To say that today was not the day I expected as an understatement. There are very few pictures as I was very focused on dealing with an issue that arose an occupied much of the day. I promise, if I make it to Oshkosh tomorrow, there will be incalculable numbers of photos to make up for it.
After checking out of my room, I walked up the hill to College Town Bagels, where I grabbed bagel and a cup of tea for breakfast. It was sunny but cool so I thought I would sit out on the patio and enjoy my breakfast before heading out to the airport. Little did I know that doing so would make me get into a situation that had been a subject of a funny but insulting song about Cornell from decades ago.
While I was eating, a garbage truck pulled up and parked right next to me while the driver ran in to get breakfast. The smell from the truck so overwhelming that it nauseated me, causing me to have to get up and move about 50 yards away.
The Cornell Alma Mater is often twisted to sound something like this:
Far above Cayuga’s waters, there’s a terrible smell.
Some say it’s Cayuga waters, others say Cornell.
And for once, I would have to agree.
I got to the airport and pushed the airplane out. As I started, all systems looked just fine, so I taxied and took off, headed westbound. There were scattered towering cumulus clouds, but I picked my way through them, including one that had a tunnel through the heart of it that I flew through.
Because of the clouds, I planned to fly higher than I had yesterday. Right as I was leveling off at 8500 feet, I felt a single backfire, and then a loss of engine power. I quickly diagnosed the problem as a complete failure of one of my two engine ignition systems. Not a good thing.
Piston engine aircraft have two ignition systems, each one having its own separate spark plug for each piston in the engine. This is done for redundancy, and because of this, my engine continued to run, although not as efficiently as it would’ve with both systems working. It wasn’t an emergency, but it certainly wasn’t good.
Since I was very high up, and there were many airports strewn along my route of flight, I decided to stay an up high and continue to my destination. I figured it was better to be with Chris Shearer, who is an airframe and powerplant mechanic who also has access to all the tools that I might possibly need, then it was to try and land at one of the small field below that I was unfamiliar with and had no resources to deal with the problem.
A humorous moment occurred when I sent him a text message outlining my problems, and he responded by asking me where I wanted to go for dinner. It was only after an extended back-and-forth of texting that he realized I had a significant problem, because the one message I sent him explaining that the situation never got through. We didn’t realize this until we were talking about it in the evening at his house.
I made it safely to Wadsworth and parked on one end of the field. Chris showed up just a few minutes after I landed, and we went into a nearby aircraft repair facility to chat with the owner and see if there was availability for a Hangar. Everybody was very nice and offered to help in anyway they could.
Because I had just been flying, the engine was quite hot, so there was no point to try and work on it right then. We popped the cowling off to left it all cool, then went out to get some lunch at Chris’s house, which was located on an Airpark 2 miles away. In case you were wondering why I didn’t fly directly to the runway by his house, it is because it is far too short to safely operate my airplane.
Kris and I met back in 2000 when he was a student at the Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base and I was a visiting instructor with my Long-EZ as part of what was called the Qual Eval program which had airplanes with unusual configurations and characteristics come to the school to provide the students with unique experiences. I participated in this program over five years, but Chris was in the first class I worked with.
He and I lost touch after Edwards, but 13 years ago when I was doing a fly about with my eldest son, Sean, we diverted into an airport near Dayton, Ohio, and while we were working on the plane in a hanger, Chris walked in and we reestablished our friendship.
Chris gave me a tour of his amazing home and hangars, as well as his various airplane projects, we returned to the airport. By then, I had thought about what I had experienced and come up with a couple of ideas that were likely candidates. After a few minutes of troubleshooting, I decided to swap out the sensor that fed the electronic ignition system. Once I did, this, the engine ran fine.
Over the next couple of hours, Chris and I put everything back together and then I did a brief test flight during which time all systems worked fine. The plane is now fully capable of taking me on tomorrow to my next destination.
While we were at the airport working on the plane, Lisa did me an immense favor by putting through a load of laundry for me, and then folding it, which was much more than I deserved.
It was time to go back to the house where I had a wonderful cold shower to help offset the heat and humidity that I had experienced while working on the plane.
The headaches of my plane behind me, I was able to visit with Chris and his wife, Lisa, at their house. She and I had a difficult conversation about the challenges of caring for parents with age-related maladies. I had gone through dealing with these with both my mother and Kay‘s mother in recent years, which has given me a great appreciation for all the stress it can cause on family members.
The three of us, plus another houseguest of theirs named Louis, joined Chris’s mother and father for dinner at a local Mexican restaurant.
Lisa and Chris have invited Louis into their house while he works on his various pilots licenses. This is an incredible act of kindness and that enables him to be in the amazing environment found at an Airpark community where people walk straight from their kitchen into their airplane hangars.
One we returned home after dinner, we stood outside in the twilight and watched as the fireflies came out. When Kay and I had lived outside of Kansas City, although we weren’t big fans of Kansas, we have incredible memories of watching the fireflies in our yard in the nearby woods.
We wound up the evening by sitting in the kitchen and talking about airshow, airshow pilots, and the risks inherent with intentionally doing dangerous maneuvers close to the ground. Kind of depressing, but that’s the kind of thing that pilots tend to talk about.
I got to have a video call with Kay and Alex after they had fixed their favorite dinner together called Moroccan chicken. They were both in a great mood, especially Alex, who had driven much of the night down to Mount Rainier National Park with some friends just so that they could watch the sunrise, and then driven all the way back.
With my airplane is working again tomorrow I will be off to Oshkosh, the Mecca of aviation.
