Chapter Seven

July 1st, 2006

The grease gun and I have become friends. We have developed a close personal relationship.

I'm very interested in aviation. I've tried to think of ways to slip in a little of my interest into the chapters on flying coast to coast in a 1929 Bird biplane. WoooHooo, I found it.

Getting weathered out of the sky isn't much fun and it's really easy to accept the fact that I can't fly because it isn't safe. If it isn't perfect I don't go. In reality I think there has only been one day that I maybe could have flown but didn't. It was a bad day to start but it got better in the afternoon. I waited and the next day was perfect and I flew on.

There was a question about what I wear while flying. I have my homeless clothes to fly in. The leather helmet isn't something I wear because I want to be 'stylin' vintage. It really is a necessity. There is a cloth version but I don't have one in cloth. The fingerless gloves work well when I'm flying above four thousand feet. It gets cold and I do have a slight draft in my office when I'm at altitude.

There are lots of cute adages in Aviation. One is that the propeller is actually a fan to keep the pilot from sweating. The proof is that when the propeller quits the pilot breaks out in a sweat.

I'm in Fort Wayne Indiana. I had two choices of airports here. The big one or the little one. I landed at the small airport and one of the first people I meet is Geoff. He's the President of the National Vintage Aircraft Association. No kidding. He likes my vintage airplane. There's a whole pile of people in the USA. Only one of them is the President of the Vintage Aircraft Association and I meet him here. He has a hangar full of aviation tools and is willing to let me use any of them. He also drives me all the way to the opposite side of Fort Wane to the big airport to pick up my rental car. What a treat this guy is, funny too. (Just as a side note. My rental car is a 2007 Chevy Cobalt LS and it's twelve dollars and forty eight cents a day. $12.48 a day. I wouldn't rent my best friend a car for $12.48 a day.)

I need to change the oil on my plane. I'm early with the oil change but I think it best if I do it now so when I get a good day to fly I don't loose time to maintenance.

I'm parked in a large hangar that was built in 1926. There are about ten planes in the hangar. My antique is parked next to the two newest ones. The picture of the white airplane with my biplane in the background is a Cirrus. It and the blue one in the other photo are the future of aviation. The white Cirrus has a rocket launched whole airplane recovery parachute built in at the factory. Yup, it really will parachute the entire airplane, people and all back to earth. The blue one is a LanceAir. It will fly at twenty thousand plus feet in a fully pressurized cabin and go about two hundred and fifty miles an hour. It'll go a thousand miles in four hours.

Oddly enough I don't covet either of them. I love the fact that my instrument panel is so simple. I don't have much to monitor. I can see and hear and smell my engine. It's right up there exposed to the elements. They have tons of widgets wired up to their engines. They have temperature gages for each cylinder and even have a probe in each exhaust port to read the exhaust gas temperature right as the flame exits each cylinder. They know the temperature of the gasses in and out of the turbo charger. They know the outside air temperature too. I think of them as systems managers. I'm flying.

I love to photograph their airplanes. They are so sleek. The light from the hangar windows plays like liquid on the side of the LanceAir. It slips through the air with very little resistance. No wires out dragging in the wind.

Those airplanes are built out of fiberglass and resin. Some are even made from carbon fiber that is tougher than steel and lighter than Aluminum.

My airplane is made from wood and cloth. The wings are made from little bitty sticks glued together to form the shape of a wing from the front edge to the back edge. These are the ribs and they are glued and fastened about a foot apart to a main spar that goes from where I sit out to the tip of each wing. The main spar is a little bigger than four inches by six inches and about sixteen feet long and is made from one hand picked piece of straight-grained wood with little wood gussets glued to it for strength. (For my European friends. One hundred millimeters by one hundred and fifty millimeters and about five meters long.) The wing looks "spindly" until the next part happens. In the next step the wing is covered with cloth. Yes, cloth. The cloth is literally sewn on to the wood ribs and main spar. You use a long needle that will reach from top to bottom on the wing and you actually sew the top cloth to the bottom cloth. There are many stitches. You then cover where the stitches go with a ribbon of cloth cut with pinking shears. If you look close you can see the little triangles on the edges of all the fabric that covers the wings. Most of the hull is fabric covered too. It is then coated with a glue called "Dope" to make it water proof and make the fabric hold it's shape. You then paint the dope. They are often refereed to as "Rag Airplanes" in the aviation world. I know, now you think I'm the "Dope". No kidding, it's true.

Wire.jpg

Any screw or bolt that is important to the airplane is safety wired. You pass the wire through a small hole in the head of the screw and twist the wire until it is tight and then pass the wire through the next screw head and twist it again. This way the vibration of the engine won't unscrew an important part so it can fall off. No kidding, it's true.

July 5th. 

I'm off to the next adventure.

I flew to Fort Dodge, Iowa. Kinda fitting don't ya think?

One hell of a run. Given weather I can fly, really fly. It's really abusive to do five hours in a wind.  I stopped to upload fuel and to download fuel, if ya know what I mean. I find I can't out-fly my bladder.

I don't even know where I stopped today. It's one airport at a time. I land and do what the airplane needs for lubrication and then look at the chart to see where the next airport I'm going to is. I choose them by how far apart they are. A couple of hundred miles and then at the end of the day I pick one more that is an hour's flight or less and make that extra step. Fort Dodge was an easy one to pick.

See the video “What Its like”. You can’t read my lips because the Mike covers part of my mouth. I said, “This is what it’s like to fly a biplane”. I’m holding the video camera in my right hand and my left arm is on the cockpit rim. Who’s flying the plane? I discovered no one was flying the plane. OOOPS. Makes a funny video though.

I went from Fort Wayne, Indiana to Fort Dodge, Iowa today. Another good run tomorrow as the weather is going to hold up one more day.

I have an updraft in the cockpit and I find the wind blows up my skirt so I tuck my pants inside my socks. Nice fashion statement, huh? My homeless look is getting more homeless as I go along.

Kisses to you all,

Young Samdodge