I’ve got 22 hours on the Phantom and am starting to get proficient enough to fly cross country. I’ve done hundreds of takeoffs and landings and flew 7,000 feet up to test the limits of the carburetor on the Rotax 503 motor (that’s the limit
There haven’t been any cumulus clouds for a couple of weeks and when they were around, it was just too windy for me to fly. The cruise speed of the plane is around 45mph, so the winds aloft on days like that would leave me hovering.
On a suitable day–not much wind but plenty of cumulus clouds–I’ll start to school myself on catching thermals up to the cloud bases. I’ve been reading about that and the illustrations in the book are of the same plane I have.
I think Roger is also getting more confidence in me because he offered to fly his ultralight with me to another airport to the west in a few days. I’m painting a sign for his private airfield south of here, which will be another landing spot for me.
Cowboy Bob on Cape Cod suggested a quick-turnaround move which he mastered when he was fifteen in a Piper Cub. He said it later saved his live in the Aleutians when he was unable to get over a mountain pass and was about to hit a rock wall that surrounded him on three sides. After trying it on my flight simulator a few times, I did it successfully over the big practice pasture near us. I’ll need to do it a hundred times or so to get consistent results, of course, so I’ll do it a few times every time I go up. Half the time I end up stalled and in a steep dive and a quarter of the time I do it right. When it’s done right it’s a nearly zero-gravity move, with literally no loss in altitude and I bet it looks really cool from the ground. Carol’s going to film me doing it at 500’ up.
I gifted the remaining mountaintop death ray array in our region, a few days ago. I didn’t go there, before, because it’s a quite tall mountain surrounded by forest on one side and Lake Pend Oreille (underground/underwater base) on the other but when I got there I could see that there were plenty of big fields within glide distance, after all. At the time, Carol and her buddies were setting up camp across the lake from there, having just arrived in the Zodiac. It’s a cool campground that’s mainly accessible by boat. She could see the mountain top but didn’t see me do it but she said I succeeded in turning that 6-tower weapon into a life force generating station. I love flying in the mountains. I want to go to Alaska for bush-flying lessons before long.
I’m setting up to build the Affordaplane and have received the engine, Joe Cell, landing gear and in-flight adjustable prop. Next stage is to get some welding lessons and just start putting it together from scratch. I intend to add a folding-wings feature so that I can pick it up with a trailer if I land somewhere that I can’t take off from. Also, if I have to land on a highway I can fold the wings immediately after landing so that I wont’ be a menace to traffic.
Last year, I started busting the mountain top death ray arrays before I was ready to fly cross country and that cost me the plane and almost a year of waiting to get back in the air.
Now, there are several pilots posting on EW, each one far more experienced than I am. [Image Can Not Be Found]
Funny how that works. A similar trend materialized with gifters interacting with dolphins and whales: I think David on Maui is racking up the most experience with that, now, so Carol and I will seek to play catch-up next winter in Florida, grid willing. We heard about a pod of dolphins that started swimming with people at the south end of Daytona Beach, which I hope is yet another positive trend. They sure like orgonite, so that’s good incentive for anyone who can get to the ocean to toss the stuff into the sea for them to distribute and perhaps interact with the gifter.
~Don