Sunday, May 12, 2013

May 12, 2013 Spring is Here! As in the last blog entry, I haven’t updated it for a long while, November of 2012. Not much has happened mainly because this year we have seen a very long-g-g winter. Two weeks ago, we had cold and several inches of blowing snow. But apparently the weather gods felt embarrassed by that and immediately afterward brought us some warmth and better weather. We even had one short afternoon with the temperature flirted with the 80’s. It’s Sunday morning, the current temp is 38 degrees, forecast to be in the 50’s, so a little cool. I’m on my way to church and will probably go out to the airport this afternoon, if I don’t watch the final round of the Players’ Golf Championship. I heard from Richard by e-mail a couple of days ago, and he’s also getting ramped up with flying again. He got his Sport Pilot License recently and flew for the first time so far this year, so all of us are slowly retreating from our winter hibernation and cautiously peeking toward the skies. We talked about what has to be done to the JW. I have been to the airport twice this spring, once to remove the battery and bring it home to attempt to charge it and see what condition it’s in, and also to put some foam hand grips on the control bar. The battery turned out to be pretty much toast. Behaved like a brick; wouldn’t take a charge at all. Richard speculated that because it was in the plane all winter unheated, it probably froze and that spells death to batteries. It was my fault; Bob has warned me to take the battery out and bring it home for that very reason, but I never got around to it. It was in the plane when I bought it, so no telling how old it was, so I console myself with the thought that it was probably at the end of its life anyway. Fortunately it is a standard item at Walmart, not too expensive, and I got a replacement this past week and did the initiation stuff according to the instructions, so we’ll see how that works. I think I’ll take it out to the airport this afternoon and try to get as much as possible ready to fly. I don’t think there’s anything that is preventing me from taking it around the patch a couple of times. I need to do that soon just to confirm that I can do it. There are times when I feel incapable and even anxious of actually flying the JW. But there are other times I feel an exhilaration at the thought of the screaming engine noise and 2-cycle hot-oil smell and bumping and grinding down the runway to stagger into the air, then the sudden pivoting up as it frees itself from the ground, trying to figure out the climb attitude, the relative calm of flying at pattern altitude, then the realization that I should actually attempt a landing, the turn onto final, the pulling back of the control bar to my gut and watching the ground rush up to meet me, then the push-out to flatten the attitude and bleed off speed, then finally touchdown, hopefully in one piece. And maybe full power and around again, if I feel good about the previous circuit. But no more than two times around; don’t know how much fuel I have to work with. My plan is to fly it once or twice around the pattern the first time. The fuel level is probably at only about 1/3 full, but that’s OK for just a couple of patterns. Then when that is accomplished, I want to determine the consumption rate by filling the fuel tank to capacity and flying an hour, maybe doing mostly touch and go’s. That would have the dual purpose of improving my WSC flying skills, and also seeing how much fuel is consumed during that period. I have no idea what the consumption rate is, whether 1.5 GPH, 2.5 GPH, or what. With only a 5-gallon tank, and considering a reasonable safety margin, it’s critically important to know the fuel consumption rate. So that’s the plan. But there are a few things to do before that. I need to get the JW set up, get the engine running smoothly and reliably, make sure everything is tight and secure, and figure out how to deploy the wing more easily than it has been to date. So I’m looking forward to blue skies, warmer weather, and light winds.

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