Tinworm-wings: Crash landing

Thursday 24 June 2010

Crash landing

Nobody get alarmed, now.
Any landing you walk away from is a good one....even when you plough into a field of crop when your engine fails on take-off, as it did on Monday. The only thing I hurt was my bank balance, and even then it could have been a lot worse.
The take-off was longer than I'd have expected but I put this down to slow wind. The climb was sluggish, so that I checked that I had the throttle all the way out, which I did...but the Dragonfly levelled off at about 100', if that (my vario had chosen this time to fail too!), then started sinking startlingly quickly, so that when I started a quick turn to do a downwind landing onto the field, I wasn't sure I'd pull it off, so straightened up again. But then I was running out of surface. At the end of the field beyond the runway is a deep ditch and if I struck the far bank I would probably break my neck. I couldn't stop short of it and it didn't look like I could flare over it, so I made a very fast decision which makes me proud. Counter-intuitively, I pulled the bar in, increasing my rate of descent, but also raising my speed, creating lift over the wing, so that we leapt the ditch and just made it into the crop beyond.
The crop was thigh-high, so there was no chance of rolling to a halt - the crop acted like an arrester wire; the front wheel hit in hard and the plane slewed sideways, so that the front strut bent dramatically and the trike turned up - its starboard wheel in the air...and I hung from my strap and struggled to release myself, before calling in on the radio that I was ok, seeing Dave Broom's Quik circling above. Baz called me on the mobile - he had seen it all - and assured me that Dave Garrison, who had also seen it from his window, had jumped in a truck and was on his way. Shortly afterwards, he and another pilot arrived to help. Embarrassingly, this is not the first time Dave has rescued me! But as last time, it wasn't my fault - neither bad airmanship nor poor judgement before flight had caused the engine failure.
I got home last night after three days away from home - filthy and exhausted, having camped at Sutton Meadows and at Sywell and after two days of exertion. Tuesday and Wednesday I was up at Sywell, where Paul Dewhurst let me do my own mechanics, sympathetic to the fact that as I am out of work, I really can't afford expensive work on things I CAN do myself; when Ben gets back from France he will do the bits it will need an expert for. (He will put bushes in my widened monopole holes, etc). I took the engine off the trike (with help and advice from Mark) and put it in my van ready to take it down to Paul Bailey. Then I changed the front forks.
But the best bit, the part that makes me feel proud of myself, is that I taught myself to take the sail off, which I did while Stew was gliding Tuesday evening. And he confirmed when he got down that the tubes had sustained no damage. He agreed that only the splayed hang bracket will need replacing.I struggled quite a bit getting the sail back on, punctuated by occasional teasing from Stew (one time champion hang glider and now-instructor), but eventually succeeded after camping beside it, then finishing at about 5a.m., as balloonists inflated their ballon nearby.

I talked to Paul Bailey at lunchtime today and he put the engine failure down to the big end bearing, which he has replaced for free with a more robust one which he uses in his more recently developed engines. I did ask that if the repair didn't cost me a lot, he also fit the quick release hub which is also a recent-ish development and which I have coveted for some time; so now I have one of those too. So, it won't be a cheap crash, but I think my plane will actually be better than before it happened.

I went back to Sutton Meadows with the wing and re-rigged it and put it back in the hangar with Andy (a really nice hang glider pilot who told me about ground handling), then talked to Roger, a glider tug plane pilot, who is an interesting personality. It was gratifying to have my wing safely back on its trolley in its bay before coming home. (there was another pic and more text but the editor kept messing about with its html, so I give up - below is a pic of the wing skeleton)

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Ground handling (how to store an aeroplane at home and get it to the airfield)

A trial flight in a Thruster, when I was 28, c.1991

I have started to learn to fly before...TWICE! First time round I had just graduated and got a job at an aerodrome in Cornwall, where I earned flying hours by fuelling microlights, giving hourly weather reports to the Met office etc. The weather was bad, so there was little flying to be had...and in the end I was paid with broken propellers and bits of crashed fuselage to hang on the wall. The boss was a great bloke called Ian Stokes, who had been a leading light in forming the BMAA and had manufactured Thrusters in the early days . In retirement he moved to The Gambia and became a publican and, shockingly, was murdered this year.

Flying Rogues

ten years on from my first experiences at Moorland Flying School (and now nearly ten years ago) the flying school was under new management and my girlfriend and I booked full courses. We both made good progress initially but never felt we were being moved on and had difficulty pinning the instructor down to signing our logbooks. When another instructor signed himself as P1, we got suspicious, contacted the CAA and were horrified to learn that our instructor did not have a current instructor rating, that we had not been insured and that none of our hours counted towards our licences. We were eventually refunded and the instructors were prosecuted by the CAA.

The very sympathetic CAA investigator spoke to the BMAA on our behalf and my hours have been allowed to count (at the discretion of the school). But in point of fact, I flew way over the minimum number of hours subsequently, so it is really quite academic in the end.

Around 2001 an instructor in Norfolk tried to convince me that if I bought his aeroplane he could teach me at a cut rate, as I'd then be using my own plane. Great idea, I thought, except that it turned out that the aircraft in question had failed a noise test and could not be used from the instructor's field. He later admitted that I would have to learn on his aeroplane at the normal rate. He resisted showing me the paperwork, kept avoiding me and eventually, when it was quite clear I wasn't going to buy without the paperwork, told me to F-off.

So far my experience has been that there are a lot of rogues in flying, which is one reason why I was so very impressed by the professional set-up at Sywell.

by air to Africa

My sister and I were lucky to fly many thousands of miles in the 1960s and '70s in many aircraft types, including BOAC VC-10s, Boeing 707s and even a Nigerian Airways Dakota, as our dad (and later our mum) had teaching posts in Kenya and Nigeria. Those were still the romantic days of flying, when passengers walked across tarmac and up steps, rather than walking down the tubes that have turned passenger flying into a mundane affair. (Mind you, aren't take-offs still incredibly exciting!?)

Back then air hostesses GAVE children the sorts of nick-nacks that their parents have to pay fortunes for from the airline catalogue these days; things like model aeroplanes, keyrings etc. We were also given sweets to help us cope with depressurisation. (And they were hostesses, so nobody give me a hard time)

Mum says that I cracked my first joke when I was small, on a flight out to Kenya, when I said, "Mummy, shouldn't there be a wing on this side of the plane too". Apparently I got her with that one.

At Kano airport I remember standing behind an engine and thinking how hot it still was....and then being told that the engine was cold. The heat was Kano. I got a headache and took several days to aclimatise.

The airport perri-ways at Kano were littered with aircraft that didn't make it, including a burnt-out Mig 15. The Nigerian Airforce flew them and my dad played squash with one of their pilots, Ben, at the Kano Club. I recall a Mig fly-past on my birthday. Was it arranged with Ben over a beer? Was it a pure coincidence?

At Entebbe airport (Uganda) I remember climbing down the steps on to the runway and being encircled by soldiers with machine guns, who then went through all our belongings and confiscated my cherished Swiss Army penknife, purchased on one of numerous European stop-overs. That was in the twitchy time after the Israeli hijacking ...and mum had to stifle my protests.

Before my first flight to Nairobi, as an infant, I was scared stiff. I didn't understand that I wouldn't have to sit astride the fuselage, as I did on my pedalcar! In a funny way, I not only overcame that fear but have come full circle; microlighting is just like sitting on that pedalcar......open to the elements - real flying!