Villar Plastic Surgery

My friend from Aspen. Here for two days

FUELING A STEARMAN
The gas tank on a Stearman is located in the center section upper wing. It technically holds 46 gal but since the tank is angled on the ground I have not been able to fill it to max capacity. There is a spring loaded gas cap secured by an internal chain to keep it from falling in the cockpit. If that cap is not secured, the flow of air over it will suck the fuel out and spray the cockpit in flight. Bad! Same for oil cap on the left side. Oil will be sucked out in flight! Also bad. 4.6 gal capacity.

Young limber pilots climb up the front to fuel the tank. Step on the tire, then a foot hold on the landing gear, then a foot hold above the primer and crank support, then there is a walkway on top of the cowling. Limber legs and stretchy pants are required🙄🙄

Older stiff pilots with tight pants chose to fill the tank from the back. They stand in the front cockpit seat. They place the hose in, and fill the tank watching the red marker in a fuel gage under the tank. There is a cork float inside connected by a thin rod to the red marker. However, when the marker reaches full, the tank is not really full. So now you have to climb up on the side panels to be able to look in the filler hole. The side panel has a reinforcing plate where it is screwed to the next panel. You must step here to avoid damaging the side panel. But you can easily slip.

On long legs, I fill the tank to the very rim to maximize my safety margin. But with two hands on the fuel handle, balance is precarious and squeezing too hard on the handle can propel you backward.

This happened without consequence in Douglas Ga on the way up. Just fell into the seat.

But fueling up at Galesburg, I squeezed to hand and fell back on my windshield, shattering it! Oops🙄🙄🙄. I tried to tell everyone that it was a bird strike.

But these are all experienced Stearman pilots and restorers. They all looked at the shattered glass pattern. “ That bird had really big ass cheeks 😜” they said smiling knowingly.

No one had a spare window, so my plan was to remove the front one and put it in the back to get home. Marina pulled out the tool box and removed the screws and the back frame front and back. Dr Karpinsky had given us duct tape which was essential in saving the Apollo 13 astronauts.

She taped the broken window front and back so it could be removed with filling the cockpit with broken glass. We pulled the glass the used more tape to pick up micro shards in the dash board. These could blow into your eyes while flying.

As luck would have it, there was a glass shop in town. It was 3 pm. We took the front glass and asked if they could make a new one. Sure, one week. We need it tomorrow. “3 of our four employees are out tomorrow and we are backed up”, the lady explained. It was $ 75 for the glass.

I pulled out a hundred dollar bill. Please tell one of your guys he can have this if he comes in to make the window. We have to leave Sunday morning.

In New York she would have snatched the $100 and demanded two more. But in the Midwest most people are kind and honest. She took the $100 and said this will cover everything. I picked it up the morning at 9! Good people are everywhere around here. Marina invited her and her Peeps to the Airshow but they did not come due to previous plans. So we installed the windows.

I was gifted a wooden plank that goes across the cockpit to stand on, but my seat got in the way. So I was going to re engineer it when I got home

This battery pack saved my ass. ForeFlight is an amazing navigational app that I have on my iPad. I did all my flight planning on it. I ordered charts as a back up, but they did arrive on time. so ff I went with ForeFlight it tells me when aircraft are too close, when restricted areas are active with military operations, exactly where I am and the direction I am going, my track and direction, and all airports I can divert to. it has 3D pictures of all the airports.

so I am heading up to Douglas Georgia and about half way I notice my battery life is down to nine! this means that if this iPad shuts down, I am lost. no headings, no airports to divert to, no control tower frequencies! lost in space. there were no airports in sight. if you see an airport, you can set your transponder to emergency and fly over the airport. they have a light gun that can signal you when to land. but I was nowhere near an airport I could see. I took a note pad out and wrote down my direction of flight (heading) then the frequencies of Douglas. then a few nearby airports as power went to five!

as the hair on the back of my neck stood at attention, I recalled that the GoPro camera on my helmet was attached to a large axillary battery pack. I pulled the wire from the camera and plugged it into the iPad. the power slowly went up and hovered at thirteen. I would turn the iPad off and fly ten minutes on heading then check my progress and shut down again. this went on for 1.25 hours as power rose to 24. when I reached Douglas, I circled to check the grass and landed. the airport was desolate and my mentor Tom Reilly was out of town.

it is very difficult for one person to fill the plane with self serve gas. you put in your credit card and chose more gas than you need, 40 in my case. then you ground the plane with a long cable from a spring loaded spool. then you have to have to pull the gas hose from its spool with a ratcheting sound. Then you have to carefully put the hose through the wires and lay it on the wing without scratching anything. then you climb into the front cockpit an open the gas cap on top of the upper wing. then you pull up the nozzle and stick it in the hole. then you climb up on the top of the seat back so you can look in the hole to fill to the very top. then everything in reverse order. a pain in the ass at my age.

as I am anticipating this nightmare, a black RV pulls up. Chris Rou, an old friend pulls up and helps me fuel the plane. at the other airports except one, I received help. my mother used to say, it is better to be lucky, than to be good.

when I laid over in peach tree aerodrome, downloaded Foreflight on my phone for backup. but had this on battery pack too. Power consumption is high because iPad is on full brightness to see the map in the cockpit due to glare.

Some thoughts on fog. Bad s**t! I used to fly my Stearman to Rockport Maine to attend film school work shops for about ten years before a tornado in Wilma destroyed our hangar and plane. Up there I encountered fog banks. You could see fog roll in from the sea. It had a flat top and you could fly over it and it had a well defined front wall. You were wise to carry plenty of extra fuel in case you had to divert if it rolled over your airport.

On my first encounter, I came to rock port and the weather report was broken clouds. I had a primitive GPS with a centered needle that marked your course but no maps. As I flew over the airport, it was sunny above and a fog bank below. As I circled above, I searched for alternate airports. This was my first trip to Maine. Suddenly I saw a small hole in the clouds and the numbe 14 was below. Today it is 13 Due to shifts in magnetic North.

My instructor, Wild Bill Voorhes who trained pilots in WWII taught me how to cut the engine and go into a steep spiraling dive in case you ever need to break through a small hole in the clouds. I dove down and landed. The real fog was a mile out and thes densely packed clouds preceded it. I have seen this in the Hampton from a boat on Long Island, but never in Florida.

But I encountered a deadlier version in the mountains . I was flying north in clear weather an encounter a thin bank of clouds ahead at 35 hundred feet it was hazy below so I climbed over ir at 4500 ft and it was clear ahead with broen clouds, but then solid overcast ahead with the sun above. The temptation is to fly over it, but the danger is that you cannot get back down over your destination which was reporting minimal VFR. So I found a hole and spiraled down into the haze. No big deal. We call that scud running in Florida (low cloud ceiling with haze) just watch out for towers.

As I flew threw the haze at 2500 feet, it became denser and denser until I hit Zero viabilit. This is terminal in a Stearman. We have no instruments with artificial horizon. I made a 180 degree turn hoping not to lose spatial orientation and broke back out! I allowed the Adrenalin rush to subside and searched for the nearest airport in Foreflight (a miraculous new flight map technology). I circled the airport to see if they had a clear and well cut grass apron to land on and three pointed her in at 70 mph. This allows for a very short landing. The technique used in carrier landings. I fueled up just as the haze and fog rolled in. I met a guy who came over and gifted me a drinking cup with US Navy printed on it which he manufactures. In the FBO, (fixed base operator that service and fuel aircraft) we watched the weather reports and the locals said this stuff burns off by 1 o’clock . So I went to the pilots lounge and plopped down in a recliner and the kid at the counter brought me a free coke. I slept for three hours and woke up to sunlight.

I learned a valuable lesson when I flew my Stearman to St Croix 2 weeks after I got my license with Clyde Dawson in his Waco UPF7. When you do something incredibly stupid and die, they say “what a fool, what an idiot, he should have known better”. But if you survive, they say, “what a great adventurer”.

This was not stupid, but is was a learning experience I am happy to have responded to correctly and survived. Lesson learned, fog bad! And sneaky.