Smoky View

When my work phone rang the other day and my aircraft mechanic’s phone number sprang up on the caller i.d., I figured he wasn’t calling to say he was finished with the airplane’s annual.

“I’ve got news,” Bill said after I answered. “Sitting down kind of news. Are you sitting down?”

“Yeah. Shoot”.

"You need a new windshield. This one’s cracked.”

Now, that wasn’t totally unexpected. I had seen some small cracks in the windshield down near the mounting screws. They weren’t radiating outward beyond the mounting base, so I wasn’t sure if replacing the windshield would be necessary. But I also knew that Bill had hinted not long after we bought the airplane that he would want to replace it. So, I half-expected him to tell me we’d have to do it this annual though I was hoping to get another year.

“That’s the bad news,” he said. “The good news is they’re available and you’ve got your choice of three colors…”

One of the things you must account for when owning a 30 year old airplane is you have some reasonable possibility of getting replacement parts. Many Grumman owners turn to David Fletcher and company for that; and though I didn’t ask Bill where he was getting the replacement windshield from, I suspected he was buying from Fletcher. Not that it mattered…

“…clear, green, and grey. The clear costs about four hundred and seventy-six dollars and the grey and green about twenty-percent more. Robby keeps saying that green is so dated, but that’s what you had in there.”

Frankly, I was taking Bill’s word for that. I really hadn’t noticed the tint. I was trying to roll over in my mind the impacts of using grey or green. I had been wearing grey tinted glasses for years and liked them, so my first instinct was to order the grey. But at that moment, as Bill waited silently on the phone, I wasn’t sure what to do. Besides, my wife was half-owner. The last thing I wanted to do was stick something in the airplane my wife and its other half-owner was going to be unhappy with.

“Grey will go with anything,” Bill said. “Green goes with your yellow upholstery, but if you ever change…”

“I like the grey,” I said, “but honestly I need to get back to you after I talk to Connie. I’ll call you back as soon as I can.”

I managed to get Connie on her cell phone, told her what our choices were, and that the green was what had been in there. She wasn’t sure about the grey but agreed to it when I told her I had been wearing grey tinted glasses for years and really liked them. I called Bill back and told him to order the grey. He said it would take a week to get it here, and my heart sank. Though I knew from working with Bill previously that our airplane could easily be down a month getting the annual done, I had hoped it wouldn’t be the case. Ordering the windshield guaranteed I wouldn’t get the airplane back for another week and probably two and it had already been down two. While the weather had been hot as hell and not very comfortable for flying, I still missed not being able to hop into the plane and take off.

No one likes to get a phone call that says you’ve got to spend more money on your airplane to keep it airworthy. But that phone call is a hell of a lot better than one calling your friends and family telling them you were killed or injured in an aircraft, especially if the accident was due to failure of a component you could have replaced and knew you needed to.

Down and Out on an Annual

My friend Jim, who is an aircraft owner, pilot, and CFI, says you’re not an aircraft owner until you’ve been through your first annual. Well, we’re there now; I flew the airplane down to Galveston (GLS) on Memorial Day and dropped it off with my favorite mechanic, Bill Wynn. The hangar seemed kind of empty when I was there; in fact, Bill hooked a tow bar to it and pulled it into the hangar even before I got out. He said he thought they might start on it “tomorrow”; but I called him yesterday (Thursday), three days after I dropped it off, and he admitted they hadn’t really done anything to it, yet. I’ve been telling Connie we’ll be lucky if we get the airplane back in three weeks, a month if things take a little longer than expected. It seems a bit ridiculous to me to lose out on using your airplane for a month for a yearly inspection, but that seems to be the way it is.

I flew it down Monday afternoon after thunderstorms had clobbered the area in the morning, pouring down 10 inches of rain on the northeast side of Houston. By noon, the storms were giving way to blue sky and temperatures in the high seventies. I took Connie out to eat at our favorite restaurant, the Flying Dutchman, over in Kemah, calling Bill on the way via my cell phone to make sure he would be there in the afternoon. He called me back moments later to say he would be. So, after lunch, Connie and I drove home to pick up my flight gear and then out to the airport to preflight the Cheetah. Everything checked out and it had plenty of gas in it, so I gave Connie my handheld radio and showed her how to call up 123.45 on it. We’d use it when we could to coordinate things, and I told her I’d switch up that frequency just as soon as I cleared the airport traffic pattern.

The Cheetah’s been hard to start lately, though it’s mostly the fault of the pilot who’s having to readjust his starting technique more than he remembered with the onset of hot weather. Regardless, I got the engine started on my second attempt, though the battery didn’t seem to be supporting restarts as well as it used to. As I taxied away from our carport, Connie hopped into our Montero and started driving to a parking spot from which she could see my take-off. I set the altimeter and listened to the winds on the ASOS as I taxied the airplane down the line and over to a run-up area on the airport’s north side. Leaving the canopy cracked open to stay cool, I performed the engine
run-up and take-off checks, but readjusted the mixture to lean for taxi and left the fuel pump off. It’s a fairly long haul down to the takeoff end of runway 14 from where I was; I made a radio call alerting everyone to my taxi down to 14 and told myself, “Fuel pump, mixture, and canopy to go” as I guided the airplane out onto the taxiway, letting her gain some knots as she ambled down it so the rudder would get effective enough for me to stay off the brakes. As I reached the end of the taxiway and the runway, I pulled up to the hold short and stopped the airplane to finish the takeoff checklist. Mixture full in, fuel pump switch on, and canopy closed and checked locked.

“Pearland Traffic, November Niner Eight Niner Eight Uniform, departing runway One Four,” I called.

I taxied the airplane out onto the runway, smoothly pushing in the throttle as I turned the ship to align it with the runway centerline. The winds were zero six zero at eleven, meaning I had a fair crosswind from my left. My feet danced on the rudder pedals to keep us straight down the centerline, and I pulled back on the yoke, rotating the nose up, as we hit 60 mph. The airplane seemed content to just fly nose up for a second and then it lifted off. I yawed her a little left to track the centerline and pushed the nose over, leveling off at about ten feet, to let us accelerate down the runway. As the treeline approached and then end of the runway disappeared beneath me, I pulled up smoothly to zoom climb a whole three hundred feet, settling the airspeed down just above best angle of climb airspeed at eighty. Easing the nose over a little, I let the airspeed climb to best rate at about ninety and then held the climb there to get some altitude. Rolling left slightly, I rolled onto the familiar 122 degree heading that would take me to Galveston, turned off my electric fuel pump at a thousand feet, and switch the radio over to 123.45 once I was convinced there was no other Pearland traffic.

“Connie, are you up?” I asked over the radio.

“Yep,” she replied. “That was a cool takeoff.”

“Thanks,” I answered, knowing full well that the guys flying RV’s, if they had seen it, were out there thinking, “Is that all he can do?”

The sky above me was a bright blue with some thin clouds at about four or five thousand feet. The air was fairly smooth, though the GPS ground speed was only reading about 98 knots and I was having to fly a one one zero heading or so to maintain my one two five track. The winds were out of the east southeast at about twenty knots.

The collection of homes that marked Friendswood fell behind me as I crossed the grey, six lane ribbon of FM528 also known as NASA Road 1. I kept an eye out for traffic heading toward or away from Ellington but saw no one else. I started scanning the southbound lanes of Interstate 45. Connie had been concerned she’s get caught in traffic heading toward the Island now that the storms had cleared out. But I figured that most folks who wanted to be in Galveston were already there; and, if anything, our biggest risk was getting caught in traffic trying to leave it. Traffic heading toward the Island looked relatively light, and visibility was so good I could see the highway all the way down to where it curved onto the causeway.

“I’m over Dickinson,” I called to Connie over the radio. “The traffic on the Interstate looks pretty light.”

“Can you see the bridge?”

“I can see all the way down to it. I really don’t think you’re going to have any problems at all.”

“Thanks,” she replied.

I flew on down past the four lane that peeled off toward Texas City as if it were a cement vine growing east off the Interstate. The GPS was clicking off the miles, and I was fast coming up on the point where I wanted to switch over to the radio frequency for Galveston’s tower.

“Connie, are you still up?” I asked.

I got no reply. I tried again but still heard nothing, so I switched up to Galveston Tower. I reported my position and intentions, and the tower cleared me for a left downwind entry to runway 35. From my position, I could fly the perfect forty-five degree entry to downwind with only a slight tweak of my nose. I was asked to report at three miles and I was still about seven out, so I began a slight descent from sixteen hundred down toward the one thousand foot pattern altitude. As I was crossing the bay, a helicopter called to depart and the tower cleared him out, advising him and me of each other’s position. I called “no joy” and swung the airplane into downwind, throttling back, completing my landing checklist, and slowing my airplane down.

I wasn’t exactly sure where the winds were but had a feeling I might have a bit of tailwind now, so I was watching for a groundspeed increase as I turned final. Indeed, I did see one and wound up really working to get the airplane down evenly, touching down just at the intersection of runways 35 and 31. Taxiway Delta was ahead and I headed toward it but the tower cleared me to taxi down 35 to Charlie, so I pressed on, watching a Cessna 150 taxi past me on the parallel taxiway and in the other direction. Off at Charlie, I switched to Ground frequency as instructed and reported “up”, and Ground cleared me to taxi to parking. Turning left, I taxied over to Bill’s hangar to find a Piper Cherokee also sitting outside it. Swinging around it, I parked my airplane at Bill’s door, shut down, and recorded my flight time in the aircraft’s log and on my kneepad for later transfer to my own logbook.

Bill surprised me by coming out to the airplane with a tug-type towbar in hand and connected it up to the airplane, pushing me and it into his hangar as I finished putting my gear in my bag. Hopping out, I shook his hand and we talked about getting into the annual. I showed him a list of five other small maintenance items I wanted to roll into the annual, and I dug into my airframe log to see how long the current battery had been in the airplane to find out it had been two years. Based on that and the number of times we had run the battery down this year, I asked Bill to replace the thing.

We stood at the front of the hangar waiting for Connie to catch up to me; she showed up almost a half hour after I arrived. We said “goodbye” to Bill and to our airplane, hoping that he wouldn’t find too much wrong with the airplane he needed to fix and that we would have the airplane back in a couple of weeks.

Here’s hoping a hurricane doesn’t REALLY screw up our plans!