n5lp
fugio ergo sum
Most of the posts from folks with flying RVs tend to be about how much fun they are to fly, how efficient, how wonderful they are for travel and blah blah. Well, yeh, that stuff is true, but not all is peaches and cream.
It is true that some people actually like building these things, not me, and maybe those same people like working on them, again not me. About three months before the condition inspection I start dreading it. My airplane is in its tenth year of flying and most of the issues I have found have been discovered during normal maintenance, like during tire changes, while washing, or just by being intimately familiar with the airplane and noticing changes. Still, it is required and I have found some problems during these inspections.
The Carlsbad climate is warm and I have tried to do the inspections in cooler months. This year, circumstances pushed the inspection to August, not a cool month. My inspection facility is an uninsulated, dirty, tee-hangar with a west facing door. I try to work mostly in the mornings but it is still pretty miserable doing a lot of the work, especially contorting around in the cockpit, removing panels and cramming myself back in the baggage compartment and going upside down to get under the instrument panel all the while with pools of sweat dripping off my face.
I finished last Sunday and later in the day decided to take a dusk flight. With everything clean and tuned and with the yearly tire inflation done, the airplane just seemed to taxi and fly smoother, you know like how a newly waxed car runs better.
I climbed out in smooth air over Carlsbad as the lights on the softball fields were coming on, the players appearing as crawling ants on the diamonds. We didn't get the forecasted thunderstorms, but there they were in the distance with the flashing light show. The pedestrian lights lining the river were reflecting on the water and there were a few boats moving along between the bank-defining lines of light.
I flew on north of Carlsbad toward the big sink hole, now around 400 feet wide, which I hadn't been able to see in over two weeks, in fact no one has seen it who doesn't have access to an airplane. By the time I got up there I could just make it out in the deepening dusk.
Heading back to the airport the lights of the nearby towns were emerging from the sea of darkness, evoking for me one of my most memorable flights, back in about 1967, when I had had my private license for one day and made a night formation flight with the examiner from the day before in the other airplane. It was the first time I got to see just how stunningly beautiful a night flight over the desert can be with the towns showing up over a hundred miles away.
The wind for landing on runway 8 was going to be about 10 knots, 30 degrees off the nose. The downwind leg is flown facing the Guadalupe Mountains and NO lights at all. I am making a lot of references to the attitude indicator as that is the only horizon I have, although the weather is clear and a hundred. Since I don't have recent night experience and tend to botch the landings when that is the case, I decide to do a rare-for-me wheel landing using the glassy water technique of just setting up a very slow rate of descent until touching, a neat option of the tailwheel configuration.
On short final I have power on in a slip and am facing back to the east now as a huge orange moon just starts peeking out from the clouds on the horizon. Lower, lower, then squeak on the upwind tire, then squeak on the downwind tire then hold it straight as the tail settles. As I turn off the runway I pop the tip-up canopy into the vent position, taxi to the hangar, shut off all the lights and the engine then sit for a while in the darkness.
Yes, the annuals are pretty miserable and I hope I get to keep doing them for many years!
It is true that some people actually like building these things, not me, and maybe those same people like working on them, again not me. About three months before the condition inspection I start dreading it. My airplane is in its tenth year of flying and most of the issues I have found have been discovered during normal maintenance, like during tire changes, while washing, or just by being intimately familiar with the airplane and noticing changes. Still, it is required and I have found some problems during these inspections.
The Carlsbad climate is warm and I have tried to do the inspections in cooler months. This year, circumstances pushed the inspection to August, not a cool month. My inspection facility is an uninsulated, dirty, tee-hangar with a west facing door. I try to work mostly in the mornings but it is still pretty miserable doing a lot of the work, especially contorting around in the cockpit, removing panels and cramming myself back in the baggage compartment and going upside down to get under the instrument panel all the while with pools of sweat dripping off my face.
I finished last Sunday and later in the day decided to take a dusk flight. With everything clean and tuned and with the yearly tire inflation done, the airplane just seemed to taxi and fly smoother, you know like how a newly waxed car runs better.
I climbed out in smooth air over Carlsbad as the lights on the softball fields were coming on, the players appearing as crawling ants on the diamonds. We didn't get the forecasted thunderstorms, but there they were in the distance with the flashing light show. The pedestrian lights lining the river were reflecting on the water and there were a few boats moving along between the bank-defining lines of light.
I flew on north of Carlsbad toward the big sink hole, now around 400 feet wide, which I hadn't been able to see in over two weeks, in fact no one has seen it who doesn't have access to an airplane. By the time I got up there I could just make it out in the deepening dusk.
Heading back to the airport the lights of the nearby towns were emerging from the sea of darkness, evoking for me one of my most memorable flights, back in about 1967, when I had had my private license for one day and made a night formation flight with the examiner from the day before in the other airplane. It was the first time I got to see just how stunningly beautiful a night flight over the desert can be with the towns showing up over a hundred miles away.
The wind for landing on runway 8 was going to be about 10 knots, 30 degrees off the nose. The downwind leg is flown facing the Guadalupe Mountains and NO lights at all. I am making a lot of references to the attitude indicator as that is the only horizon I have, although the weather is clear and a hundred. Since I don't have recent night experience and tend to botch the landings when that is the case, I decide to do a rare-for-me wheel landing using the glassy water technique of just setting up a very slow rate of descent until touching, a neat option of the tailwheel configuration.
On short final I have power on in a slip and am facing back to the east now as a huge orange moon just starts peeking out from the clouds on the horizon. Lower, lower, then squeak on the upwind tire, then squeak on the downwind tire then hold it straight as the tail settles. As I turn off the runway I pop the tip-up canopy into the vent position, taxi to the hangar, shut off all the lights and the engine then sit for a while in the darkness.
Yes, the annuals are pretty miserable and I hope I get to keep doing them for many years!
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