Thursday, May 24, 2012 My First Jetwing Flight

This is a red-letter day. I have decided to go fly the Jetwing. The plane has been in the hanger for a couple of weeks now, and I haven’t been out there since. Sandra agreed to go with me to film the event (and pick up the pieces, if necessary). After rolling the Jetwing out of the hanger, I discovered that with the wing attached I could not fully deploy the wing. I could attach the kingpost after-cable, but the main tensioner cable would not pull back far enough to attach it to the turnbuckle.
Finally, I detached the wing and was able to get the tension on. But this is a potential problem, because my entire thinking was that I wanted to deploy the wing keeping it attached to the carriage, and then just raise the wing into flying position.
But that is a project for later. I did the pre-flight check, started the engine, and taxied to takeoff position. The wing was light and out of the west, which was the direction I preferred. If I was to take off the other direction, there were power lines that in a worse-case scenario could come into play. Taking off to the west was over fields and unpopulated areas.
I decided that now was the time, and gave the foot-feed full power. The Jetwing responded and we were rolling. The Jetwing left the ground but it seemed sluggish. Although I thought I was giving it full power, I reached down and gave the hand throttle a push to make sure it was getting full power, and doing so the Jetwing started to skew from side to side as I had only one hand on the control bar. Why couldn’t I get full power by using the foot feed and/or the hand throttle? The aircraft was mushing dangerously toward a stall, or may have actually been in a stall, when I reached down again to the hand throttle and discovered it had retreated to maybe half-position. Obviously I had much less than takeoff power, and the plane was headed perpendicular to the runway toward the weeds. I had the bar full forward, but as I saw the takeoff had failed, I pulled the bar back to regain some airspeed and then as the Jetwing approached the ground, I pushed it back out and landed it gracefully in the weeds alongside the runway. The landing was the only positive thing this day, and what was positive was that I hadn’t damaged the Jetwing. What an ignominious first flight! I taxied back to the hanger and put the Jetwing away, discouraged with the outcome of the day.
After I arrived home, I called Larry and discussed my experience. I told him my suspicion that because partially my height, being a little taller than Larry who had used the foot feed without any problem, and that my right ankle was the one that had been injured in the crash in 2009, maybe I couldn’t use the foot-feed effectively. He agreed that that might have been an issue, and also that because I was heavier than him, that I maybe should keep the control bar at neutral longer before pushing it out to allow for more speed on the ground run before liftoff.
That all sounded right to me, so I began planning for the next step.