Pictures of 446RV
On the first day of the new year (1-1-11) a friend of mine agreed to fly me in his Ercoupe down to
Northwest Regional Airport (52F) which is just about a mile away from the Texas Motor Speedway outside of Ft. Worth where I was having my RV9A painted. The painter is
GLO aircraft painters. They had called on Wednesday the 29th to tell me my plane was finished and ready to be picked up after having it for about 3 weeks (I flew it down on Dec 3rd).
So Jim and I took off in his ErCoupe around 8:00 am Saturday morning to go pick it up. It was a very cold morning Saturday. The outside air temp gauge showed around 10 deg F when we took off. We had a pretty good North tailwind pushing us along in the Ercoupe so we got there pretty fast showing about 145 MPH ground speed. Grady O'Neal, the owner of GLO and painter of airplanes, met us there and opened the doors to reveal 446RV fully painted.
Well, I was stunned. What a gorgeous plane! I spent the next hour to hour and a half examining every inch of the airplane. I had heard stories of guys taking off to fly their newly painted airplane home only to have an off field forced landing because some component was not reconfigured correctly when the plane was put back together. No worries here however. Grady and his crew do a fantastic job. They pay attention to every detail and make sure everything is exactly the way it was when it came into the shop.
After Jim and I had a quick bite to eat and filled up both airplanes at the pump we took off for home. Although I had done a very thorough critical examination of the airplane and found absolutely nothing out of place I was still nervous about taking off. It was kind of like the first flight all over again. Of course all of my nervousness proved to be totally undeserved. I took off and the airplane flew just as fantastically as it had before the paint. In fact, as Grady had told me, it seemed to fly just a bit faster. All those nice shiny slick surfaces had to be giving me a couple more miles per hour in speed. It sure felt faster.
This plane is a blast to fly. It climbs like a rocket, it has speed to spare (only limited by how much money I want to spend on fuel to go fast), it maneuvers by just thinking about turning, climbing, descending. I cannot say enough about how much fun this plane is to fly.
So, heading back home, the North wind is now a head wind. I climbed up to 6500' (at about 2000 FPM) once clear of the DFW class B airspace; set up the autopilot to get me headed home; leaned out to about 30-35 deg lean of peak and trimmed out for a cruise speed of just around 145-150 MPH. All of this while seeing a head wind of about 12-15 MPH. Oh yes, and all of this while burning right at 7.0 GPH. Did I already say what a blast this plane is to fly?
After 1.2 hours I found myself setting up for approach at
Thompson (53OK). I have never been comfortable doing low passes in the past but I could not pass it up this time. I setup for a low pass over the runway, came straight in on 35 for the low pass. Mary (my wife) was waiting outside the hangar along with others around the airport as I flew by showing about 165 MPH on the True Airspeed Indicator. Man is this plane fun!
I came around on downwind and made an uneventful approach with a slick soft landing on our grass runway that was a pretty as you please. I think this airplane really could land itself.
After 5 years, 1 month and 3 days of building I saw my first flight on July 20, 2010. I flew off my 40 hours of Phase I flying between July 20th and October 1st. The 41st hour saw me flying my new airplane to LOE in
Weatherford, OK (KOJA) on October 1, 2010. Now on 1/1/11 I picked up my newly painted airplane.
Life is Good!
Keep bucking those rivets because it will very much be worth it one day!