year, and such birds typically fly circling patterns in thermal air currents at traffic pattern altitudes.

The pilot’s abrupt maneuver during the approach was consistent with an avoidance maneuver. The maneuver, which was calculated to be a 65-degree angle of bank to the left, most likely placed the airplane into an accelerated stall condition, which developed into a spin.

The airplane was loaded toward its aft center of gravity limit, which could have increased its pitch sensitivity, thereby exacerbating the turn. A successful recovery from an unintentional stall-spin at pattern altitude is extremely unlikely.

This crash was particularly noteworthy at the time because it almost hit an elementary school.

This is a good time to consider stalls and load factor:

An airplane's little mysteries

Now that I've gotten the Reiff preheater system installed, I went flying yesterday even though the temperature was -12C. I wanted to do some cold weather testing and find out how cold it can get before the pilot of N614EF needs to land and warm up.

I also wanted to see if changing a configuration setting on the Garmin 296 would fix the problem I'm having with my TruTrack Digiflight (single-axis). It doesn't want to follow the Garmin flight plan, even though it's getting solid data. Bottom line: It didn't.

I also wanted to do some TAS checking and found that at 5,000 feet yesterday, I was getting about 150 knots (173 mph) at about 65-70% power.

After I landed, I noticed this...

The rear part of the lower, right-side intersection fairing ripped off. I'm not exactly sure why. Before bonding them to the wheelpants, the intersection fairing was screwed into place after applying epoxy.

I did notice recently that the rear seamline had started to split. I think the gear leg fairing was being pushed into it and so it was acting like a putty knife. I'm not sure that accounts for the ripping off the fairing. I did, as you can see, split the wheel pants along the seam, but the rear part of the intersection fairing was not sitting proud and, thus, exposed to the airstream. Ironically, the left side intersection fairing is sitting in that fashion.

It's -6 (F) this morning, so I'm going to pull everything off and bring it home to a warm house for evaluation.

The day EAA put a warbirds owner in his place

Over on the EAA forums (which are good,by the way), the monthly "we want the EAA the way it used to be thread) had broken out again, as it usually does every month when Sport Aviation arrives in the mail and every single article doesn't appeal to some member.

But, hey, can we get a little love for EAA over here. And some for Jack Pelton, the interim president.

A warbird owner has been rebuffed by EAA in his attempt to have EAA pay him to bring his plane to Oshkosh, a perfectly abysmal precedent and the fastest possible way to ruin AirVenture.

AvWeb has the whole story.

Pelton was commenting on a decision by Fighter Factory President Jerry Yagen to have his exceptionally rare Second World War demonstration aircraft steer clear of the big show this year. Yagen is now lining up dates for his recently completed Mosquito fighter bomber and a new-build version of an Me. 262 jet fighter but he says he won't bring them to Oshkosh unless EAA pays him to do so. Yagen told AVweb he believes other warbird owners feel the same as he does and some will also boycott the show. "Sorry to say that the days of bringing such expensive airplanes all across the countryside for free will most likely not happen again," Yagen said. He said he thinks there has already been a perceptible decrease in the number of warbirds at AirVenture and that it will escalate. He also said he doesn't think AirVenture should pay for all warbirds to attend but that there should be compensation for aircraft like the Mosquito and Me. 262 that will be major drawing cards to the event. Pelton said Yagen's request is not only financially impractical, it would require EAA staff to perform the impossible task of determining which aircraft warrant funding.

We'll get along just fine without you, sir.

Baby, it's cold outside!

When I was renting airplanes, I didn't give two rips about starting an engine in sub-freezing temperatures. It wasn't my engine.

Now that I'm flying my own airplane, and now that I've had to relocate to an unheated hangar, I care. A lot.

So other than a circuit around the pattern prior to moving the airplane from the old hangar to the new one, I haven't flown much, and I don't want to start the engine until it's equipped with a preheating system.

I tried to rig up a cheap one, but you can't find a good functional ceramic heater anymore with a metal shell. All the ones today are plastic shells and they're also tapered and sleek, lousy for screwing on a duct adapter and some ductwork to pipe into the exhaust opening of the cowling for preheat.

After some investigating, I ordered a system from Reiff Preheat Systems. It consists of four bands which, using worm clamps, clamp around each cylinder, and a heated element that is bonded onto the bottom of the oil sump.

Today I set about installing it.

The cylinder bands went on fine, but it's a bit of a struggle to get the system to fit if you have a Lightspeed coil on the top of the engine, as well as a fuel injector spider sitting up there, too. The heating element wire from the #4 cylinder is going to be too short. Drat!

The harness goes along the top of the engine block, which is a problem because of the Lightspeed coils, which I removed for a little elbow room. I'll try to clamp it to the case bolts with offsets and Adel clamps, but it's going to have to take a sharp turn to avoid the coils and, more important, the stainless lines coming off the fuel spider. I'm not crazy about it.

Meanwhile, work progressed on the oil sump. I used paint removing, a scraper, and some stainless steel to remove and prep all the paint on the bottom of the sump.

Then I mixed up the supplied epoxy -- it looks like a JB Weld type of product -- and attached the heater element, the wire from which will snake up the back side along the engine mount, through the baffle and attach to the harness.

Now it has to cure, which is a problem because, well, it's cold. It takes 24-48 hours at 75 degrees and goodness knows how long it'll take at 30 or so degrees in an unheated hangar.

But, it's not as if there isn't more work to do. The wheelpants all need to come off because snow is packed up inside them from taxiing over to the new hangar.

I don't know when I'll fly again.

Underwater escape

Who hasn't had nightmares about this scenario?

What part of hold-short don't you...

Yikes! This could've gone badly...



It's a good reminder not to fixate on your landing point when landing an airplane. Keep scanning, not only for other traffic in the air, but also for the situation on the ground.

Similar to an intersection, I don't trust drivers until I see their wheels stop. I assume everyone is going to blow through the intersection.

Good job by this pilot to avoid disaster, though.

Here's the (almost) accident report.

The cover boy

OK, I'm not really the cover boy. I'm the "Page 102 boy" in the January 2013 edition of Sport Aviation Magazine from the Experimental Aircraft Association.

The quotes aren't exactly the way I said them and one that's wrong slipped through. I didn't say I never missed kids games or events. I missed a lot of them, partly because of the paper route. I regret that immensely.

And the plane that's shown on the third page isn't my plane. I don't know whose plane it is, but thanks for letting us use your picture because it's nicer than mine is. It looks like an RV-10 to me, so I presume it belongs to Gary Speketer, who stopped by to help me hang the engine, and whom I wrote about here.

How plane crashes happen

(Reposted from the day job)

It's not often we hear firsthand the stories of how plane crashes occur, especially the one in Rochester, Minn., last week in which four people on their way home from the Packers-Vikings game in Green Bay, ended up upside down in a crashed plane.

The cemeteries are full of pilots and passengers who tried to land an airplane in bad weather.

But pilot Scott Lebovitz, 23, of Owatonna, and three passengers Daniel Cronk, 36; Alan De Keyrel, 38; and a 9-year-old boy, all from Byron -- suffered only bumps and bruises.

Mr. De Keyrel has written a compelling account of the incident (and provided very interesting pictures) on his company's website:

We descended into the clouds. From that point on, I never saw runway lights or anything on the ground. I recall looking at the altimeter briefly and noticing our slow decent towards the ground. From the time that I actually saw the ground to impact, there was no time to react, grab for the controls or even say anything. I saw the ground for a split second and then “BAM!”, we were hanging upside down.

“Oh my God! Get out of the plane before it explodes!” Scott shouted.

“Cronk, Colin,” I yelled, “are you okay?”

Both responded and I felt a huge sigh of relief. We were all alive! I reached for my seatbelt and quickly unlatched it, crashing to the roof of the plane. It was pitch black. I couldn’t find the door handle. A window popped open during the crash so I crawled through the small opening. Once outside, I realized that I was standing on the wing. I heard Colin say, “How do I get out?” in a scared voice. I leaned through the window opening and said, “Colin, crawl over here!” A few seconds later I saw his legs appear and I pulled him from the wreckage.

Understandably, the writer cautions people not to judge the action of the pilots. In aviation circles, that's an impossible request; it's how other pilots learn. It was a mistake -- a very bad mistake -- to attempt to land in the conditions. As pilots, we always grapple with "Get Home-itis," the tendency to make bad decisions because we just have to get home. We fly in weather in which we shouldn't fly and sometimes things don't turn out as well as they turned out in Rochester, as this tragedy from last year reminds us. Our mistake as pilots when reading stories like this, is thinking that we wouldn't or couldn't make the same mistake; it's an unimaginably easy one to make and quite often we don't realize it until after we've made it and lived.

Hopefully, we only make these sorts of mistakes once. And if we're lucky -- very, very lucky -- we get the opportunity not to make it again.

(h/t: Sasha Aslanian)

Seed catalogs? Who needs 'em to get through winter?

There's a foot of snow on the ground in December in Minnesota, and that has always meant one thing: it's time to think about Oshkosh.

And this new video from the people at St. Cloud State University -- who give you EAA Radio every year -- should help...

Why can't RV builders deal with accidents?

First, I love Van's Air Force. It provides a great service to the RV building community, but the recent crash of an RV-6 provides a typical example of what happens when an RV airplane crashes.

It follows a pattern:

1. Someone posts about an accident.
2. Someone speculates about the cause.
3. Someone says it's disrespectful to the family to discuss the crash.
4. A moderator closes the thread.

It happened with this thread today.

Let's be honest here: For the most part, families don't read Van's Air Force. And this isn't about respect for families. We're afraid to talk about crashes. Period.

This is unique to the aviation community. You don't see the same reaction to car crashes or crimes, for that matter. Only with airplane crashes.

What are we really so afraid of?

Like it or not, this happened, and the discussion surrounding accidents can refocus our building efforts on safety. You don't need a bureaucrats report to do that.



If we're grown up enough to build and fly airplanes, we should be grown up enough to talk about the occasional crash.

The case of the weepy rivet

I've been working on polishing the plane for the last few weeks and have been working on the most difficult part, especially for someone who gets dizzy when flat on my back looking up and back: the underside of the left wing.

I completed the outer half of the bottom of the wing last night and found this when I was ready to move on to the next section...

What with the accompanying wind-swept blue streaks, RV veterans will recognize that immediately -- as I did -- as a fuel tank leak around a rivet. It's not uncommon, but it's disappointing nonetheless, especially since I used a lot of ProSeal (the sealer) on that tank -- almost an entire can, or twice as much as what most people use.

The rivet is along a rib line which just happens to be below the fuel cap opening in the tank, which at least allows me to peer inside and see if anything looks out of whack.

Behold...

That brown spot on the top of the stiffner certainly leads me to believe that something is going on there, but I'm not yet sure what. It's not where the weeping rivet is. The weeping rivet is on a rib line. Also equally perplexing is the color around the rivet head -- brown. Avgas is blue.

So what's next? First, of course, I need to drain the tank and I'm going to try to fix this without taking the tank off the wing. Then I'll poke around at that brown crud to try to figure out what it is and then I'll poke at that rivet head that's actually weeping to see if the ProSeal has broken down there.

I'd like to think throwing some more ProSeal on there (after attempting to cut out, perhaps with an Exacto knife duct-taped to a dowel) would solve the problem. But it's possible the route the fuel is taking is actually coming from the other side of the rib, which is not accessible.

There is the possible fix of using LocTite around the manufactured head and hope it "wicks" up into the area and block fuel, but I would think this is somewhat problematic given gravity and all. I could apply a slight vacuum, but this is a dangerous task because fuel vapors could ignite at the vacuum cleaner I'd use. Not good.

Alternately, I could remove the tank, cut a large access hole in the back baffle of the fuel tank, get in there and slather all sorts of stuff, and then put a removal plate over that hole and seal it tight. Of course, that introduces new possible points of failure.

I could also just try drilling out that rivet and using a long bucking bar to buck a replacement.

We'll see.

Hey, at least it's gotten me out of polishing for a few days.

The Oregon accident

In most accidents involving RVs, I take comfort in being able to figure out a cause and most of the time the cause is pilot judgment. We can and do have control over our aviation fate with constantly refined judgment.

But when it's the aircraft that appears to be the reason for an accident, it is an even more disturbing incident.

Such is the case with the crash of an RV-6 in Oregon, where two men died when the wing apparently separated from the plane.

The Lebanon Express has details here.