EAA Chapter 983 Newsletter February 2001 Mailing Address: EAA Chapter 983, P.O. Box 903, Granbury, TX. 76049 Website http://www.eaa983.org

Bill Mainord told us about his sojourn up in Alaska last summer at our February meeting. (Did you know that big as Texas is, it would become the third largest state if they divided Alaska in two?) Bill had the good fortune to be in Alaska for a fire fighting mission this past summer and in the process a bit of "bush" flying ala Alaska. He started by answering an ad for fire fighting by Ram Air Inc. under contract to the Alaska Division of Forestry. The job entailed flying out of Fairbanks, Ft. Wainwright AAF. Let him tell it:

This turned out to be more of a full time job than I intended (6 days/week, 9-14 hours/day!) But I had never flown fires before and thought it might be interesting. I was so-o-o-o right. Ram Air treated me like family and their aircraft were good and had excellent maintenance. State and federal officials I supported in my flying also believed in safety first and I was never under pressure to do anything unsafe. The aircraft I flew was a Shrike Commander, same as Bob Hoover uses in his air shows. I did not get as exotic in my flying as he does, even in Alaska. There were three mission categories:

• Fire detection. Most fires are started by lightning strikes. There is a ground based system similar to airborne "strike finder" that monitors and plots the position of lightning strikes. Then a sortie is flown to see whether a fire has been started.
• Reconnaissance flights are made over known fires to monitor their status. Not every fire has to be "fought". Many burn out or are not a threat. The challenging part of flying these missions is flying "in the smoke" to observe and still keep the aircraft in a normal flying envelope. It was a combination visual and IMC with lots of maneuvering at low air speeds. Lots of fun with the downside having to clean smoke and cinder residue off the aircraft. No job is perfect!
• Air Attack was probably the mostinteresting and different. It involved flying overhead an active fire with an air attack supervisor aboard. He is responsible for safety as well as orchestrating both air and ground elements. Air attack provides an "eye in the sky" for the ground boss who frequently, and literally, cannot see "the forest for the trees".
• Retardant dropping aircraft included two PB-4Y's, a KC-97 and a DC-7. Lead "target marking" was done by more nimble Pilatus PC-7's.

Since there were not too many fires this year, I flew support missions to recruit and pick up fire fighting personnel. One memorable flight was into Kalskag, a village airfield shortened by major construction. Weather was forecast to be good VFR, but about 60 miles out it became too low even to "scud run". I had to climb, call center, got a "pop up" clearance to Aniak, flew an ADF approach until breaking out at about 500' AGL, then got a special VFR clearance out of class E airspace, followed a river for 24 miles in 2-3 miles visibility, and landed on the 1980' gravel /dirt runway in blowing rain.

Alaska flying is different in the following ways:

• Flying colored (NDB) airways
• Flying real NDB approaches with NDB holding in IMC
• Special VFR clearances
• Flying IFR in uncontrolled airspace
• Flying IFR for extended periods without radio or radar contact with ARTCC
• Flying low to the ground in low visibility, commonly referred to as scud running.
• Routinely flying into short, non-hard surfaced, unattended airfields
• flying low through mountain passes because the mountains are obscured and the freezing levels are so low that IFR is ruled out because of icing.
• monitoring fuel closely because refueling points are often hundreds of miles away.

Alaska is truly a great land, majestic in every respect. Flying there is awesome. Every day I marveled at it's vastness and beauty. Flying there demands your attention. Axioms; The best navigation aid in Alaska is a full tank of gas; and a corollary, an aircraft will normally fly a little better overweight than with no fuel.

Bill has served as our Chapter Vice President and Granbury Airport Board Chairman. He is currently a flight instructor at Granbury. Bill began his Air Force career as an Aviation cadet in 1961. He flew as navigator on C-124's and A-26 Invaders until attending pilot training at Laredo in 1966.The majority of his subsequent flying was in C-124's, and he was the chief "Herky" pilot for the Military Airlift Command. His final assignment was as Defense Attache to Venezeula. where he retired as a "bird" Colonel after 30 years. He can't get away from flying and if he has his way, he never will.

Thanks Bill for a fascinating story!

Business Meeting highlights

We have 123 paid up members .Where are the rest of you guys? We went into the new year with a membership of 170. We would love to have the remaining 47 folks send in their dues. Please! Incidentally, you cannot be a member of our Chapter without being a member of the Natl. EAA. See Treasurer Dick Keyt for National applications if you are not a member. We had 68 members and guests at our Feb. meeting.

The guests included: Gene Berrier, (new member); John Holt (who is joining); Richard Meyers, board Chmn. Of Granbury Aviation, new member; Lori Lewis, Roe and Marsha Walker (joining). Gray Bridwell, Pres. and Brian and David Bauries came from the Abilene EAA Chaptr. Our membership survey results are still being tabulated, but it appears that you would like the business meeting highlights to be printed in the newsletter. We will try to do that. Some of you would like a Board of Directors and we will begin setting one up. This will help in the every-other-year election too. Some would also like to see;

• Hot air Balloon demonstrations at our meetings here at Pecan.
• Local skydivers parachute arrival at our meeting (as part of the Spring fly-in)
• Fly-outs after the meetings to selected "$100 hamburger" joints. (Weather permitting of course)
• We will try to include one safety oriented item in each newsletter.

Don Saint described a new airspace between Mineral Wells and Abilene VR-118. It is not a low level military route, but is a space where military jets will be operating at low levels. Y'all be kereful out thair y'heah? (Who said I couldn't learn Texan?). Your Chapter has volunteered to buy a display case for EAA 983 promotional items in the new Granbury terminal. ( It was specified that it be equal to, or larger than the current 99's case, just kidding.) We intend to have occasional monthly meetings at the new Granbury Airport terminal. John Holt is the new full time airport manager who has also joined our Chapter and is encouraging such meetings.

1. Dave Boldenow has started a new fund raiser. We have been putting in money to defray the cost of drinks/doughnuts/cookies. Write your name on your dollar and if you win the drawing at the end, you get $10 back. Sucha dill! John Darby won the February drawing.
2. Roe Walker and wife Marcia are new residents at Pecan. They are both pilots. Roe is a retired Air Force "jock" who used to fly B-47's & B-52's til he retired in '75. Then stints at Boeing until he retired again. He has recently taken delivery on an ultralite Murphy Rebel.
3. We need a name for our newsletter! Chapter 983 is accurate enough, It just does not have the pazzaz it ought to. For instance the newsletter for Chapter 1000 out at Muroc has the caption "The Leading Edge", Chapter 12 in Houston has "Wing Tips", #168 in Dallas has "Hangar Echoes" #790, "Winds Aloft". We are therefore initiating a contest for the name of our newsletter! The winner gets his dues paid for the next year.

Waco UBF-2 (the "U" refers to the engine, [Continental], the "B" is the wing design, and the "F" is the fuselage. That explains (more or less) the alphabet soup of Waco designations.

John Darby and Arnie Schecht are engaged in a labor of love down Stephenville way. They have only been working on it about a year and have made remarkable progress. They expect to be finished in about 5 more years. One unusual aspect is that they are building a "plans built" experimental and it will be licenced as an experimental.

They looked at designating it as a rebuild with the original licence and all, but would have to pay some $20000 for the paperwork. They are building virtually all of it, with some judicious help in the metal work. John is doing the wooden wings. Both outer wing panels have a bolt connection to the center wing section. Flight loads are entirely taken up with flying wires. They use a lot of airfoil shaped tubing, all of it made in England in small, very expensive lots. The ribs are conventional, nailed and glued together pieces. They have been using plans on loan from the Smithsonian, 25 sheets at a time. (For a total of 300) The plans are reversed engineered, that is, the plane was built, and then the plans were drawn.

Arnie is working on the steel tube fuselage and has gotten pretty proficient in Oxy- Acetylene welding . The landing gear is a welded stub-wing like structure with a shock absorber strut mounted internally. The strut is unusual in the there is no scissors mechanism to stop the wheel and strut from rotating. Instead, a spline is used. (I wonder how they keep it sealed?) The engine is a 250 HP Continental from a WW-ll LST. The LST did not have to worry about such Trivia as dynafocal mounts and therefore has a bunch of bolts that fixed the engine to a ring mount. 

John Darby is an Air Force retiree having flown a flock of aircraft since '51 starting with a LT-6G as forward air controller in Korea, then a tour in F-86's, also in Korea. He flew the F-84 and F-4 before retiring in '73. If you remember "Tora! Tora! Tora" and the Zeros, John was flying as one of them in a dolled up T-6. Arnie retired from Eastern Airlines in '86. For a while he flew DC-3's for Colonial. They were using aircraft purchased from American. Arnie remembers flying #21798, the DC-3 featured in the account of the long single engine flight featured in our Nov. Newsletter! Arnie added a bit more info. In addition to the feathering valves being mounted on the rear cabin bulkhead, they used hydraulic oil for feathering. That was OK if you did not unfeather. Unfeathering pumped the hydraulic oil into the engine. Not a good oil additive. It was remarkable that the engine held together as long as it did.

Thanks John & Arnie for a good account of the Waco Construction!

Safety tip: The Nov. 2000 issue of AOPA had an interesting account of an accident involving a very experienced Bonanza pilot. He was not able to respond to the controllers heading instructions. In several transmissions the pilot stated that he had "a gyro problem". The pilot had medical problems, but there is a different lesson to be gained. Bruce Landsberg Executive Director of the AOPA Air Safety Foundation goes on: It can be determined if a gyro was rotating at impact by whether there are score marks on the case from the rotor. If there are score marks, the gyro was running at impact; if not, it was not. In this case both the HSI (vacuum) and turn coordinator (electrical) were not running! (The attitude indicator was OK.) The turn coordinator is usually the most reliable and many instructors (this one?) advise using it in a conflict situation. Bruce hypothesizes that the turn coordinator was not running at takeoff and that an in-flight failure of the HSI caused the pilot to fall back on that old standby, the turn coordinator, which in this case was dead. Do you check your turn coordinator on each flight? Listen for that whine when you first turn on the battery, check it again during taxi.

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