Cross Country, solo
The first XC would be to Bridgeport (1F9) on Aug 19. There are no nav aids, but it was straight out US380. The field should be visible on the near side of the lake where the bridge crosses it. I did all the flight planning, got up early and got my weather briefing and filed the flight plan. Dave signed it all off and I took off. My only apprehensions were landing at a strange field and restarting the engine without embarrassing myself.
I did my business and went out and pumped the tanks as full as they would go. I took a picture of the Mouse at the pumps which becomes the first of the series of pictures that record the places the Mouse has been. Now comes the restart of a hot engine.
Amazing! It started right up. I taxied out and took off. Now all I had to do was keep US380 off my left wing. I turned east from the crosswind leg and climbed to 3500'. Soon, I could see the airport at Denton, the midpoint. As I got east of Denton, I noticed a 727 with gear and flaps down descending through my altitude pass about 2 miles in front of me. This ain't good! About that time, I noticed a Fokker cargo plane just below me that would also pass in front of me. What gives?
They are flying long straight in approaches to Alliance airport, just north of Fort Worth. After making sure there were no others out there, I quickly descended to 2500 for the rest of the flight.
We are in the middle of one of the hottest summers in Dallas history. The temperature reaches upper 90s by noon every day. The only way to fly is late evening or be on the ground by late morning. These little birds do not have air conditioners! On Aug 22, we plan my second excursion into class B airspace, a night flight to Redbird airport on the south side of Dallas.
As usual, Dave was running late. I got the Mouse out and ran the pre-flight and then taxied down to Dave's. When Dave was finally ready, I couldn't get it started again. I nearly ran the battery down before it finally fired up. Everything seemed normal during taxi and pre-takeoff. We climbed out, got the RBD weather and contacted FTW approach. They gave us a squawk code, altitude and heading and handed us off to Addison tower. Addison gave us a new heading, right over the center of the airport and then a heading that would take us directly over Love field.
As we were passing over Addison, the tower asked us if we were reading the radar interrogation. There is a light on the transponder that flashes each time a radar interrogates the transponder. The light was not blinking at all. Normally, it would be flashing continuously. We could hear ADS tower, but they were not reading us at all! We quickly determined that the alternator had gone off line and we were rapidly running the battery down. Dave started trying every circuit breaker on the panel while I switched off everything except one com and the nav lights (the red/green wingtip lights). That took enough load off the battery that I could transmit again. I told ADS that we were aborting the RBD run and returning to Aero Country.
Other than communication, loss of electrical is not a serious problem. The engine runs on magnetos, so it will get you where you want to go without a battery. Only the turn coordinator in the primary flight instruments needs electricity. You are required to have a working flashlight for a night flight (I have 2 in my flight bag on every flight, along with spare batteries). The only worry was if we could key the mike 5 times at Aero Country to turn on the runway lights. I tried about 2 miles out and the lights came on.
Dave is still futzing around the panel as I fly the pattern. As I turn on final, he says "*@&%", which I didn't need to hear right then. He had found a circuit breaker on the far right of the panel that was popped. Guess what circuit breaker it was? That's right, the alternator!. Now, I had a landing light, but not enough time to bring up the panel lights or radios. The landing was atrocious, but no harm done.
Dave went down the next morning and put the battery charger on it, but that evening it was still dead. Multiple deep discharges had done the battery in. I picked up a new battery at Tex-Air and took it out to be charged. On the 28th, we were going to do the RBD flight again so we took the new battery down to install. I had noticed a crack in the propeller spinner 2 flights earlier and asked Dave to check it. As I was frantically hooking up the battery in the darkness, Dave came up and said "Take your time, we aren't going anywhere.". Two of the 6 nut plates holding the spinner to the backing plate had broken loose from the back plate.
Now, I needed a new spinner. The next morning, I put out a call on the Musketeer message board for spinners. I called Tulsair and they had one, about $300 plus shipping. I placed the order and about an hour later got a call from a Sam Linz in Florida. It seems that the engine Johnny put in the bird came off Sam's Musketeer and he still had the spinner. He would ship it to me for $100 plus shipping. You Bet! I called Tulsair and cancelled the order. Sam's care package would arrive Friday. I had it shipped to the office as UPS home delivery could be a major headache.
I was a pallbearer at the funeral of my best friend's mother in law Friday. I had just gotten back when Patrick called and said the box had been delivered to the office. I immediately called and thanked Sam and then called Dave to let him know I/we would be installing the spinner on Saturday.
Saturday morning, I ran over to the office, grabbed the box out of Patrick's office and headed for the airport. About halfway there, the thought occurred to me: what if this one is brown or green or some other color that will swear at our mouse?
I got to Dave's hangar about 9:00 and immediately opened the box. Major relief when I found it to be plain aluminum. The old one was white, but more on that later. I went to the hangar where the mouse is, removed the spinner and taxied it back to Dave's. With a lot of advice from the normal selection of old pilots who go through that hangar on any given day and some help from one of the other students removing the prop and help from an old A&P putting it back on, Dave manned the torque wrench after his last lesson of the morning and the job was done by noon.
I pushed it back out of the hangar and gave it a much needed bath. I had been trying to control the bug population of north central Texas by doing lots of ground reference and touch and go's. After the bath, The bird is back to being proud and beautiful. The natural aluminum spinner looks better than the white one, I think. By this time, I am tired and do not have a dry stitch on. Remember, it gets to 100 about noon and it is now 2:00. I put it back in it's hangar and went home to cool off.
This is Labor Day weekend, so Sunday morning, I put 1.6 hours on it killing more bugs at McKinney and make a fuel run to Sherman. I've got all the paperwork for my second cross country signed off for Monday.
This one is to Wood County (3T1). There is no Nav aid close, but I want to try a complex (relatively) VOR flight. Flying to the Quitman VOR will take me about 15 miles north of Wood County and I can monitor the 10degree radial from Sulphur Springs VOR to know when to turn south. Of course, the turn point will be over the east shoreline of Lake Fork, so I will know if my VOR work is right.
I get off about 9:30. The flight is smooth and the VOR intersection comes up right where it is supposed to. I identify Wood County about 7 miles out and fly right over it. It is deserted. No taxiway, no buildings of any kind. The only sign of use is a beat up old plane on a pad by the center of the runway. Well, no stop here, just a touch and go. I land a little long and get really worried that I can't get back up before I hit the trees off the south end, but it makes it. So back to Aero Country. By the time I am over Greenville, I have to pee so bad I can taste it (I've now been in the air over an hour). Nothing I can do about it by myself, the Mouse don't got an autopilot. I fly on. The landing at Aero Country was bad, but I didn't care, just let me at a bathroom!
Trouble in the airplane patch
As you may have noticed, the quality of my landings is deteriorating. I am still doing reasonably well on the larger strips like McKinney and Sherman, but the 3000X40 shoestring at Aero Country is giving me fits and it is getting worse.
On September 7, it is blowing about 12 knots mostly from the west northwest. I decide to do some practice T&Gs anyway. I make the first one (barely) and abort the second one. I make the third one (badly) and try to abort the fourth one. When I hit the throttle, nothing happens. I salvage the landing, what else can I do? But it ain't pretty.
I pulled off the end of the runway and the engine is purring nicely. I do several runups and it responds each time, all the way to full static power. Of course, they couldn't tell that I had tried to abort that last one. I am not a happy camper, so I put the bird to bed and leave a note for Dave to call me.
What I don't know is that several of the hangers-on at the airport had witnessed my efforts and couldn't wait to call Dave and tell him how bad I did. No matter to me, I was going back to dual again until I had my landings under control anyway.
Now begins the most frustrating part of my learning to fly. We diagnose the problem quickly, but getting back in the groove will take forever. I am making my approaches too high. This forces me to drop too quickly on short final to a short strip which makes a smooth flare nearly impossible. The problem is not as noticeable on the longer strips as there is more length to get it down on.
I log about 6 more hours in September and go on vacation to New England the first week of October. Then the weather turns sour for the winter. I made a fuel run September 30 and didn't fly again until Nov 25. I was able to fly a total of 6.7 hours from Oct 1 to Jan 1, which is not good when what you need is practice, practice, practice.
The only good part of this time is that I finally learn a reliable way to restart the engine when it is hot. There is a message group on the net devoted to the Musketeer line and they are an incredible resource on the subject. From them and several other sources, I collect numerous ways to restart fuel injected engines. I analyze all of them for intent and purpose of each step. I discard the steps that seem to be "magic" or superstition and line up those that remain. I now have a picture of what will work. When I try it out, it works well, so that problem is now behind me.
I arrived at the hangar about 9:30 and preflighted and pulled the plane out. Sandra, three teacher/chaperones and a dozen challenged kids arrived about 10. We all walked around the plane and explained to their level what the parts were. Then each kid got to sit in the right seat with headset on for a picture.
After the picture sessions, Dave arrived, the kids piled back in their bus and headed for the end of the field. We fired up and took off past the bus with faces at every window and a few brave ones standing in the wind shadow outside the bus. We made a low pass down the runway and wagged the wings. Then we did a touch and go. As I was climbing out on the crosswind leg we could see the bus leaving the airport. The Redhead reported that night that the kids talked of little else that day.
