Fragments

Bill called me at work the middle of last week to tell me the Cheetah was ready. I had a fleeting thought that the airplane might come up that day but had done nothing to arrange to pick it up. With Bill’s notice that it was ready, I called my wife to see when she could get off work. She couldn’t leave her work much before four p.m., which would put her home at five or later. Bill closed up shop at six, so with Galveston forty-five minutes away, I couldn’t wait on her. I left work at three, got home at about three twenty-five, let the dog out of his house-bound jail, got a drink and hit the bathroom, grabbed my flight gear, and departed the house at about four p.m. Southward, down the causeway of I-45 I drove in my Tacoma, reaching Galveston’s Scholes Field at about 4:45. I stopped in the Terminal for a few minutes and then gave Bill a call on my cell as I drove toward the airport gate closest to his hangar. I didn’t have to wait long; a guy in a silver sports car came through the gate, and I snuck through when it opened for him.

I keep swearing I’ll go by the airport office and get my own gate card I’m down at Galveston so much.

Bill met me as I parked my truck outside his hangar. The Cheetah was sitting outside the hangar, nose pointed inward, but otherwise looked ready to go. I pulled my flight bag and my aircraft’s engine log out of my truck and handed him the latter. He headed back toward his office to fill out the book but only got to the Cheetah when a black SUV pulled up and he went out to talk to its occupants. Placing my flight bag up on the Cheetah’s right wing, I climbed into the cockpit to pull the control lock out and do my other pre-flight cockpit checks. The SUV pulled away, Bill left to fill out my engine log, and I started my walk around, the first per-flight inspection of the airplane I’d done in about ten days. Funny how things change when you own your own airplane. When I was renting, I might fly twice a month and feel fairly proficient; now that I was an owner, ten days out of the airplane felt like a year.

Bill came back with the log book as I finished up my pre-flight. Despite the financial pain they had caused, I felt good about seeing the black Slick magnetos bolted to the engine, and the shiny, new, blue ignition harnesses winding to new, shiny-silver spark plugs.

“It’ll start a lot easier,” he told me. “Before it might have started on the second rev. Now, it’ll hit right away.”

“Great!” I said, as I hopped into the cockpit, hooking up my headset and strapping in. Starting hadn’t been a problem since we installed the Sky-Tec starter, and it had gotten slightly better after Bill had done the carburetor work a few weeks ago. I had a hard time imagining starting the airplane would get any better, but I always did like to think I was getting something new or better for my money.

I headed down the pre-start checklist, checking avionics off, pumping in two shots of primer, and turning on the Master and the electric fuel pump momentarily. The fuel pressure jumped up to about 5 psi, and I shut the fuel pump back off and switched the Mag switch to Left, calling “CLEAR PROP!”. No one was in front of me and Bill was to my right so I hit the Starter button. The engine roared to life! Oil pressure came up, so I switched my attention to turning on my beacon and navigational lights. The sun was rapidly going down, and its light was already fading. By the time I flew up to Pearland and picked up Connie and flew her back again, it would be truly dark. I made sure I laid two flashlights out on the passenger seat and installed the little LED lamp I used at night on the brim of my ballcap. I turned up the lights on the Cheetah’s instrument panel and they winked at me weakly. Better than nothing on a dark night, but that’s why I made sure my caplight and flashlights worked. I wasn’t quite ready to land the Cheetah in the dark with no lights, though I needed to be. (And could using the handheld radio I had in my flight bag to control Pearland’s runway lights.)

Slowly and deliberately, I worked through the Taxi checklist while listening to the automated weather, closed and latched the canopy, flipped my primary comm radio over to Ground and gave them a call, relaying my position and my desire to “taxi for takeoff VFR”. Ground cleared me to takeoff on runway 17 via taxiway Echo, which was the taxiway whose yellow stripe laid perpendicular maybe fifty yards in front of my nose. I goosed the throttle a bit and the airplane rolled forward. Just past the hangars on my right, I turned right and positioned the airplane just off the taxiway before turning left to point my nose down the runway and stopping to perform the Before Takeoff checklist. Holding the brakes while I ran the engine up to 1800 rpm, I flipped the mag switch from Both to Left to Both to Right to Both, marking the mag drops as I did. Interestingly, the mag drops were now reversed from what they had been before being replaced, i.e., the right mag now dropped only 100 while the left mag dropped 150. That surprised me; I had thought I’d see less drop than that, even though they were still within limits, though barely so. The rest of the engine checked out fine, so I throttled back and continued to configure the airplane for takeoff. Once I was done, I taxied the airplane up to the taxiway line and followed it to the hold short for runway 17 where I switched up to the tower frequency.

“Galveston tower, November Niner-Eight-Four-Eight-Uniform, ready for takeoff on One Seven VFR, “ I said.

“November Niner-Eight-Four-Eight-Uniform, cleared for takeoff on Runway 17. Say direction of departure.”

“Northwest.”

“Right-turn out approved.”

Slowly, I advanced the throttle, moving the airplane out toward the runway centerline. As I reached it, I kicked in left rudder and pushed the throttle the rest of the way in so I was at full power as I swung onto the centerline. The airplane pushed me gently back into my seat as the runway began moving past. As my airspeed indicator hit 60, I raised the nose, and a few moments later, the airplane gently lifted off and climbed into the sky.

My climb rate was barely hitting 500 feet per minute, not great for a cool day. I hit three hundred feet and let it climb another hundred before rolling to the right and turning back toward Pearland before I flew directly over the five or six story condo that laid directly in my path. As I stopped the turn on about a three-zero-zero heading, I looked down and to my right at the black asphalt on runway 13 and then turned my attention back to my airplane and its climb. I turned the fuel pump off as I passed a thousand feet; and suspecting the airplane was still running too rich, I pulled the mixture out to lean and watched the RPM jump up over 100 rpm and the associated climb rate increase to over 500. The rough running and low performance problems were still there, as I suspected they would be. I was convinced, despite Bill’s earlier work on my carburetor, that something was still wrong with the carb. There could be no other explanation for what was happening.

I leveled off at sixteen hundred feet and motored toward Pearland as I switched over the radios to listen to Houston Approach. To my right, the BP petroleum plant at Texas City was lit up with white lights; while ahead the sporadic multi-colored clusters of lights showed where humans were huddling together in townships and small cities. While I could only see the lights of airliners far ahead and above me as they made their electronic ways into Hobby, I listened as Houston Approach worked them and others I couldn’t see in the airspace around me. I didn’t hear anything that appeared to be a threat, so as the GPS showed me I was only six miles from Pearland, I switched the voice radios over to Pearland’s frequencies and announced my position.

For a few moments, I was in bliss. The airplane hummed along quite contentedly as I scanned the skies and ground trying to take in what I was seeing: all the cars, lights on, moving down the grey ribbons, dotted by yellow-light spotlights, that were I-45; a few moving lights far away that were other airplanes up in the sky, the multi-colored lights that only made stronger the impression that the homes and businesses below were toys. I was the giant, yet small and far away above.

Amid the lights ahead, I saw a rectangular dark area lined with lights I first thought was Pearland’s airport. I clicked the radio five times to make sure I’d turned the runway lights up and stared some more. Out of my peripheral, I caught a glance of something just left of the nose that looked more like it, turned and looked, confirming it was the Pearland airport. I was in a good position to angle into a left downwind for runway 14, so I called that over the radios as I maneuvered into it. Abeam the runway and mid-field, I pulled the power back and completed the Landing Checklist as I slowly pulled the nose up to both hold altitude and slow to my no-flaps landing speed. Ahead, the lights of Hobby airport and downtown Houston blended together in the darkening sky; but my only focus was now the rectangular, white-light lined runway to my left. Keeping its end in sight even as it blinked out behind some trees, I trimmed the airplane up to hold 75 as I rolled left onto base leg. Picking up the approach end of the runway, I glanced at the altimeter and found I was at 600 feet, slightly below where I needed to be to do a flaps down landing. Rather then bringing on power, I decided to hold what I had and land flaps up.

As I glided down final, I got a few knots fast and by the time I readjusted the nose, it was obvious my touchdown point was going to be further down the runway than I had wanted but still before the turn-off’s into the Terminal and parking areas. I landed normally and then got on the brakes a bit to get me slow enough to make the second exit, one that led directly to the taxiway into the Cheetah’s covered tie-down. I pulled the canopy open as I turned her right to exit the runway. As I taxied past the two lines of airplanes that line the ramp area parallel to the runway, I saw a car with only its parking lights on waiting for me to taxi past it. I could tell the car was Connie’s; she was waiting for me to park so she could climb aboard.

I taxied down the little road to our “hangar”, turned the airplane left to taxi closer to it, and then spun the airplane left to park before shutting down its lights, engine, and power. Once the engine stopped, I heard Connie step up on the wind and could see her dark silhouette holding out her purse. Taking it from her, I out it behind her seat and then laid out her seat belts and headset chords so she could enter. She stepped down into the seat, and then placing a foot down on the floor, lowered the rest of her torso into it. She strapped in as I pulled up my checklist and prepared to start the engine again.

“How does it fly?” she asked.

“It starts right up,” I said, “but the mixture problem is still there, and the new mags didn’t lower the oil temperature any as Bill had hoped.”

“Well, we knew we needed new mags anyway,” she said, trying to put the best spin on things.

Nodding, I started running through my preflight checks. I again yelled for everyone to clear the prop, hit the starter button, and the Cheetah started right up. I ran through the taxi checklist while listening to the automated weather report, turning on instrument and navigational lights, checking that the intercom worked, and configuring the radios for taxi. Then, I advanced the throttle and we taxied forward over the grass, turning right onto the small asphalt incline taking us toward the ramp.

We taxied up to the ramp and turned left to roll between the lines of parked airplanes, past the small grey Terminal building and the round, white gas tank the airport fueled from, onto another taxiway that turned right and led to a small run-up area and then the runway. I spun the airplane into the run-up area and stopped, leaving the landing light on to help me catch movement out of my peripheral vision if any occurred during the run-up. The airplane checked out again, so we taxied out to the taxiway parallel the runway and headed down it. I clicked the radio’s microphone five times to bring the runway lights up, then spotted a coyote on the left edge of the taxiway thankfully making a hasty retreat. Connie missed seeing him entirely.

At the end of the runway, I closed up the canopy, pushed the mixture to rich, turned the fuel pump on, called the take-off checklist complete (even as I checked that the mags were on Both) and looked for traffic. Not seeing any, I broadcasted we were taking runway 14 for departure and were headed southeast as I pushed the throttle in and the Cheetah accelerated down the runway. We lifted off into the dark, climbing at only about four hundred feet per minute. I pulled us up to best angle to get some altitude, and then once we hit five hundred feet, very carefully leaned the mixture until the engine pepped up. As we climbed through one thousand feet, I switched the electric fuel pump off and switched the radio to Houston Approach. He was very busy and several of his customers were shooting approaches into Ellington. I spotted the Coast Guard aircraft he was talking to several miles away but level with us and traveling in almost exactly an opposite heading. We heard a NASA T-38 maneuvering for the approach, too, and though I was uncertain of exactly where he was knew he wa above us, for now. As we pressed south, I heard approach vectoring a Cessna for the ILS 13 at Galveston. I told Connie that was the guy we needed to watch out for.

A few minutes later, as we passed west of Texas City, I heard the Cessna switch to tower frequency and followed him over. We heard a Citation call “departing Galveston for closed traffic” and spotted a large cluster of white lights a little above us and just east of the airport we knew represented him. The Cessna called his position at about eight miels north, to which I responded by calling our position as eight miles northwest as I spotted him co-altitude and landing light pointed toward us at the moment. He responded by saying he didn’t have us in sight, to which I responded he was at our nine o’clock and I had him in sight. (A better response would have been to tell him we were about three miles away on his nose and co-altitude.) The Citation volunteered to take a long downwind to let us both get in, so I held my speed up at 120 miles an hour all the way down the pike as we lined up with runway 13 and its rabbit-like approach lights. I flew the four ball VASI down until we were a couple of hundred feet above the runway and then pulled the power back to slow down the best I could. We touched down just short if the white instrument landing marks but going much too fast to make the first turn-off at taxiway delta, so I let the airplane roll and let the guys behind me know (over the radios) I was going to be rolling to runway 17 and turning off there. I did exactly that as the Cessna finished a low approach and the Citation turned in.

The tower was closed and I was the only one going in or out, so the airfield was strangely quiet. There was dust all over the ramp and taxiways from some ramp repair underway, and our yellow taxiway line disappeared in the dark. I taxied us slowly because of that and maneuvered by the blue edge lights marking the taxiways and around the saw horses that protected the construction areas. Once clear of all that, I turned us toward Bill’s hangar and the dim white outline of my Tacoma sitting outside it.

As we approached, we saw that Bill’s hangar door was only half-way down; and that made me wonder if he was still there. It was an hour after closing time; but as we pulled up to drop Connie up so we could drive the truck back, I saw Bill waiting to greet us. As I shut the airplane down and Connie and I got out, I said, “I need you to go flying with me.” I was convinced that the only way he was really going to understand the problem was to see it himself.

“The engine roughness is still there, “ I continued. “It smooths out when I lean it and the RPM jumps up at least one hundred RPM.”

Bill looked shocked. It was obvious he thought he had fixed the problem.

“Do you want to leave it?” he asked.

Well, that wasn’t what I had planned to do, but flying it like it was simply was not acceptable. I quickly changed my mind.

“Yeah, I guess so,” I said.

We talked about the signatures I had seen: the roughness at full throttle, leaning it out at full throttle made the RPM leap up from 100-150 RPM, sluggish climb performance, and for that trip out, no carb heat RPM drop. We thought that perhaps the carb heat was on all the time so it was dumping heat into the carburetor, something that would match all the symptoms. He said he’d look into it first thing in the morning.

The next morning, I did get a call.

“Well, we’ve confirmed it was what you thought it was,” he said. “I ran it up to full throttle and Robby could see it puffing out black smoke. I leaned it out and the RPM jumped up a little over 100, just like you said. It’s something in the carburetor,” he said. “But I need some time to think about it. I don’t understand right now what’s going on.”

A few days later, Bill told me he wanted to overhaul the carburetor. He had mounted the same model carb from a Cessna 172 and mounted it on my engine and got 100 more static RPM and no engine roughness at full throttle. He wasn’t finding anything major wrong with mine, but was seeing a lot of the small valves and jets had dents or other small imperfections. It made sense that a carb overhaul might finally fix it; there really wasn’t much left except for overhauling the engine itself. So, I’m waiting now for this to play itself out. Bill said the parts would be in Thursday and it wouldn’t take long after that to get my bird up.

I’m hoping I might get a chance to fly it this weekend.

Dodging a Bullet

A few weeks after we got the airplane out of annual, Connie and I took off on a cross-country flight to Branson, MO. We were going to meet her family there to celebrate her mother’s eightieth birthday. As always, the flight started by sneaking out of Houston under the Class B, level at fifteen hundred feet as we pressed east. As we passed the fifteen nautical mile circle from Hobby, I climbed us up to twenty five hundred feet and then squeeked us up a couple of hundred feet more to avoid the possibility of hitting anyone flying west at their even plus five altitude. I had to wait a bit before I could climb up any higher; we were staying under the Class B shelves a little longer than we normally did to angle more northeast and stay over dry land.

As we left Baytown and then the Taylor County airport behind us, we exited out from under the Class B rings and became clear to climb. Our course would take us just slightly east of north, so our correct cruise altitude was “odd plus five”. I planned to climb us up to three thousand five hundred for now. I shoved the throttle forward, and then engine responded, but roughly! Connie wasn’t saying anything, but I knew something wasn’t right. The outside air temperature had been in the seventies on the ground, so the first thing that popped into my mind was the possibility of carburetor icing. I pulled the carb heat full out and the engine seemed to smooth out a bit, so I left it for a minute or so and out it back in. The engine got rough again, so I applied carb heat again, and it smoothed out; when I reduced carb heat and the engine got rough again, I realized that carburetor icing was not the problem. My airplane’s engine has always run rich, so I started leaning the mixture back to see what would happen. Engine operation smoothed right out, so I continued the climb, checking my engine’s parameters, which all appeared normal. We leveled off at thirty-five hundred a few minutes later and everything seemed fine, so I climbed us up to fifty-five hundred where we leveled off for the rest of the flight.

We hit Branson the same weekend that a bunch of other Grumman owners were flying in. While we didn’t run in to them during our Saturday and Saturday night there, we did happen to be out at the airport and parked just off the departure end of the runway, when most of them were departing. I’ve long suspected that, while Cheetahs are not know for their stellar climb performance, ours was worse that the average Cheetah. While it was often impossible to tell whether any particular four-seat Grumman was a Traveler, Cheetah, or Tiger, some of them were marked with the model name. All in all, they were all airborne by the time they hit a third of the runway length. When we took off, we didn’t lift off until we had eaten up just under half the runway length. There were moments when I wondered if we were going to get off…

Returning home, at fifty-five hundred feet I could only get two-hundred feet per minute climb.

A few days after I got back, using the pilot’s operating handbook, the actual performance I had observed, and one of my old college airplane performance textbooks, I calculated we were 18 horsepower short of where we were supposed to be. I had assumed standard day conditions which, of course, we didn’t have; so the actual number was probably less than that. Still, it was confirming my feelings that something just wasn’t right. Our fuel consumption rate seemed to confirm that; it normally was 8.5 gallons per hour and on this flight it had been 10!

I called my mechanic and discussed what was going on. We had not really looked into the carburetor, and that made sense as a good place to start. So, he dug into it and found the throttle plate bushings were extremely worn (causing some internal leakage within the carburetor) and the accelerator pump had a hole in it, reducing overall gas flow to a trickle of its expected self.

Despite my mechanic’s prediction the airplane would accelerate much faster, I couldn’t sense any added speed down the runway when I lifted off. I climbed the bird up to thirty-five hundred feet and forty-five hundred feet on a couple of occasions, and climb performance didn’t seem to improve but did seem to hang in longer before falling off. At about five thousand feet, I was seeing about four hundred feet per minute. But I also noticed a pronounced engine roughness at full throttle, even as low as fifteen hundred feet. I took the airplane back with that complaint about two weeks later.

Bill thought the carburetor might be dumping too much gas in at full throttle, so he checked it. It seemed to be set correctly, so he did a run-up and noticed that the engine ran rough when running on the L mag, even though the mag drops where within limits. He checked the associated plugs and found one on the number 2 cylinder was oil-fouled. He cleaned it up and tried it again, and it oil-fouled almost immediately. Feeling that the problem might be in the magnetos, he took them apart and found that the left mag was about to fail due to some cracked parts. He also borescoped the number 2 cylinder and determined there was blow-by past the rings and on the intake valve side, but thought the cylinder had some more life in it before being overhauled. (He estimated 200-300 hours. We had only one cylinder that showed anything a bit off in compressions, and I didn’t think it was the #2.) He called and told me the mags were about to fail and would have had I flown it much longer before calling him in. We had dodged an “engine-failure bullet”, though the failure might have produced only a precautionary landing rather than a full off-field spot landing.

I was happy about the whole thing from two standpoints. First, I hadn’t had to deal with either a precautionary landing or a full fledged engine failure. Secondly, we had been given a ‘heads-up” that the number 2 cylinder would need to be overhauled soon. That gave us time to get funds together to ensure we could cover it.

While we had dodged the bullet from the safety standpoint, we obviously got hit from a financial one. We had just paid for the annual a few months ago, and the projected costs of the carburetor work were going to eat up most of the funds we had managed to save above that. That put us in the hole when it came to paying for the magnetos themselves and for the accompanying labor. To deal with it, I took out a loan to pay off my credit cards, pay for these airplane repairs, and generate enough spare cash to create a hedge against the cylinder overhaul costs but to perhaps improve either the avionics package or the interior of the airplane. I’ve looked at our finances for days, and that approach seemed to be the best solution.

I’m pushing our finances as hard as I can; and, truthfully, one more major upset will put us in the position of having to sell the airplane, whether we want to or not. That would probably knock me out of flying for a short while, but sometimes there are other things more important than keeping me in the air.