Why it’s oh-so-cool to live by an airport….

From my front porch:

And how cool is this? Here’s the opposite picture taken from that little door just in front of the tailwheel:

In unrelated news, we have house guests for the weekend. They brought their dog Mookie with them, news that I initially thought foreshadowed a weekend of trying to keep Brave Sir Hogarth, he who remains convinced that he should be the only dog on the planet, from killing the interloper. As it turns out, Hogarth has met the only dog that he has ever liked. They’ve spent the weekend playing with each other and having a grand time!

Mookie is a Chihuahua/some-kind-of-brindle dog like a boxer or pit bull. I’ve taken to referring to him as either a Chibrindle or a Brindlehuahua. He’s a tiny little guy, but he stands up to Hogarth, and that seems to make all the difference. In fact, the funniest thing I’ve ever seen is that little dog launching himself off of the sofa and onto Hogarth. It’s been quite enjoyable to watch Hogarth come to the realization that he could have been having a great time with other dogs instead of constantly being, well… an asshole about the whole thing. Pardon the somewhat harsh vernacular; sometimes the situation just insists on a forthright description.

So, here’s Mookie:

And check out this awesome self portrait:

Hint: it’s all in the eyes…

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Hogarth’s sporty new seasonal wear

We’ve been looking in the pet stores and department stores for new neck wear for Brave Sir, but without much luck. The selections are slim, and the prices somewhat robust for a foot square piece of cloth. Today at Hobby Lobby, as I was milling around the store while waiting for a couple of pictures to be framed, I came across a nice selection of bandanas priced at a fraction of the prices we’d been seeing.

This is his new Fall Holiday look:

I believe that I have mentioned his aversion to the camera before:

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Brave Sir Hogarth: lucky that I hate to pay shipping charges

If it wasn’t for the $4.95 shipping charge, Brave Sir would be greeting holiday visitors accessorized thusly:

The dog simply doesn’t appreciate how good he has it.

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The Sad and Tragic Demise of my Hangar Frog

With the Mother of All Cold Fronts having blown through last week, it’s not a huge surprise that the calm that typically comes after the storm here in Ohio has stretched through the entire work week and into the weekend. And, as is usual when the calm winds and high pressure stick around for a few days, the weather is perfectly flyable, albeit with reduced visibility. The hallmark of extended high atmospheric pressure in Ohio is, after all, haze. Knowing that, I called Co-pilot Rick on Saturday evening to see if he’d be up for a late morning flight, after the inevitable fog had lifted. He was downtown watching some kind of historical reenactment where they attempt to light the river on fire in celebration of the Cuyahoga River fires of the 20th century (near as I can figure) when I called, but it doesn’t matter. A 1015 show time was confirmed with a later call. Destination not important, or even thought about yet, truth be told.

The Weather-out-the-Window(tm) forecast was sue-poib, but it was every bit as hazy as I had expected. I also saw some .1 nm visibilities (fog) reported down south, too. The 1015 go time looked like a good decision. With plenty of spare time on my hands, Brave Sir Hogarth joined me in sampling the Weather-on-the-Porch(tm) for awhile. With hot coffee in hand, I sat and read my first Large Print novel (Memoir From Antproof Case) which, ironically, happens to be about a guy that has a visceral hatred of coffee.

The large print is helpful for those mornings on the porch that are so sunny that they force me to use sunglasses rather than reading glasses. Anyway, I’m enjoying the book. There’s even parts about flying in it that I hadn’t expected.

I liked the paragraph about the weather.

Eventually we were joined by Co-pilot Egg, still tired from her big day with the band on Saturday. She marched in a parade in the morning, then traveled out to Dayton for a band competition. They placed 5th out of 17 bands competing, which is good, but they didn’t get back to town until after midnight.

Wanting to maximize my time relaxing on the porch, I waited until the last minute to head to the hangar. I got there just a couple of minutes before the Co-pilot was to arrive, so I got the hangar door up and the airplane pulled out in a hurry, finishing just before I had to head back to open the gate for Rick. I had wanted the plane out of the hangar before I went to get him so I could just drive the Miata into the hangar for parking while we were gone. And that’s what I did. And I ran over my hangar frog on the way in.

Sometime this Spring, a young frog took up residence under the weather stripping of my hangar door. Every time I opened the door, he’d start hopping into the hangar. I really didn’t want him there, although I can’t say for sure why. I’d scoop him into the saucepan that Brave Sir drinks from when he comes out to loiter with me and carry him down to the end of the hangars. There I’d drop him in the grass with an admonition to never return. An admonition that he completely ignored, as it was to transpire. To his chagrin.

All through the summer, I got used to looking for him every time I opened the door. I’d scoop him up and take back down to the end of the hangar row, inexplicably firm in the knowledge that this time he wouldn’t be able to find his way back. He always did. Today, when I was in a hurry to get the plane out, I forgot to look for him. Well, until it was too late. He wasn’t hard to find when I did remember to look for him. He was broader, flatter, and much, much slower than normal. I took him to the end of the hangars again, but this time I didn’t need to tell him not to come back.

As neither Rick or I could conjure up a destination for the day, I took the simple expedient of using AirNav.com to find the cheapest gas that was at least 75 miles away. That turned out to be Ashland County (KDWU), Kentucky. The AirNav comments were all very favorable, and we figured the worst case is that I’d buy some gas and we could fly back up north for lunch at Portsmouth.

The flight down was glass smooth, although the humidity and latent heat in the air foreshadowed a bumpy ride back later in the day. We don’t sweat things like that, though. The visibility was pretty low, but the GPS guide dog was there to direct us infallibly to the airport. We diverted a bit to take some pictures of the Portsmouth water front, but by that time we were within a few miles of Ashland and it was easy enough to find in the murk. The winds were reported as calm and there was not a plane to be heard on the frequency (except for the few hundred flying into Vinton County for their annual Fly-in, anyway) so we had our choice of runway. I used 28 both because of its position relative to our entry heading and because it was mighty darn scenic! We turned left base over the river, and overflew a barge while we were on final. I was too busy to take any pictures, unfortunately.

We had no plan at all for what to do once we landed, so I asked the airport guy if 1) there was anything to do, and 2) whether he had a courtesy car to use to get us there? Yes, to the car, but no ideas as to what to do with it. He said there’s always something going on in Ashland, so we should just head down there.

“How far is that?” I asked.

“Ten minutes. Five if you do it right. Our car ain’t much to look at it, but it runs like a scalded dog.”

I think that’s the exact moment I decided that maybe Rick should drive.

I didn’t keep track of the time, but I’m pretty sure it took longer than 10 minutes for us to get downtown, the reason mostly being that the car may have smoked like a scalded dog, it didn’t really run like one. It did the job, though, and we managed to find downtown Ashland. Where, as predicted by the airport guy, something was going on. I never saw a sign explaining what it was, but there were crafts, food, and music.

Not having had lunch yet, we decided against both the live rat and the educational experience:

The Arts & Crafts stuff was worth a look, though:

This one is really demoralizing. My porch swing doesn’t look anything like this one:

These are really cool! They cut the ‘logs’ out of 2x4s and stain them to look like logs. The big dollhouse was priced at $500, the small one at $50:

I took a lot of video of this corn mill. I felt kinda guilty about it, so I bought a $5 jar of farm-fresh honey and a $5 jar of Piccalilly. Then, realizing that the opportunity may not arise again any time soon, I asked the guy what in the hell Piccalilly is, and what’s it’s used for. He ran off a string of veggies that are in it, all of it pickled in vinegar and sugar. He said they use it on hot dogs and stuff.

“Oh. It’s relish.”

I think I was saved from a scathing stink eye by the guy standing behind me who chose that moment to announce that he wanted to buy the entire stick of pickled beets.

After perusing the culinary options open to us, I decided against the shrimp or crab Po’ Boys. Ashland is right on the water, yes, but it’s not shrimp or crab water. No telling where that stuff came from. Nope, not for me… I decided to take my chances with a spicy Italian sausage with grilled onions. Knowing, mind you, that there was very likely to be a bumpy ride home. Caution to the wind, though:

We were joined by a couple of local residents enjoying ice cream cones. I made sure to explain to them too that Piccalilly is really just relish. Made their day, I’m sure:

The predictions of a bumpier ride home proved true, so I sat back and let the Co-pilot fly us home while I concentrated on keeping lunch down. An endeavor, I must say, that I succeeded in quite admirably.

So, other than having suffered the tragic loss of my hangar frog, it was a pretty good day.

Here, courtesy of PapaCam, is your Zenumentary:

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Plane back together, Brave Sir Hogarth doing fine

Co-pilot Rick and I got the newly corrosion-free aileron back on the plane a couple of nights ago. Piece of cake, mostly, with the only wrinkle being the incompleteness of one of the diagrams that I drew to make sure I remembered where everything went. Rick brought along a tool that I had never heard of, and turned out to be worth more that its weight in gold: a washer wrench.

It’s a very clever idea, the washer wrench. It holds washers in place while you install the bolt and nut. That sounds like a simple operation that shouldn’t require a special tool, but some of the washers were slid into very tight confines and even with the washer wrench to hold them it can be quite difficult to keep them in place long enough to get the bolt properly aligned. I don’t have much recurring need for a tool like this, but when you do need one, you really need one.

Regarding Brave Sir Hogarth, I recently discovered a lump the size of a golf ball under the skin near his left shoulder. Mako, one of the dogs the preceded Hogarth, died at a relatively young age from canine lymphoma, which exhibited itself with large tennis ball sized lumps in her belly. Once bitten, twice shy. Even though the all-knowing Google told me that Hogarth’s lump was different and quite routine in dogs his age, I decided to take him to the Vet for a check-up.

We waited a good 45 minutes past our appointment time before the Vet got around to seeing us, a delay for which he was profusely apologetic. I told him not to worry since Hogarth is “a patient boy.” ‘A patient’ – get it? Well, don’t feel bad. Neither did the Vet. Not my best effort. Banter Amp(tm) only set to level three due to stress over Best Friend’s condition. Not to worry, though. An aspiration of the lumps (there turned out to be two of them – one down by his groin. Gee, how’d I miss finding that one??) showed that it was just a pocket of fat. Still, “was it diet that caused that?” Nope, not at all. That’s good news for Brave Sir, because he really, really likes his weekend treat of bacon grease poured over his kibble. Heck, I’d probably eat kibble too if it had bacon grease on it! Me and my boy, we love our bacon!

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He was warned

Now before you get all judgmental on me, I have to stress that he was warned. Repeatedly.

What has happened is that Brave Sir Hogarth has discovered that he has a taste for cat food. Whenever he gets the chance (in other words, every time we leave the house), he avails himself of the opportunity to empty the cat’s bowl. Now I’ll grant that he makes more efficient use of the vittles in question than the cat himself does, given that the cat regurgitates roughly 30% of everything he eats in furtherance of his feline performance art project (for which he apparently is in the running for a hefty NEA grant given the devotion he shows to it), but it’s causing problems nonetheless.

See, the cat resents it. Gets him all riled up, truth be told, and the cat has a touch of the vigilante in him. Took matters into his own hands, such as they are. Being as the cat food is of much higher culinary quality than the dog food, the “eye for an eye” approach of getting redress via the eating of the dog’s food was deemed to be a non-starter. No, the cat has decided to even the scales by peeing on the dog’s bed. This we cannot have.

The cat’s unilateral and unsanctioned decision to discipline the dog having failed (because let’s face it: there aren’t many smells that are offensive to a dog, and I’m not convinced that Brave Sir even realized that the cat was attempting to punish him. “Thanks for the new scent, Buddy!” was more the reaction I saw), our hand was forced – we had to get control of the situation. Scolding, however, had no effect. Oh sure, we got the droopy ears and averted eyes, and we got the supplicating rolling on the ground in shame, but first chance he got to engorge himself on the cat’s chow… he did.

So I raised the stakes. I told him that if he did it again, I was going to put a goofy cat hat on his head, take pictures, and post them on the internet with the expressed goal of humiliating him. And I meant it:

I hope this works. If it doesn’t, my only recourse is to pack him off to military school or something.

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For the dog what has it all…

Every now and then I feel pangs of guilt (tiny, little, itsy-bitsy pangs, but pangs none the less) that Brave Sir Hogarth has been unable to fly with me since I selfishly traded the larger Tampico for the far less voluminous RV. Maybe a gadget like this would make it up to him:

I know I would benefit from it. No, not by increasing my abysmal excercise quotient; it would give him something to do other than constantly dropping a wet, smelly, slobber-coated ball in my lap on the rare occasions when I try to watch TV. The gravitas of Mr. John Adams, for example, suffers grievously when a juicy Kong Ball gets plopped into my crotch. Trust me.

I don’t know why we don’t just get rid of the thing. The ball, not the canine companion, that is. It’s supposed to help keep his teeth clean and his breath sweet and fresh, but the breath thing is apparently relative. I suppose regular dog breath is pretty nasty, but the ministrations of the Kong Ball cause it to smell like the inside of that abandoned tire you found out in the woods. Or the inside of a really old diving suit. Ick. Maybe he’s using it wrong – he’s never been big on reading the instructions, as you can imagine.

Of course, he’s hopelessly devoted to it and would miss it terribly if we were to dispose of it. I’ve tried hiding it, but he mopes until he finds it. He likes to leave it out in the middle of a room, which presents an ankle twisting opportunity for the guy that leaves the house for work while it’s still dark, so it has to be put in a corner. He resents having his toys moved, so often puts it right back in the center of the room. There are only two sentences that Hogarth understands: “Do you want to go outside,” and everything other thing spoken to him. The first he understands as we would. The rest all translates in his mind as “go get your ball.” Except for one exception: “Go get your ball” seemingly translates as “stand there and look stupidly at me.” I appreciate the irony of that.

Anyway, I think he’d really love having a machine to throw the ball for him, although I suspect the noise of it would drive me batty. I’ll wait for the New & Improved version.

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You just never know

Believe it or not, out of pure selfishness I was hoping for cruddy weather this weekend. It never pays to try to out guess the weather in Ohio, but I try anyway. Last week’s snowstorm convinced me that this would be an excellent time to get the annual condition inspection out of the way since I’d clearly be grounded for a couple of weeks anyway, if for no other reason than the inevitable ice wall that would form an unsurmountable barrier in front of the hangar.

So, here I am with my airplane all taken apart for the inspection, and clear blue skies visible through the official Weather-out-the-Window portal. The taxiways are bone dry, without an icy obstruction to be seen. Oh well. Brave Sir Hogarth and I will go over this morning and do some of the routine things like removing the air filter for cleaning and inspecting the filter screen in the gascolator.

I had already pulled the spark plugs out for inspection:

Beyond the routine stuff, the inspection always finds things for me to fix, and it will be a lot nicer working out there on a nice day than an icy day. I was out there a few days ago sweeping out some of the dust and insect detritus that gathers during the winter months. I’m rarely in the hangar during the frigid weeks of the annual flying hiatus, so it was a lot like coming back to a long neglected house and going through the re-familiarization process. It felt nice to be there – winter is the season when I spend so much time out of the flying routine that I start to question why I even bother having the thing. It’s a form of Seasonal Affective Disorder (or ‘SAD,’ one of the more apt acronyms I’ve seen) I suppose. Odd that something as simple as pushing a broom around for half an hour can cure it, but there it is.

The reason I was out there in the first place was to remove the inspection panels so the AP/IA that I have come in and do the inspection wouldn’t have to. Interestingly, if I had built the airplane myself I would be allowed to do the annual inspection myself, but I think I would choose to have a fresh set of eyes come in and do it anyway. This may be a personal flaw, but I have the capability to become completely blind to things over the course of a year. This makes the annual inspection a kind of mixed blessing: it’s good that the inspector finds things that need to be fixed, but often times the things he finds make me question why I didn’t find them myself.

For example, the federal regulations require that the airworthiness certificate be displayed in the airplane. I had taken mine home to make a copy, and rather than returning it to the little display window, I just left it in the envelope I carried it home in and stuffed the envelope into the window. That was pretty sloppy and doesn’t constitute being displayed, and it feels a lot like it would feel to have a maid come in to clean your house and be confronted with an unflushed toilet. Sure, she’s there to clean, but there are some things that you really ought to do for yourself. So there it was on the notes sheet yesterday afternoon, and I have to confess that even though I was completely alone in the hangar, I blushed a little bit. Well, at least the floor had been swept!

There were some things that I found myself, though, and left him notes to point them out. The heat muff around the exhaust has been rubbing itself raw against the side of the cowl, which doesn’t bode well for the long term health of either. I wasn’t sure what was causing the pipe to hang lower than normal, so I left a note to have him take a look.

It seems one of the clamps that hold it in place is at fault, so that should be an easy fix. The little white night navigation light on the tail was burned out, so I added that to the list. I have to confess that I didn’t notice that light being defunct on my own, but that’s another story, and an uncomfortable enough one that I will only share it in live conversation. I’ll just say that it was one of the most uncomfortable things that’s ever happened to me at the airport.

Also in the notes was a short sentence describing a mysterious hole in the carburetor, possibly intended to hold a probe (carb temp?) of some type:

I don’t think there’s ever been anything in there. It’s a mystery.

It was interesting to pull the cowls off for the first time since I finished the engine class. Having been working in that realm for the last ten weeks has perceptibly changed the way I look at things on and around the engine. In fact, my mechanic asked me if having torn apart an engine and reassembling it, and as a result having seen how relatively simple and robust those engines are, has made me more comfortable with flying around behind one. It was a good question, but I had to be honest and answer no. I’ve never been overly concerned with anything failing inside the engine, what with it being only 300 hours since a factory remanufacture and the major parts typically lasting for thousands of hours as long as they aren’t abused. No, what gives me pause with regard to the engine is not the engine itself, but all of the ancillary stuff attached to it.

Magnetos, fuel lines, oil lines, and support equipment of that nature cause the majority of engine outages. This is part of the reason I’ve decided to buy and install an EGT gauge, and it is also why I’m considering the replacement of the 8 to 10 year old oil and fuel lines. While it’s remotely possible that the forged steel crankshaft could break in flight, it’s far more likely that an oil line would rupture. The net result would be identical. The hoses are still fine, but they’re starting to show age:

I can replace them both with premanufactured (as opposed to buying the tools and parts to custom make them myself) hoses available from Vans for about $130 for the two of them. It doesn’t have to be done now, of course, and I’ll probably defer it until summer.

I could work on the plane all day, although at 40 degrees I was getting pretty cold. The temperature doesn’t really bother the hairy-faced-son-I-never-had very much, but he does bore easily:

That’s ok, I have a pretty extensive shopping list now, and it will take awhile to get it all found and ordered from the massive Aircraft Spruce catalog, and the canoe could use a little attention too.

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The difference between cats and dogs

Cats:

It’s all about the comfort, and if you want any lovin’, you’d better bring treats. Cats seem to enjoy puns, too, as evidenced by the silly names applied to said treats.

Dogs:

“You had me at ‘outside'”:

Full disclosure:

Hogarth’s outdoor sojourn was immediately followed by a nap in front of the fireplace, but ever mindful of his reputation as an outdoorsy, rugged sort of fellow and extremely distrustful of the in-house paparazzi and their wild rumor-mongering, he refused to have his picture taken.

He still doesn’t fully grasp the concept of a see-through fireplace, though:

The cat? He doesn’t care what you think:

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Doing the relaxing thing

Ah, ’tis the time of year when three will get you ten, although I opted for the four will get you eleven deal this year. Four vacation days, when combined with holidays and weekends, netted eleven total days off. I like to call it “retirement training,” although I take to it so readily that I’m not sure retirement is something that I will need to dedicate a lot of practice time to.

Helps when the weather is nice, of course, and when last I took keyboard to pixel, such was most assuredly not the case. Today is the proverbial horse of a different color, though, as was yesterday, but that one didn’t count. Today was mid-40s and sunny, albeit the weak tea of a sun that we get in late December. This time of year the old sun is just tuckered out and can’t manage much more than a feeble afternoon effort in crawling across the southern horizon, but beggars/choosers and all of that, right?

Brave Sir Hogarth has either finished, lost, or simply forgotten about his Christmas gift from yesterday, so he found himself somewhat at a loss for recreational activity today, which is eerily similar to my situation.

Long past the age when I could spend a day or two rubbing the novelty off of new toys over the first few days after the “big day,” I get cabin fever nearly immediately. Thus, ’twas good fortune indeed that the two of us had a day that lent itself to us getting out of doors and communing in a communal way with what passes for nature here-abouts. Brave Sir Hogarth is quite the rabid fan of our local dog walking park, named by the parks department somewhat whimsically as the “Wag Tail Trail.” Brave Sir knows it by a different, more canine oriented moniker, of course, that being “The Long Trail of Interesting and Intriguing Smells:”

He enjoys leaving his mark, as it were, to the maximum extent possible, whether that be with periodic spritzings of recycled water, or when that runs dry, the practice of scratch marking:

I read somewhere that in the actual wolf pack, only the higher ranking wolves scratch mark, which fits well with Brave Sir Hogarth’s over-inflated and self-aggrandized sense of his position in our pack.

The tall grass and weeds are all brown and hibernating, of course, but still interesting to look at:

Having met my obligation to the hound, I dropped him off at home for his after lunch but before tea nap, and went to the airport to share another little jaunt with Papa Golf. The weather was nice enough for the prolonged preflight that I like to do when I haven’t flown for awhile, and everything on the plane looked good. The engine started with the alacrity and aplomb to which I have become accustomed, and all seemed in order.

A call to Bolton Ground resulted in taxi directions to runway 4, which was not unexpected given the light breeze out of the north. As I was heading down to the parallel taxiway, I saw one of the rental 172s heading back in. At just about the same time I saw him and realized that my ride out to the runway was obstructed, the ground controller amended my taxi clearance to “taxi to taxiway Alpha, hold at Alpha 3, the 172 is going to come up the main ramp.”

I was just passing the turn I would have to make if it were I that was going to divert to the main ramp and the 172 that would continue down Alpha, and my right foot, having such a short memory that all it could recall was having heard “main ramp,” and knowing that the opportunity for turning onto the main ramp was increasingly fleeting, hit the floor (taking the right rudder pedal along for the ride) and turned us onto the main ramp.

This, as you might expect, caught the controller somewhat unawares, and his nicely crafted plan to keep us little airplanes from meeting nose-to-nose fell apart around him. He quickly instructed the 172 to keep on truckin’ down the taxiway, and then patiently explained to me the multitude of ways that I am an idiot. Nicely, of course, as he’s one of the friendlier controllers. I knew already that my impetuous foot had led me astray, so there was nothing for it other than to reply with a weak “my bad,” and continue on my way.

The takeoff was happily non-eventful, and I soon had us up to 3000′ and loafing along at a fiscally responsible 1900 RPM, netting a ground speed of 132 knots. Having given no real thought to the topic of where exactly to fly to, I decided on-the-fly (so to speak) to head down to the south and overfly Deer Creek Lake, or more accurately, what’s left of it.

Now, I’m the first to poke fun at Saint Algore and his highly lucrative business of passing off periodic climatic trends as a cause worthy of the highest order of fruitless panic (and encourage others to donate! donate! donate! to the cause) while himself living a lifestyle of pervertedly conspicuous consumption, and I don’t believe for an instant that draconian masturbatory legislative acts such as the banning of incandescent lightbulbs will make one iota of a difference, but I cannot deny that we are in the throes of a drought:

Boat ramp to nowhere!

Sad, that, when considering the effort I recently put into building a boat.

Turning back to the north to head back to Bolton put me in the position of a nice, long straight in approach to the same runway that I had recently departed from. The tower asked for a position report when three miles out, and I actually remembered to comply. It would have been a bad day to forget, what with having already embarrassed myself once already.

I’ve been thinking of modifying my approaches a bit, with the idea that I might like to keep some altitude in the bank earning interest a little longer than I have been, having been using the same type of flat approach that I used to use in the Tampico. It makes for an easier landing, but has the unfortunate aspect of increased (albeit very slightly) risk of not having any options for a happy ending whatsoever if something untoward were to happen to the engine whilst dragging myself around the pattern.

First try today, then, for a higher approach. At about a mile and a half out on the straight-in final, I was doing an indicated 140 mph, and the altimeter was reporting 2,200′, which is 1,300′ above the ground. I pulled the throttle to idle and left the flaps up. I held altitude until we slowed to the best-glide speed of 100 mph, which is also maximum flap extension speed. That would be nice when it came time to drop the flaps, assuming I had excess altitude and/or airspeed to worry about. If it was the case that the glide got me to the runway at a good landing altitude, I planned on a no-flaps landing, which could be the case depending on the scenario I was faced with if ever doing this for real.

At 100 mph and a little less than 1 mile from the runway, it still looked like I was going to have altitude to spare, but I knew that it only felt that way because I was higher than my normal approach. A look at the 700 foot-per-minute descent rate disabused me of any thoughts that I might actually end up too high on the approach. Sure enough, as I got within a half mile or so of the runway it was apparent that I was sinking too quickly to make the runway. I experimented with slowing to 80 mph indicated, but that only exacerbated the problem. I finally had to use a little throttle to extend the glide far enough to reach the runway. While I wasn’t able to glide all the way to the runway, I did make it as far as the open grass area (open, yes, but watch out for those runway lights!) just short of the runway. It would have certainly been a survivable landing if I had actually had to make it. It was good practice too, and I intend to do it again.

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