Off relatively early for to travel to Gillespie Airfield in East County, just for the trek of it. A lady there having a 1971 Cessna 177RG Cardinal all broke down for annual inspection, and kindly offering her services through the CFO organization to let us peek under the hood like. See where the pixies live.
I’ve no aversion to systems knowledge and line diagrams per se, and am full well willing to do it the diligent on plane operator handbooks. It’s just that, in a relatively simple “complex” aircraft like the Cardinal, there are very few things that can go wrong in flight which one can meaningfully intervene in. There’s always the odds of mere piloting buffoonery, such as failure to maintain safe flying speed, running out of fuel or neglecting to lower the rollers, but I’d have no one to blame for that but myself. For mechanical failures, the emergency checklist is mercifully abbreviated: If the only engine catches fire, then off goes the fuel selector, the spinner stops and you may prepare for your “off airport landing”, which is the optimistic euphemism in use for a controlled crash somewhere within the glide arc. If the spinner stops of its own accord, good luck getting her going again. Off airport landing to follow. If the prop fails, it’s probably due to an oil leak, and it uses engine oil, so after an interval of bone jarring vibrations as the prop tears herself to shreds the engine stops and, well: You get the picture. If the landing gear decide to play the fool and fail to come locked, you may pump a while at the emergency handle and hope for the best. That failing, it’s an “on airfield” landing that will all too likely end poorly.
The long and short of it is that there are very simple failure modes which are both irrecoverable and inaccessible from the cockpit. I prefer to believe in pixies behind the firewall, and below the floorboards. Kindly beings who keep the engine stoked, the spinner turning and the rollers in their proper places, up or down as commanded. Souls that can be propitiated. Opening her up and looking inside only reveals the machinery, not the ghost in the machine.
I’m all about the ghosts.
Herself also is the proud owner of a new (to her) Steen Skybolt, and you’d have laughed to see me try and feign insouciance. Oh, an aerobatic, open cockpit taildragger? Hum. You see them everywhere.
A brief stop, having missed breakfast, at a local hole in the wall for a bacon, egg and cheese burrito with salsa. If only for the nourishment that was in it. Was fashed nearly to tears to discover after arriving at Montgomery Field that the cooks had unilaterally decided that a bean and cheese burrito was more nearly the thing, the obdurate, contumelious b*stards. After that, ’twas a solitary dogfighting hop with a nearly monoglot Guatemalan plastic surgeon and his brother. The former flew quite well, considering he’d prolly caught no more than one word in three of my preflight brief, and something less than that once airborne.
It was a perfect day to fly, really. The sky an inverted blue bowl wholly innocent of clouds, ignorant of the very notion of clouds. The winds gently down the runway, the ocean flat, arrayed in orderly ranks of white, green and blue starting from the beach and heading to sea. One hundred miles of visibility.
What with other things in the way, I’ve flown too little in recent weeks. Tomorrow I hope to head up to Warner Springs in a Beech Debonair and then maybe do a bit of soaring.
That should charge me right back up.
What a fun read.
Pixies are indeed good and (usually) kindly beings -believe in them myself I do. As long as they throw the ball back into the fairway after hitting some wood.
Cap’n Lex,
“I prefer to believe in pixies behind the firewall, and below the floorboards. Kindly beings who keep the engine stoked….”
I’m a believer, especially after an epic C150 adventure this summer, one leg of which involved crossing a stretch of rather cold water.
Oh, we had a raft aboard of course, my beloved and I. We’d flown many hours in this aircraft over the preceding few days, many hours of opportunity for the engine to communicate some incipient distress, and everything seemed to be working just fine. I figured there would be twenty minutes when, if the engine quit, we’d have been unable to glide to either shore. Really, how unlucky would we have to be for the engine to quit within those particular twenty minutes?
Better not to contemplate the odds, if we had turned out that unlucky, of swimming free from an aircraft most likely inverted, after those fixed wheels dug into the water; of deploying the raft, climbing in, and keeping warm enough until help arrived. Anyway, the mill churned on until dry ground thoughtfully appeared underneath us, and all the way to an on-airport landing.
Thanks for the wonderful flying posts.
Lifties live in the daytime and are good pixies as they keep your aircrate aloft. Gwarkies live in the night and steal your lift. Bad things happen at night 5.389567 times more than during day. Takes more power at night cuz the gwarkies are hanging all over the wings n things.
Hauled the Lance outta the hangar on Thursday and flew to Greenville SC. Bee-yuti-full day. Clear, light winds, and the old girl was humming. Passing Shaw had a couple Vipers go zorching by – do they ever fly without externals? then Cola-Town (CAE) then to downtown Greenville downtown Cleared to land with a G-4 sitting on the numbers with tower telling me he’s rolling. No he ain’t. yes he will be. OK, but he ain’t right now. At 300 ft I tell tower I’m off the left side for a go-around. Finally the guy gets going without even a “pardon me”. Guess my gas bill doesn’t enter into his cost-of-flight calculation.
I’m interested as to why a Cardinal? Figured a low wing guy all his life would like looking up and out. But then never having sat in one maybe the wing is afar enough aft so as not to impede that upward/outward scan?
You, feigning insouciance? The mere thought makes me LOL! Drooling a large puddle perhaps, but, not insouciance.
As a caveat to a great blog post; I had the privilege to witness the Blue Angels today at the Wings over Houston airshow and it was stunning to say the least. The talent those men/women have for flying is truly a sight to behold. Lex what a time you must have had on the stick of that great aircraft.
Lex what a time you must have had on the stick of that great aircraft.
When the Blue Angels visited my locale this fall, I attended with my mother. 10 minutes into the show, she turned to me and exclaimed with genuine astonishment, “How do they do it?! I mean how, do they fly like that and then just walk away when their careers are over… How do they not lose their minds?!”
I think that was her way of saying that it must be the most indescribable thrill to fly such planes. I agree, and I honestly can’t imagine what it’s like to be told “No more.” I’m no pilot, but it’s grown on me and when I see those jets flying overhead on the freeway when I go past the base, I want to leap through the roof of my car and jump in the back seat. It’s almost magnetic–and I’ve only got my imagination drawing me in!
List of phrases never to say in an accident investigation: “I prefer to believe in pixies behind the firewall…”
RE: Vipers without externals- Probably the only ones to do so consistently would be the ones at Fallon for Adversary/TopGun purposes. Love the paint jobs and the unconfirmed rumors of the love/hate relationship that the Nellis Viperdriver fraternity feels toward them. As in “They get to tear around in minimal drag configuration all the time in “OUR” airplanes and fight-fight-fight.” It’s better than football IMHO.
It must be awful on the ground, with the nose-wheel all the way aft like that.
I always hated the guys in our community (2 in particular – -ex P3 folks) who insisted you know every nut and bolt on the aircraft. I only wasted my very limited set of brain cells on stuff that made a difference.
On one of my last NATOPS tests at the RAG, the question was “When the ‘oil low’ warning comes on, how much oil is left in the system.” My answer, “It doesn’t matter, I have to get out the book and do the ‘oil low’ procedures.” NATOPS boy didn’t like that and ran me up the flagpole. Skipper laughed and said to him “Well, he’s right you know. Doesn’t matter what is in the tank, you have to do the procedures if the light is on.”
Win.
Nose/
I see you’re the kinda guy who doesn’t feel the need to take the watch apart to tell people what time it is….Saayy…I LIKE you, you fur bearin’ critter!
Heehee. Yup, I like your mind!
Since we are parking one of our airframes on Tuesday this week due to a BER (Beyond Economic Repair) analysis that confirms the C-check is not justified, I have been tasked with finding an airframe (s) for a six month lease as a “bridge” to provide capacity unitl our 75 ton capacity three engine widebody comes on-line in mid 2010.
I have located four airframes currently parked in Airzona, all bundled up in storage mode. We will inspect the records, inspect the airframes and select two of the four as finalists.
The monthly lease pays for the airframe, landing gear and avionics. Rotables, spares inventory, differences training, routine maintenance and manual revisons are our cost. We will pay a “per hour rate” for each engine on wing plus insurance. All in, it is like leasing a rental car from Hertz with for about a $125,000/month for ownership, engine hours and insurance.
My part of the deal, after we agree to acquire the airplanes is to generate $1.0 million a month revenue per airframe for six months. This means I need to fly each airplane about 100 hours a month in revenue service.
Anybody with an eye for business or incremental revenue flight operations (scheduled or adhoc) is welcome to point out places that will be looking for 45 ton long range intercontinental airlift.
I think they’re looking to move about 45 tons of paper ballots from Caracas to someplace to called Defacto, Honduras. Don’t know if that qualifies as long range or not, haven’t heard anything about Honduras in a while. They’re premarked, so there should be trouble at the Defacto Airport.
Potosi,
I’m sure there is a Chavista carrier more likely to provide lift. Sorry, but not our cup of tea.
http://gc.kls2.com/cgi-bin/gc?PATH=CCS-SAP&RANGE=&PATH-COLOR=&PATH-UNITS=mi&PATH-MINIMUM=&SPEED-GROUND=425&SPEED-UNITS=kts&RANGE-STYLE=best&RANGE-COLOR=&MAP-STYLE=
Guatemalan plastic surgeon? Sureee. That’s just the cover for a cia ex-pat.