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I got a surprise e-mail from Korrey, the owner of Kolorfast yesterday. He will be painting my RV-8. Originally, it was supposed to go in for paint sometime in February. Then he said that they were behind schedule, and they wouldn’t be ready for me until March. But yesterday, he said that they were ahead of schedule, and he wondered if I could bring it in ASAP. Someone else must have cancelled at the last minute.

The sooner it goes in, the sooner it comes out, and I’d rather have it down in the winter than in the summer, so I decided to go for it. I’m taking the next two days off to do a few odds and ends that I need to do before it goes in for paint. This weekend I’ll remove the control surfaces, fairings, etc, and Tuesday AM I’ll push it a few hangars down the taxiway to their paint shop. It should be out of service for six to eight weeks. I’ll miss flying it, but it will be nice to finally get the painting done. I’m really looking forward to seeing how it looks in the Golden Hawks paint scheme. I’m hoping it looks as good as Hawk One, which is the Vintage Wings restored Canadair Sabre (a Canadian built variant of the F-86 Sabre, with a higher thrust Avro Canada Orenda engine).

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I got in a fair bit of flying for work this week, with trips to transport people for meetings in the Cessna C550 Citation II and the Beech King Air C90A. Saturday it was clear and cool here, so late morning I headed to the airport to fly the RV-8. I planned to do some more cruise performance testing with wheel pants OFF. The data I got on January 24th looks really, really clean, and I wanted to see how well data from another flight at another altitude would match up to the previous data.

I left the aircraft to preheat while I had lunch, then did a walk around, pulled it out of the hangar, and climbed in. I strapped in, and reached down to grab the headset, and it wasn’t there. I had taken it home as I wanted to try it in the King Air, and had forgotten to bring it back to Smiths Falls. I went back in the hangar, hoping that perhaps my old David Clark headset was in there somewhere, but no luck. Drat. Drat. Drat. I pulled the aircraft back in the hangar, and pondered my next move.

It would take an hour and a half to drive back home and return with the headset, and I really didn’t have that much time to spare, nor did I want to do that much driving. I called Terry to tell her that I wasn’t going flying after all, and she offered to bring the headset to me. What an angel! Thanks Terry.

After Terry arrived with the headset, I launched. I dropped the idea of doing more cruise performance testing, as that would take more time than I had to spare. I simply flew up to Ottawa and did two practice ILS approaches, then did a few circuits at Smiths Falls, taking advantage of the left crosswind to get some practice in crosswind landings.

The ILS approaches went well, but I definitely need to get some more cockpit storage pockets. If I am solo, I can put things in the passenger footwells, which are right beside my seat. But that won’t work when Terry is along.

Lessons Learned:

  1. Make and use a “Going to the Airport Checklist”.
  2. Leave all critical items such as headsets in the aircraft.

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I didn't get flying this weekend. It was bright, sunny and cold on Saturday. I could have gotten flying mid-day, but I knew that the taxiway to the hangar would fill up with cars parked for Andrew Phillips' memorial service. There would be no way to get back to the hangar before the end of the afternoon, and Terry and I had another commitment which meant I needed to be on my way home by 1530. Oh well, there is always next week.

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Andrew Phillips was killed when his RV-7A crashed on Saturday, 23 Jan. No idea yet on what caused the accident. He was flying back from Lindsay to Smiths Falls, in the company of two other aircraft. They were talking back and forth on the radio, and suddenly he was no longer answering, nor could he be seen. The other two aircraft searched along the ground track, but didn't see any signs of a crash. They then headed for Smiths Falls, hoping to find that he had experienced a radio failure, and that he had already landed. But, he wasn't there, so they went online to check his Spot track. The Spot hits stopped about where he was last seen, so they phoned the Trenton Joint Rescue Coordination Centre to report him missing, then they gassed up and went back to search some more. A Search and Rescue aircraft from Trenton found the wreckage at about 10:30 PM. Andrew's body was found in the remains of the aircraft. Read news stories and his obituary.

I had spoken with Andrew a few times, but certainly didn't know him very. He was a very nice guy, and was a tremendously enthusiastic member of the local RV community. My heart goes out to his wife and two young sons.

Andrew's memorial service was held at the Smith's Falls airport Saturday, in the Classic Wings hangar. The turnout was huge, with all the chairs filled, and a large crowd standing at the back.

I've lost a huge number of friends and acquaintances in aircraft accidents over the years. I was counting them for awhile, but stopped counting when I hit twelve back in the early 90s. Flying certainly has its risks - you can greatly minimize the risk by using best practices for everything, but you can never completely eliminate the risk. Everything we do in life has risk. You can die in a car accident (as we almost did last year), you can be killed walking along the street (as happened to a neighbour a few years ago), and you can expire in your sleep. In the end, you need to live your life. Be smart and careful about what you do, and how you do it, but don't stop living.

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The low cloud finally pushed off to the east late this week, so I was able to get flying on Saturday afternoon. Once again the remote controller for the preheat failed to work. Fortunately it wasn’t too cold, so 1.5 hours of preheat while I had lunch, checked tire pressure, etc was enough. I did another test of the remote control, and it failed again. I brought the whole system home so I can so some proper troubleshooting.

I spent 45 minutes doing some cruise performance testing to get some data wit the wheel pants removed. Then I zipped up to Ottawa to do some practice instrument approaches. On the way home I heard mention on the radio about an ELT, so I tuned COM2 to 121.5 MHz, and heard the distinctive tone. I learned this afternoon that an aircraft based at our airport had crashed, and that the pilot was killed (his name hasn’t been released yet, so I won’t mention it). I knew him, but not that well. His family has my deepest condolences.

We bought another car this week - a 2005 Mazda 6 hatchback, with the four cylinder engine. Nice car. Terry is able to drive again, and needs a car to go to her physiotherapy sessions. And, I got the main computer working again. It took about an hour to open up the all-in-one iMac and replace the hard drive, and a few hours to restore everything from the backups.

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No luck with the weather this week - way too much low cloud whenever I had time available - so no RV-8 flying :( I did manage to get one prof flight in Transport Canada’s C182 late Friday afternoon, but that wasn’t nearly as much fun as an RV flight would have been. Oh well. You can’t fight the weather.

I did crank out a software update for the preheat remote control. The new version, in theory, will write the ON/OFF state of the solid state relay (SSR) to the EEPROM whenever the state changes. The program will check this recorded state on startup, and will put the SSR ON and start the timer if it was ON when the system lost power. This change, if it works, will provide protection from any power interruptions. Next time I get to the hangar, I’ll load the new version and test this new function. If it doesn’t work I’ll load a simpler fall-back version that defaults to SSR ON at power up, with no fancy reading and writing to the EEPROM.

Some time ago, Dynon updated their EFIS software to allow GPS data to provide a backup to pitot data in the attitude computation algorithm. This was a welcome software change, as the previous attitude algorithm was heavily dependent on valid airspeed info to stabilize the attitude computation. If pitot pressure was ever lost, perhaps due to an iced up pitot tube, or a bird strike, the attitude display could become unstable. Not good for IFR ops. The latest EFIS software, which I loaded last week, will use GPS groundspeed to stabilize the attitude computation if the airspeed data becomes questionable.

Originally I thought I would have to do a major panel diving exercise to run a wire from the GPS 430 to the Dynon EFIS. But, when I dug into this, I discovered that the GPS data that is needed is exactly the same data as is currently sent to a jack in the cockpit for data recording. Similarly, the input to the EFIS that this data must be sent is the same wire that is connected to a cockpit jack to allow in-flight data recording and on-ground EFIS software updates. So, rather than crawling under the panel to run another wire, I’ll use a cable with a plug on each end to connect the GNS 430 cockpit data-out jack to the EFIS cockpit data-in jack. I made the required plug yesterday, and I’ll try it next time I go flying. The new GPS data in the EFIS will also allow it to update its internal clock, and to provide GPS track on the heading tape, and GPS data on the optional HSI display.

Terry got clearance to start weaning herself out of her cervical collar 10 days ago - that took a week, with a few more hours out of the collar each day. She still has occasional pain, but it is much, much better than it was before the surgery. Her neurosurgeon says that it should continue to gradually improve for several months, so it is too early to know what the end state is going to be.

I’ve spent way too much time the last three weeks fighting with computer hard drive melt downs. The hard drive on our main computer crashed between Christmas and New Years. Fortunately I had a current backup to restore from (thank God for Time Machine). I reformatted it and reinstalled everything. But, it failed again on Thursday, and this time it seems to have completely died. The computer doesn’t find it, and all it does is make a deathly repetitive squeaky click. I’ve ordered a new Samsung F2 1.5 TB drive which should arrive tomorrow. This drive is quieter and/or more reliable than anything I can find in stock in Ottawa. I’ll perform major surgery and open up the all-in-one iMac to replace the drive. I could take it to a computer shop and have them do the work, but the job doesn’t look as hard as replacing the hard drive in my 12” PowerBook, which I managed a few years ago. Wish me luck.