By lex, on February 18th, 2009
So, today was the day to travel down south to Brown Field, for to get our second hack at tailwheeling. None of your steep turns and slow flight, all efforts to be concentrated in the landing pattern. On account of the wheel landings that were in it.
Your man Eamonn was as relentlessly upbeat as possible for a second generation son of Ireland. Which is pretty darned upbeat, I can tell you. The counter-intuitive method of shoving the stick forward after touchdown was briefed in no small detail. Because of the superior visibility, I gather. And the augmented rudder authority. When last week it was all about, “Stick back, stick back!”
Your man was all prepared to jump in the back after your host had strapped in. Before reconsidering the need for someone to hand prop the machine. Without which we were going nowheres, like.
It’s nothing like an effort to hand prop a 65-HP engine, especially when your own contribution is to sit there in the cockpit and wait for it to catch. Hizzoner bundled in, and it was off to the hold short we went.
But there, alas, the left magneto proved insufficient to the task all by its lonesome. Dropping 200 RPM and running rough, against a book requirement limiting RPM drops to less than 125 RPM.
It may be better to die than look bad, but it’s hard to look very good in a 1947 Bellanca Champ, which factors into the fly/no-fly calculus. And anyways, I’ve always thought it better to be on the ground, wishing I was in the air, than in the air, wishing I was on the ground.
So we taxied back and shut her down.
Yeah. It was like that.*
These things, they come in threes.
We’re trying again on Friday.
** 09-01-2018 Original link gone; no replacement found (Missed Flight – 02-15-2009 Nneptunuslex.com) – Ed.
