I'm building a plane

Elevator again

It's not difficult to see that fast, high quality work comes from repetition. The second time building this elevator (once I devote time to it and gather a bit of momentum), is easy as pie and superior in every way to the first. The trailing edge ribs and trim tab closing spar are all sanded, fitted and glued. It's looking straighter this time around.

What I really need to do is build two Falcos, and just throw the first one away.

The float sanding of the stabilizer continues at a snail's pace. The spar is a thick, tapering chunk of wood, and it has to have a good millimeter shaved off the aft span. I don't want to even think about sanding the wing. In the monotony of pushing that board back and forth, I fantasize that a CNC milling bit could make successive passes over the surface, perfectly bevelling the spar to match the chord profile. I can only try to hold my own, hand-hewn dimensions to that imaginary accuracy. It makes me wonder how thousands of body shops across the country seem to routinely pop out repaired body panels that are visually perfect, even painted gloss black. If they can do it, I certainly should be able to.

December

My glider sits silently in its trailer up at the gliderport. That's not unusual for this time of year with a line of storms reaching back to the Phillipines advancing toward the West coast. But when there's a break in the clouds, I consider driving out to Tracy to take out the plane. The glider would hardly be worth opening up, but firing up the Cessna between holes in the clouds is tempting. Tempting, but probably stupid- a couple planes have gone down around the area in the past couple weeks, and I can't really imagine flying in the soup that's hung over us lately.

Tonight I made it into the garage and starting gluing trailing edge ribs on the elevator. Christmas has come and gone and it'll be almost a year since made a resolution, rolled that Volkswagen out of the workshop and started building. It's pitiful, really, what I've accomplished in one year. I'd hazard a guess that I'm not even half done with the tail.

But it's not nothing.

November

When the entries are titled as simply months, and when the months skip, you know there isn't a hell of a lot of activity going on. Honestly I haven't been too busy on the Falco lately. I've been trying to get out to fly the Cessna, which has been somewhat successful, and I haven't touched the glider in six months, I'd guess. Demands of work and family have been higher than usual, but tonight I was in there with the little heater blowing weakly, taking the edge off the cold night air outside. (There is seldom frost in Bay Area suburbs, but there is this evening) I was prepping ribs for that second round of framing up the elevator, and from time to time I sand a few thousandths off the stabilizer with the sanding board. Only other thing of note was the day I played hookey last week to go up to Vacaville and have Rusty teach me how to change the oil in the 170. The admiration of 2932D by folks who see a lot of planes always makes me glow, and even with the cowl off that plane garnered one comment after another as it sat between hangars at Nut Tree airport. Rusty pressure washed the engine and noted dozens of little things that he'd eventually tinker with when I brought it to the shop for a longer visit.

Things feel dormant with the winter months bearing down on me, but I've got big dreams. Big ideas about travelling. I have a mind to fly to Oshkosh next summer, and continue on to Vermont to see my parents, returning via Canada. Probably a silly idea with an engine only a couple hundred hours from TBO, but I still dream of it.

September

When I first began taking flight instruction, I started in a Decathalon. (It's a tubby, awkward-looking little plane, tracing its ancestry back to the Aeronca Champ, having more power and aerobatic ability.) My instructor didn't say anything about it being a taildragger, or anything particular about it compared to tricycle gear airplanes, we just got in and started flying. It was only after I returned years later to flying, that getting into a taildragger converted Cessna Aerobat that it suddenly seemed tricky or demanding. And before we went, there was a little ground school, with a diagram of where the center of gravity is with respect to the location of the wheels. It dawned on me that a shopping cart analogy was a good one. You push a shopping cart forward around the store and let go of it, it just keeps going. Push one around backwards and let go, however, and watch that cart whip right around as soon as you let go of it. Since I've been flying the 170, I just think of it that way. If you try it with the shopping cart, you have to make those same twitchy adjustments to the "tail" to keep it going straight, and if it's filled with groceries, it wants to keep swinging out just that much more. I took my whole family up one day. Car seats, diaper bag, everybody piled in there. I figured we were still 200 pounds under gross weight even with full fuel, but damn if that thing wasn't a completely different airplane. That's the chapter I'm in right now- that time after you get your license, where you discover these things, often quite risky things, that you'd never find out during your training.

Like figuring it's okay to take off downwind with full fuel, out of Anguin on a 90 degree afternoon. It was a very light tailwind, and I was flying solo, so I wasn't exactly heavily loaded, but I can tell you now, it wasn't okay. I was looking at the airspeed, flying at best rate of climb, or steepest climb, or whatever I thought would work best, but the trees were still passing under me awfully close. A couple people in the plane with me and I wouldn't be writing this. The irony of it is that I'm only now figuring out how to fly in and out of higher strips, with bigger payloads. And that is exactly what the license allows you to do: fly your friends to new exciting places, but you never really do that when you're in training.

Flying the 170

I've been flying my new old airplane quite a bit, not working on the Falco that much lately. I can feel the season changing from summer to fall, and I predict I'll fly less and hole up in the workshop a lot more as the rains descend on Northern California.

The last time I posted here, I was about to go up to the West Coast Falco Fly-in. I did go. The first day I zipped up there with Dan Dorr, a Southwest pilot who recently completed his Falco. It is a fast airplane, a litle faster than a Bonanza, I'd guess. We didnt' stay long since Dan wanted to get back before dark. We actually left at dusk. It's interesting watching a pilot with that level of experience, someone with his procedures as buttoned up as his are. He looks for an airstrip before he switches fuel tanks, he gets flight following. He is generally concerned about flying at night, and it's not hard to see why, I mean the dude is used to having two engines and a copilot. Approaching Santa Rosa, Dan pointed the nose down and we made our descent at 205 knots groundspeed. The airport was clearly under a marine layer already, so we shot a night ILS approach into there. When you dip into the clouds the wingtip strobes start lighting up the clouds around you, you are genuinely relieved to see the brilliant lights of the runway emerge beneath your nose as you descend out of the clouds.

The next day I drove up to the same airport, an airpark with Larry Black's house right on the field. This time I came up with the whole family. I can't recommend this. I still, (naiively, I suppose) picture hammocks and naps and devouring Micheal Crichton books when I think of vacations, but with a 1.5-year-old and a 3-year-old we are more or less a travelling daycare center. And the delightful combination of spinning propellers and toddlers made this trip that much more nerve-wracking.

We were hardly a part of the event, sneaking out of dinner early to avert tantrums, and showing up for only a couple hours the next day. The Falcos arrrived one after another, returning from a breakfast run to Trinity Center. My wife finally got to fly in a Falco with Larry Black. Sporting a wristband to prevent motion sickness, she was even game for a couple barrel rolls. While we waited, my son Benjamin was hell bent on flying in "the green airplane", so by and by we got a ride in a Piper Turbo Arrow, of all things, which I landed. How random, but that's fate. The pilot also had a gyrocopter, which he said sometimes took to cruising down the convoluted Sacramento River at 10 feet above the water, occasionally sprayed by jet ski rooster tails.

So I've been on vacation this month, fiddling with the Cessna, flying it a lot (I have 12 hours already), moving some stuff into the hangar. I flew it up to Williams, where my glider is, and Rex said "I want to fly it." So we hopped in and I passed him the "nice" headset, keeping the 40 year old David Clark headset for myself, thinking I'm doing him a favor. He looked at me disgustedly and said, "I ain't wearing that thing. C'mon, man, this is flyin'. This is FLYIN', man!" So he fired up the Continental O-300A, the short stacks roaring in our unprotected eardrums, and took off. He remarked at the short run before it leapt into the air, then levelled off at 400 feet, choosing not to go any higher for the duration of the flight. He said he used to fly up at 5,000 feet like everybody, but an old pilot from Redding explained some years ago, "What'da wanna be up there for? 'smore interesting down here! You don't wancher ears t'bleed do ya? Of course he climbs up to get over the hills, but for the most part, he stays under 1000 feet AGL. Of course he's relating this whole thing to my by shouting at the top of his lungs. I guess that's how all flight instruction used to be.

Since then, I've been flying more that way. At least around the valley, where there's a place to land everywhere you look, and when you're that low, you really can see a lot. I took my son Ben up for a ride a few days ago, his first, and he fell asleep after 30 minutes or so. That was fine, and I continued my relaxed exploration of the delta. I looked down on Ryde, Locke, Walnut Grove, then looked up to see some impossibly tall obstacles poking up 2000 feet from sea level: radio towers, the highest ones I've ever seen. That signalled my return home. I did it all at about 1200 feet, and it felt right. I think the airplane likes it. Something about the shapes of that Cessna 170 put it in the same category of the Cub. If somebody looks up and sees a Bonanza zipping along a 1200 feet, there must be something wrong, folks are expecting to hear a crunch of metal into the earth after it passes out of view, but if a 170 or a Champ or Cub is puttering down the valley at that height, it's all okay for some reason.

I took it to Pine Mountain, in the foothills, and I certainly didn't do that at 1200 feet. It's noisy, but the plane travels well. Someday I'd like to take it over the Sierras, over to Lone PIne in the Owens Valley, where the plane aparrently began its life with a stripped interior, air dropping supplies to hikers in the Sierras. On my return to Tracy that morning, I did ten touch and go's, and I enjoyed every one of them. That airplane is fun, and a fun airplane will serve me well during the years the Falco is being built.

N2932D

After a little phone wrestling with the insurance company, I flew my instructor, Ben Freelove, up to Healdsburg in a 172 to ferry the Creamsicle Cessna 170 back to Oakland. Avemco wanted me to get at least one hour of checkout from a CFI, but insisted that my CFI had have a checkout in a Cessna 170 from another CFI who I suppose was to also have a checkout . . .

They relented, and with bureaucratic blessings, Ben pushed the throttle forward on N2932D and could only have rolled 180 feet before floating up off the runway in front of me. We flew formation all the way back to Oakland, arriving as a "flight of two" all the way into the pattern. Ben gushed about it the whole way, commenting on the nice handling. We dropped off the 172 and I hopped in the right seat. Good god. The way that thing levitates off the runway with 20 degrees of flaps can only be described as ferris wheel-like. With a decent headwind, the ground roll is hilariously short, then the plane appears to lift vertically off the earth with little or no forward movement. The controls are very delicate- very little rudder (the size of a volkswagen) is needed on climbout, and it reveals every little error. I imagine after a hundred hours of flying in it, I will be a far better stick than I am now. The lightness of it reminds me a bit of the Schweizer 2-33 glider trainer I learned to fly in at Wurtsboro, NY., and in gusty winds, it gets swatted around just the same way. It's loud as hell, smells wonderful, and appears to be a full two feet longer than a Cessna 172, though the specs say it's shorter. I tried both three point and wheel landings today. It is such an honest machine: it's easy to see how quickly it can bite you if you're not absolutely attentive and ahead of the airplane. We also did some stalls a couple says ago, and the break is much more crisp than a contemporary Cessna. I am very happy with it, and it seems to attract attention just sitting on the ramp. Even the crabbiest tower controllers at Oakland seem to give a little more respect.

As expected, the Falco has not gotten much attention this week. The 170 even intruded into the workshop with me making a set of wheel chocks for it. But alas, fresh motivation is imminent! Tomorrow I am flying from Santa Rosa to Redding for the West Coast Fly-In, and I'm flying right seat in Dan Dorr's red Falco, hopefully in a formation arrival with Doug Henson. I thought it would be too embarrassing to show up and have to admit I hadn't touched it in two weeks, so tonight I did a little work on the elevator spar, then puttied epoxy and dry flox around the control tab cable tube that runs through the stabilizer framing. Just another meager step towards float sanding that piece.

Uh oh . . .

Now I've done it. Of course that Temporary Airman Certificate burned a hole in my pocket, and I just HAD to get an airplane. Just HAD to run out and buy something. Today I signed the bill of sale for a 1955 Cessna 170B in Healdsburg, CA.. Low time airframe (2700hrs), high time engine (1750hrs). It's a nice airplane. It's perhaps a little less performance than a 172, with infinitely more grace and style. I hope to pick it up this week, and I have some hope that it'll get me to the gliderport more often. Probably it's in vain, but I still hope.

Rex Mayes, who runs the Williams gliderport, actually looked at the plane for me. He's an A&P, and though I don't consider it a through pre-buy inspection, I was satisified with his perusal of the machine and the logs, and also with his comment, "If I was looking for a 170, this'd probably be the one I'd buy." I ferried him over there in a spam can. He seemed to enjoy just looking out the window at all the places his customers have crashed his gliders over the years, not worrying about the flying. (How often is Rex anyone's passenger?) He asked me how I liked flying airplanes vs. gliders now that I've been doing both. This is something I've given some thought to.

Today I signed the paperwork for the plane, then took off and hung a right. I flew down the coast from the Russian River, down over the Pt. Reyes VOR, through the Golden Gate. There was no marine layer, beautiful. I had flight following, and I don't think I busted any regs. That is impressive in itself, since you have to fly under the Class B inverted wedding cake, stay above the Point Reyes National Wildlife refuge minimums, and steer clear of the flight restrictions around Giants stadium. I both dreaded and secretly hoped for a catastrophic engine failure, so that I might have to land dramatically on on a beautiful and desolate stretch of beach. That was a nice flight, but even in the afterglow of just getting my license, I have to admit that the three-dimensional chess game of flying gliders, even on a mediocre day, still outstrips the best airplane flights I've had. Okay, that trip in my friend's L-39 Albatros from New York to Vermont in 30 minutes was bitchin, but for the time being, I will keep my Discus.

Here is a picture of the Cessna's tail feathers, which shame the Cessna lineage afterwards, and which are as lovely as the Falco's, in their own way:

Misc

I busied myself tying up some loose ends today. I pulled the laminated tip bow from the form and cleaned it up. The elevator spar is nearly done. The framing is complete and the plywood backing has to be glued on, but it came out beautifully straight. I trial fit it to the stabilizer and they seem to like each other's shape well enough. I was going to try to find a cabinet shop with a thickness sander to run the spar through, but got impatient and ran it through the planer instead. I thought it might tear up the cross pieces with the grain parallel to the blades, but it came out fine. For dimensioning anything at all, that planer is the best thing since sliced bread.

After scarfing the long 1.5mm ply backing for the elevator spar, and gluing to the tip bow to the rudder, I started working on something I've been avoiding for some time now: bending the control tube that routes the trim tab cable through the stabilizer. You only get one chance at that or else it's a phonecall to Alfred for another tube. The trick to bending is not letting the tube kink or collapse on itself. To achieve this, the tube is typically set into a curved channel that keeps the tube walls from pushing out to the sides. Another method is to fill the tube with sand to prevent it from folding and compressing. I did both. First I tried routing a channel in a curved block, and made nothing but noise, sawdust and firewood. Then I convinced myself that the channel didn't have to be a semicircular profile, and just bent the tube into a curved channel created by clamping three blocks together, one block recessed between the other two. That worked.

The tube curves through the interior of the stabilizer as if there are no obstacles in its path, but there are, and the manual has me putting reinforcing fillets of cotton flox epoxy around place the tube punches through a spar or rib. I mixed some up with West System epoxy and made some practice fillets to see what the stuff is like. It doesn't behave very nicely. It's difficult to get a smooth texture, but nobody will ever see it. It is supposedly quite strong.

Since I've gotten my pilot license, I want to buy a plane and go places, like any other idiot who just got his ticket. My goal is ultimately to fly to my inlaws: from here down to Torrance, CA, past the Los Angeles airport. It lies under a knotted mass of Class B airspace, holes punch through it here and there for VFR traffic. It seems a matter of both proper homework and experience. I think I might get both if I just take some dual out of Torrance itself.

Checkride

Any account of my checkride will hardly be a revelation to the world. I suspect I'd just be recycling the same story that thousands of other pilots have.

I think I got off easy, but it's likely because I knew what I was doing. The examiner, a 215 lb. ex-cop from Berkeley seemed to make up his mind that I could fly, and that' he'd pass me on my initial climbout. At 300 feet, he said, "I can tell you know how to fly, you're not gonna scare me." Matter of fact, he ended up doing almost all my radio calls for me, and my instructor later said, "If he did that, then he really liked you. If he had any doubts about you, he'd make you do all that stuff yourself to see how you hold up under stress." I totally blew the emergency power off pattern and descent, first ballooning, then coming up short, having to go around. A few minutes later, he said that wasn't fair of him, that he was rushing me because he had an appointment that afternoon that he was trying to get to, so he let me do it over again.

The trip back from Concord field to Oakland was marked by a feeling of tremendous relief: all that  studying was, for a time, behind me. I can fly where I like without asking, but now I have to ask myself if it's okay.

Oshkosh

I arrived at my first Oshkosh visit alone on Wednesday sometime before noon, wandering through the main gate, suddenly confronted all at once with Spaceship One, a row of Reno warbird racers, the new Texan II Air Force trainer, and a Dornier flying boat upgraded with turboprops sitting atop its immense parasol wing. I was shocked to see a Ford Tri-Motor levitate off the runway in the Distance. This was nothing I had ever witnessed before.

Not 6 hours later I was a jaded veteran.  I found myself standing in front of the ticket booth where you could buy a ride on that very same Tri-Motor for a mere 45 bucks. Nothing impressed my any more in my overstimulated state, and I thought, "Nah.", and kept walking towards a sparkling row of Beech T-34's.

I only had a rough idea where the Falcos were. I was looking for something wooden in a sea of fiberglass and aluminum. I was enjoying being lost anyway, and the homebuilt ghetto is a nice place to get lost. I passed row after row of Vari-EZ's plowing the turf. Through a clutter or Thorps, Glasairs and Lancairs, I saw just a fragment of that Frati curve of the fin and immediately my brain said "Falco". When you've obsessed over a thing, lived with it, it becomes hardwired in your visual cortex. Like a loved one, you need only to see a tiny bit to recognize them.

What is it about the Italians? They manage to make machines look so balanced and perfect, and the details, the tips and tails are no less important than any other part. That Falco motif, the soft into hard curve lives in the fin, the stab, the wingtip, all speak the same language- even the canopy answers back. It has the same magic as the rear end of any Pininfarina Ferrari. I often look at the Falco and it says to me "Airplane", like I would expect to open the encyclopedia and see a drawing of it. But it could hardly be called generic. Frati makes it look easy, but it must be awfully hard. I see something like the new Air Force trainer, the Texan II, and it baffles me how in one way it can be so perfect- the overall proportions, the wing planform, the T-34 fin shape. It has an aggressive, military air, so industrial and contemporary. They're off and running, then they blow it all with that humpback. I like the idea of the humpback, but that thing is like John Wayne saddled on a Shetland pony. I like vehicles that look like the engineers had a leash that got a little too long, but just a little bit of tweaking would make that Texan II a badass new classic.

Over the two days I was there, I seemed to hang out more with Alfred Scott than with anyone else, which was fine with me since he told hilarious stories and jokes all day. On the last night I was there, he hosted the Falco builder's dinner, I asked Alfred how he came across the Falco, how did he come to the decision to make a kit out of it. He tried warning us that it was a long and not very interesting story. He did tell the tale, and it was long, but hardly boring as he claimed. I especially liked the part about the first time he saw an SF.260 sometime in the 1970s, "I had no idea there could be such an airplane! Something that was that sexy." I think the word for him is not simply obsessive, which he certainly is, but also thorough. There's a completeness to the way he tackles a project. It's one thing to get excited about an airplane, but something else entirely to understand every part, every system and component on the aircraft, to have drawn it, and by the way, turn himself into an expert draftsman on the way there. the whole shabang seems pretty damn fresh to me. Unless you're talking about people fabricating Pitts' and Cubs for themselves, one else seems to have done what he did- to take an existing aircraft design and make a kit out of it. Now 25-odd years later, he never has built a Falco, and I think I understand why- he doesn't need to. He completely consumed every part of the airplane with his mind and recreated it again, and that is more than enough. He has built it thousands of times in his mind. He is obviously content to let others build a real object out of the Falco universe that lives in his head. He thought that, looking back now, it was a very wise decision, but he made up his mind right from the beginning, "that I was always going get along with Frati, no matter what."

Alfred noted he doesn't come to Oshkosh more than once every five years or so. He sold his own Falco a few years ago, but he's not completely done with airplanes. He still had enough of the little kid in him to make sure he didn't miss a freshly restored Spitfire zipping around the sky. He certainly must have been proud on this particular visit. I'd wager it's the largest group of kit-built Falcos ever assembled in one spot, and every one of them looked good. Every single one. The judges thought so too: Doug Henson won Grand Champion: Plans Built, Dan Dorr won Reserve Grand Champion: Plans Built, and Duane Root and Bob Brantley both won Bronze Lindys.
 

Given the opportunity to sit in several Falcos, it was a shocker to discover how I fit so poorly under Jim Petty's standard canopy. With my head bumping the plexiglas, I suddenly wondered if I was building the wrong airplane. Then I strolled over to Duane Root's Falco. With his blessing, I settled into the seat and skeptically pulled his Nustrini canopy over my head. I was pleasantly surprised to find plenty of headroom. How come? Not exactly sure, but Jims cushions were thicker, whereas Duane raised his Nustrini canopy, lowered his seat tracks, and had thinner cushions. I think also a hidden benefit of the Nustrini canopy is that high point of the curve is further aft, which is where my head ends up.  I was surprised that every single builder had just used the stock seat frames. Not a single builder I talked to tried changing the seat frames at all so that they would recline. I have hope for either version, whatever I decide.

Returning home after a two-hour layover at O'Hare, I resolved to fly myself to Oshkosh the next time I go. I opened the door to the garage, turned on the lights and walked up to my measly rudder sitting in the jig. It wasn't easy to dig in after seeing all those completed airplanes. I pried open the Resorcinol, mixed up a little batch, and glued up the tip bows for the stabilizer. That Falco motif was making its way into the world one more time, and not the last time, I'm sure.