Things were going well and running fine until I decided to take my friend James for a ride. He had never been in a small plane before, so he brought his daughter, who is about the same age as our oldest, and we took off for a sightseeing hop. After about 15 minutes, the engine…
Category: Flying
Entries Related to Flying
Symptoms of Losing the Idle Mixture Screw
We had some complicated plans for getting to Oshkosh Airventure 2014. The problem was that we had a wedding to go to in Boston on the Sunday before Oshkosh, and we had to be back at Oshkosh in time to set up the cookout on Tuesday. The plan we came up with was for me…
Using the GoPro on the Bearhawk
I’ve always been fascinated with the
37 Hours – Oil Cooler
Here’s an update from about 37 hours since the first flight. I found a few hours ago that I was getting high oil temperatures. This turned out to be an indication of several minor factors that were working together. First, the ambient temperatures started rising with the arriving spring season. Second, I didn’t really come…
Mobile Phone-Controlled Preheat
Now that I’m flying with some regularity, I’ve found all sorts of inconveniences that are wanting solutions. Â One example is the engine pre-heat. Â This is a little bit of a princess complaint, since the airport is only a mile from my house. Â Still, I don’t want to have to get in the car, drive to…
Gross Weight Testing
Today I continued adding ballast to the Bearhawk to test how it performs at heavier weights. My ballast is 80 pound bags of concrete, so I started with 160 pounds in the back seat. The weight wasn’t really noticable during a few stalls and some phugoid tests. Since I was flying with close to half…
Russ Erb Visit
I had a long overnight in LAX today, so I checked in with Russ Erb. His schedule was available for me to stop by for a visit, so I rented a car and drove up to the desert. I was excited about getting to catch up with Russ and discuss a few flight testing strategies,…
Flying Update
I have found that the engine is running a little less smooth than I think it should. This is a challenging problem, in part because it may be running just fine. I have a fair amount of experience in single-engine piston airplanes, but most of it is not in recent times. At idle, I hear…
The Bootstrap Method of Performance Analysis
The first part of flight testing was relatively easy to plan. For the first few hours, I was just interested in getting the airplane safely into the air and back on the ground. I began to find the edges of the center part of the envelope in as incremental of a way as possible. After…
Transponder Check
Yesterday’s flights went very well, and after a second thorough inspection, the airplane still looked like it was ready to fly. I took off and climbed up above the airport again, and all was still well, so I flew over to the avionics shop to get the transponder checked. This will allow me to turn…
First Flight
Last week I drove down to Charlotte to pick up the airworthiness certificate. I got back into town with it just as a cold front did, and it took these 9 days to get a day with the right combination of me being in town and the weather being good. The weather was perfect all…