What’s a $100.00 hamburger? I’ll get to that later.
My first flight was on Monday the 15th and then we had a few days of bad weather. On Friday morning the winds were calm and the sky clear so I got to the airport before sunrise to see if I could add to my forty minutes of flying time in N90HS. I was in luck and took her up for her second test flight. No ground crew this time and no parachute but I did stay over the airport. The flight was pretty similar to the first one except longer and I used higher power settings for “cruise”. I also experimented with slow flight with 11 degrees of flaps. I can set the flaps at any setting between 0 and 22 degrees but only have 0, 11 and 22 degrees marked near the lever. There are large pitch changes when flaps are extended or retracted. Nose down for extension and back up for retraction. I was ready for this from my training in the Super Sport back in January. She flew great so I brought her back in, landed, taxied to the hangar and took all of the cowlings off again. Just over an hour for this flight and no problems.
That evening the winds were light so I went flying again for about an hour. Climbed up over the airport and experimented with full flaps (22 degrees). With almost 6 hours on the engine (3 taxiing and almost three in flight) I had few concerns with it so I decided to do some “pattern work”. Take offs and landings in the traffic pattern around the airport. I need to learn how to fly this airplane and one takeoff and one landing per flight was not giving me much practice. The reason for not doing this until the engine had more time is that there is a vulnerable point after takeoff where I would not be able to land on the runway ahead of me but my altitude would not be high enough to have many options for landing. There are some fields around the airport and I scoped them all out before the first test flight but they are not optimal. I have no doubt that I would be OK but I really don’t want to bend my new airplane. The pattern work went well and the sun was setting so back to the hangar she went after filling up the fuel tanks. I had burned off 14 gallons during my taxi testing and first three test flights. Cowlings off, no issues.
On Saturday morning I got out early and flew for about an hour. Just pattern work. Trying to teach myself how to fly this airplane with some finesse. I’m not there yet but I’m working at it. Then it was time for some real flying.
Around noon I departed CFD for my first trip to another airport. Two friends, Margaret and Jerry, flew in their Classic IV’s. So the three of us flew to Brenham Texas for lunch. There is a very popular restaurant at the airport in Brehnam that has delicious hamburgers. Pilots refer to this sort of cuisine as the “$100 Hamburger”. Which is probably a little on the low side if you were to amortize the annual cost of aircraft ownership over a few dozen hamburgers. But, it is a general aviation tradition that I have been looking forward to participating in and now, just one week after my inspection, I am doing just that.
Brenham is a VERY popular destination on nice weekends. There was a lot of traffic around that airport but everyone expects this and is very diligent about broadcasting their position on the radio and working to make things run smoothly and safely. There is no control tower so it is up to the pilots to look after each other. Every so often there is a bad apple or two that don’t want to play by the rules. I had to fly the pattern twice due to a Cirrus pilot who decided to ignore the traffic pattern and fly a five mile final approach. On departure the same plane decided to do an intersection take off as I was rolling onto the end of the runway for departure. Seems that pilots with fast airplanes feel they have the right to make their own rules to avoid the need to “waste” any of their precious time. The rest of us just have to keep an eye out for them. So, here I am parked back in a corner on the ramp as it was the only space available. The wait for lunch was 45 minutes but there were plenty of nice airplanes to check out.
You can see here that the ramp is so full that Jerry parked in the grass. Yes, his airplane looks a lot like mine. Above his wing, you can see the back of Margaret’s airplane. They both arrived shortly before me. Way in the back by the hangar you can see my airplane. You may have noticed that both Jerry’s and Margaret’s airplanes have slightly longer wings than mine. I built my airplane with removable wing sections so I can fly it with either long or short wings. So far I have only flown with the short wings. With the shorter wings the “wing loading” is higher and closer to aircraft I have more experience in so I decided to fly it this way first. I’ll try out the long wings when I am more comfortable with her.
This is Jerry with his pride and joy. He built it himself in his garage and has been flying it for over a year now. His 40 hour test period was flown off a long time ago so he can go pretty much anywhere and he seems to be talking about flying to the EAA Airventure air show in Oshkosh WI this summer. I am planning on being there. I have never been and always told myself that I would attend when I could fly an airplane I built to the show. Hopefully this will be the year. The return to CFD was uneventful and my fifth and sixth test flights were complete and my appetite was sated. Not a bad day.