It flies again
I flew my airplane today.
In and of itself not big news. But it's been down for seven months after a catastrophic engine failure. I haven't written about it. History and all. But it is enough to say that my engine self-destructed on takeoff in early June - I'd only owned the airplane a couple of weeks. I made it back to the runway and landed.
I have been working for many months to negotiate a new engine. It worked.
We got it all back together 12 days ago, and it started instantly. Then we found a rather important sensor was broken, so we've waited for a new one to come.
Today Mechanic Bob called to say it was time. We fired it up, and went to the far north end of Boeing Field. It's 10,000 feet long - it's a huge runway. We powered up, flew the length of the field, did a left turn, flew the pattern and landed, took it back to the hangar and disassembled some things and looked around. It was all fine.
So we went off for a real flight. Took it out to the Cascade foothills and did some laps north and south, took notes, watched everything. Not a single thing happened that we thought, "gotta look into that..." Usually there's a thing or two, but not this time.
It runs like it's supposed to now. No more mysteries. I just need to learn to trust it again.
This is Bob the Mechanic, who was along as an extra set of eyes. And I think also to say, "I trust it. It's fine. Don't worry." And he was right. It was totally ordinary. It also looks like I might have woken him up with this turn.
And this is the machine post-flight. I finally exhaled about here.
In and of itself not big news. But it's been down for seven months after a catastrophic engine failure. I haven't written about it. History and all. But it is enough to say that my engine self-destructed on takeoff in early June - I'd only owned the airplane a couple of weeks. I made it back to the runway and landed.
I have been working for many months to negotiate a new engine. It worked.
We got it all back together 12 days ago, and it started instantly. Then we found a rather important sensor was broken, so we've waited for a new one to come.
Today Mechanic Bob called to say it was time. We fired it up, and went to the far north end of Boeing Field. It's 10,000 feet long - it's a huge runway. We powered up, flew the length of the field, did a left turn, flew the pattern and landed, took it back to the hangar and disassembled some things and looked around. It was all fine.
So we went off for a real flight. Took it out to the Cascade foothills and did some laps north and south, took notes, watched everything. Not a single thing happened that we thought, "gotta look into that..." Usually there's a thing or two, but not this time.
It runs like it's supposed to now. No more mysteries. I just need to learn to trust it again.
This is Bob the Mechanic, who was along as an extra set of eyes. And I think also to say, "I trust it. It's fine. Don't worry." And he was right. It was totally ordinary. It also looks like I might have woken him up with this turn.
And this is the machine post-flight. I finally exhaled about here.
posted by C at 4:54 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home