Pleasantville, by air!

There’s a movie I come across now and then as I traverse the wide open plains of high cable, armed only with a beer, a bag of chips, and my trusty remote control. The movie is called Pleasantville, starring Mr. Peter “Seabiscuit” Parker himself, Toby Maguire. It was nominated for three Oscars, but because it didn’t actually win any, I can tolerate it. It’s an interesting movie in the context of this posting because for some deep philosophical reason that I refuse to contemplate, (that would make me artsy, and I am NOT artsy!) it starts with everything being in black & white. The town of Pleasantville is completely isolated from the rest of the world, everything is always perfect (the basketball team not only never loses, they never miss a single shot and always win by shut-out, the only function of the fire department is to rescue cats from trees, it never rains, etc.) So, while living solidly ensconced in their comfortable Pleasantville cocoon, the town’s residents have no passion. Their entire World view is a bland black & white.

Eventually, a disruptive force is introduced to their closed community, and that disruption results in various characters discovering inner passions one-by-one. As each character finds their inner emotional core, they start appearing in color. Eventually the entire town and all of its residents are in color. This comes at a cost, of course, and that cost is that the fire department now fights actual fires, the basketball team loses a game now and then, and it rains.

So, why am I telling you about this movie? Well, it’s because I am emerging from what feels like a two month black & white spell. Yesterday, with the blue skies, moderate temperatures, above average visibility, easily managed winds, and most importantly, no snow blocking my hangar door, I went flying! While the sky promised full-living-color flight, the ground maintained its stolid refusal to get with the theme by remaining a dark and dismal brown.

That was no problem at all – its transformation to the more palatable varied shades of green and the dark, virile brown of freshly plowed fields is inevitable. I’m in the stage of the movie where the transformation to full color is well under way, and not even the fire & brimstone evangelists preaching against it can stop it.

Is that all a bit dramatic? Well, yes, but that’s as may be: it really isn’t far off at all from what I felt yesterday as I lifted off of the runway and pointed the nose of my trusty bird towards the West, albeit a little later than I had planned as I had forgotten to account for the shift from EST (Eastern Standard Time) to CDT (Congressional Dipshittery Time). It was like a veil had been lifted from my mood, if that metaphor makes any sense. Over the last couple of non-flying months, I had lapsed into a drudge-like routine of work/school/couch-sitting without really realizing how much duller my life was without flying.

The destination was one of my regulars: Darke Co./Versailles, an airport responsible for many of my most, uh, memorable landings, including one in the Tampico where I struggled mightily with a surly direct 25 knot crosswind until I was able to wrestle the plane onto the ground. Even under normal conditions, though, I find that I have trouble getting a smooth touchdown there. Yesterday, though, with what little wind there was coming out of the North, unfettered by the normal disruptions from the stand of trees just South of the landing zone on runway 27, I was able to actually make a pretty decent landing. Say, was that hangar always that color?

After a nice visit with my folks at their horse farm and a chance to sit in my brother’s new NASCAR Modified that he’s building in his shop, I enjoyed a smooth ride home at 5,500′ and 155 knots (resulting from a nice tailwind!) and planted another greaser back at Bolton.

On the drive home, I simply couldn’t help noticing how colorful everything seemed in Pleasantville all of a sudden.

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Back in the air

I finished up my remaining tasks for completing the annual today, and dropped the logs off for the sign-off from the AP/IA that I use to perform the inspection. The sum total of parts this year was less than $20, so this is by far the least painful annual ever, at least fiscally.

So, what to do with an airplane fresh out of annual, on a day that hit 60 degrees, 10 miles visibility, and 6 knot winds? I thought about that for a nanosecond or so, and shockingly arrived at the idea of actually flying the thing.

This would be my first flight in nearly two months, a nerve-wracking thought in and of itself, but it would also be the (gulp!) dreaded first flight after annual. This is the flight that I always second guess and over-analyze to the point that I’m halfway convinced that parts of my plane will be raining from the skies as they shake themselves loose. It’s never happened, of course, but the nagging doubt is always there.

After an extensive preflight (it might seem counterintuitive that one of the most detailed preflights that I do all year is right after the most detailed inspection the airplane will receive all year, but after having panels off and pieces/parts removed and replaced, it actually seems more likely to me that a problem will crop up in flight) I made my first takeoff in what seemed like a very, very long time. With a light wind from the left, I had a little bit of early swerving, but I settled down pretty quickly. Once clear of the runway, I climbed at a speed that would give me maximum altitude with the least amount of forward progress, the thinking being that I’d like to stay close to the runway and have altitude in the bank if something untoward happened to the power source. As I turned to the west, I made sure to stay within gliding range of Columbus Southwest, a grass runway airport 2.5 miles to the west of Bolton. I wouldn’t really want to land on what was probably a soggy, muddy quagmire, but if push were to come to shove, I think I’d probably be more amenable to it. It’s not far from Southwest to the paved runway at Darby Dan, and from there it’s only another handful of miles to MadCo.

Everything ran fine, so I stooged around at 4500′ for 20 minutes, savoring the feeling of finally being an aviator again. I could only delay the inevitable challenge of landing for the first time in ages for so long, so I finally worked up the nerve to head back to home base. The first landing was not so bad, although I was surprised at just how fast the runway was coming at me as I reached the numbers. It will take awhile to get acclimated to the speed again, I suppose. The landing itself was adequate, but I flared high and it seemed like I must have dropped eight to ten feet before I finally felt the reassuring bump of the wheels touching down.

I wanted to get at least three landings in before I could start to feel at least somewhat competent after the long hiatus, so it was off for another lap around the airport. What a fine decision that was, I thought, as I greased in the second one. Just to prove that it wasn’t a fluke, I pressed on to the third. Well, that didn’t go very well. Now, the story I’m using if queried by witnesses is that I was ensuring that all of the pieces/parts were firmly re-attached to the plane by stress testing it on the runway. You know, to shake anything loose in a spot where it could be easily retrieved. Yeah, that’s the story: “I meant to do that.” The tower controller knows differently, of course, since he actually heard me squeeze out a terse “six-papa-golf-going-around damn it” (all one word, with the expletive being sotto voce) at the top of the, uh, test bounce. Good practice, that recovery from near stall speed with full flaps hanging out in the breeze, even though it wasn’t planned that way. Or perhaps especially because it wasn’t planned that way, I suppose.

The third landing was a superb on-the-wheels greaser. Always one to quit while ahead, assuming I can ever actually get ahead, I headed up the hill and put her back in the barn, all pieces still firmly attached. Oh, and nothing had fallen off of the airplane, either.

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They’re gonna have to boost the lab fee!

We pay a $20 lab fee each quarter at the A&P school to cover supplies used in the classes. These are typically things like rivets, sheet metal, electrical components and the like. As I’ve spent the last few class sessions outside in the frigid cold (quite forcibly reminding myself of why I got out of the airplane maintenance gig 20 years ago) working on the Boeing 727 donated by FedEx last year, I have determined that $20 ain’t gonna get anywhere near what we’ve spent this week alone.

The topic we’re working on is 100 hour ‘A’ check inspections on the big bird. In order to facilitate the inspection of the under-bits of the flaps, slats, and spoilers, it was deemed necessary to light up the Auxillary Power Unit (APU), which is a tiny little jet engine buried deep in the bowels of the machine. Monday night, all of the ice and snow that had accumulated in the APU exhaust had finally melted away and we could crank up the noisy little bugger. That went fine, but the reponse to the commandments to move ancillary flight controls like the flaps, slats, and spoilers were met with the same kind of “go pound sand” grumbling that I get from Hogarth when insisting that he stir his dirty old self from an illicit nap on a piece of high quality furniture. The problem was quickly determined to be a complete and total lack of the life-giving blood of hydraulic systems: the Skydrol hydraulic fluid. This determination was quickly followed by the quite natural question of “well, where did eight gallons of Skydrol disappear to??”

Now, I may or may not have previously shared the sordid details of my continually degenerating relationship with the instructor, but suffice it to say that it’s not the most congenial of working relationships. This manifested itself quite apparently when it came to determining where the leak was. We started back in the tail cone of the airplane where the hydraulic fluid tanks are located, visually inspecting lines, valves, and surrounding floors for evidence of leakage. None was to be found. As the goal of Monday’s efforts was more or less just to prove that the APU could be started, it was decided that we would defer the search for the leak until Wednesday. As we were walking back to the hangar, we walked past a puddle under the belly of the plane, near the leading edge of the wing. I pointed out the fact that there were no water puddles anywhere to be seen, so the mysterious puddle might very likely be the clue we were looking for. This idea was summarily discarded by the instructor as unlikely. Fine, thought I, for I would rather be in the nice, warm hangar than outside on that frigid, windy, bone cillingly cold night hunting for a fluid leak.

Come Wednesday, eight gallons of Skydrol had been procured at the exhorbitant cost of $103 per gallon. The first gallon was pumped in (by me) and was soon gone missing. The second gallon met the same fate. The third gallon was pumped in, and I went back to the tail cone to find the same thing as Monday night: a determined search to find a 55 gallon drum in a haystack. In other words, the tail cone was still bone dry, but the single-minded search in the proximity of the tanks continued apace, with the same distressing lack of results. My query of “why does the leak have to be here, given the miles of hydraulic lines coursing through the entirety of the aircraft” was again summarily dismissed. Being of the easily peeved type, I removed myself from the vicinity and began my own search. At this point in the tale, you will not be shocked to learn that I quickly discovered that the mysterious puddle from Monday not only still existed, but was something on the order of three gallons larger. Against my better judgement (which is a polite way of saying “going against my long ingrained passive/aggressive style of conflict avoidance”) I went back to the tailcone to report my findings. That, of course, was futile. Ego was in full force on both sides at this point, so my discovery was met with no more than a shrug of the shoulders and yet another brush off.

Well, by this time I was cold, tired, and pissed off, so I adopted the petulant strategy of just removing myself from the problem. As I stood off to the side, I was eventually joined by the rest of the students, who themselves were also apparently starting to feel somewhat redundant to the entire process. I showed them my theoretical leak, and we soon agreed that there was definitely a problem somewhere in the right wing. It soon became apparent to the one lone remaining tailcone resident that his entire class had abandoned the pointless inspection of the tailcone, and that it might be beneficial to actually look at the stream of purple Skydrol dripping down the side of the airplane.

Long story short (heh, too late!!), the right inboard leading edge slat actuator was leaking like a sieve. We capped the hydraulic lines (managing in the process to soak my gloves with Skydrol, which would later lead to a stupid incident involving me rubbing my left eye with a finger covered in a film of Skydrol – a burning sensation I hope never to repeat!) and re-started the APU.

Problem solved. But I doubt if my $20 is going to make much of a dent in the invoice for eight gallons of Skydrol!

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Another Review

Fast and furious writing going on during my seasonal flying hiatus:

http://www.gamingnexus.com/Default.aspx?Section=Article&I=1413

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My latest review

Formula 1 is my motor racing genre of choice, mostly because of the relative shortness of the races. When it takes five hours to sit through a NASCAR event, I have to look elsewhere.

So, here’s my review of Sony’s Formula 1 game for the Playstation 3:

http://www.gamingnexus.com/Default.aspx?Section=Article&I=1410

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It’s all relative

One thing that I’ve been looking forward to fixing during this year’s annual is the slow drip of the left wing sump drain. I wouldn’t even categorize it as a leak – maybe on or two drops a day at most. But still, the airport folks aren’t going to be overly thrilled about the blue-green drip stain on the hangar floor so I needed to get it fixed.

Intuitively, I thought that removing the old drain and putting in a new one with anything but bone dry tanks would result in quite a bit of fuel doing what any self-respecting fluid would do if given the opportunity to leak through a nice, big, unrestricted hole: GUSHER! I asked the local A&P what he thought, and he stated that if any fuel leaked out, it would only be a little bit.

That sounded good to me, so I proceeded. What I learned was that the definition of a “little bit of gas” in the context of a heated hangar is significantly different than the definition of a “little bit of gas” in the context of a 25 degree Fahrenheit hangar with the gas flowing down your sleeve. Injury to insult: it didn’t feel particularly nice when it hit the open cut on my thumb, either!

Cause of the almost-leak: aluminum shavings in the tank had done what they were supposed to do: migrate to the lowest point in the tank. What they didn’t do was make it all the way through the drain. There were metal shavings caught between the O-ring and where it seats to the drain, resulting in just enough gap to allow fuel to seep through.

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