To those who have come across me somewhere in my MotorFalke in the past (VH-FQW), you won't have seen it for about a year.
About a year is what it takes to repair the damage from a wee mishap, have the aircraft completely recovered, and send the propeller on a happy multi-month trip interstate and then overseas to get new blades and to get the spinner converted from two position to three position (cruise/climb/feather) by Hoffman, and to argue about the normal range of things that one argues about when one has an aircraft in various bits, all of which are in various countries at once. Now, Finally, 'its baaaack'! I wanted to express my public thanks to Peter Carlson for his care and skills in doing the repairs and the fabric recovering work on the aircraft so very well, and for coping with the aircraft taking up hangar space for many further months while the propeller issues were dealt with and the prop was finally reunited with the engine. I flew over to Temora, where it was, thanks to Catherine Conway and her Grumman Traveller (ETT), and we then ferried both aircraft back home again just yesterday - all of which went very smoothly indeed. The Temora folks were having an SAAA fly-in just as we left, so we also got to look at a number of rather brilliantly constructed homebuilts (with a huge emphasis on RV-4 and RV-6's). The care and attention to detail in the building of these aircraft was obvious, and indeed it was rather hard to conceive of the amount of total work that all of these aircraft represented. There are also a quite suprising number of Grumman Travellers that live at Temora, so that was fun to see as well (always good to compare paint schemes...) Anyway, for people who like happy snaps of aircraft, I've put some of my photos of the trip up on a web site at http://www.users.on.net/simon/pics/temora-20-oct-2001 They are large images, so if you just click on them in a web browser they won't fit on the screen and you will have to scroll them around. Save them out to disk (right-click on a link) and view them in some other image viewing program if you want to make them fit on the screen properly. I'll rework that into a 'real' web page with html directives to make the browser scale the images down, 'real soon now'. Special mention goes to this image: http://www.users.on.net/simon/pics/temora-20-oct-2001/falke-swh.jpg For the demonstration that an un-stylish gliding hat doesn't necessarily -have- to be made of terry toweling, they also come in the foreign-legion model...! ... and also to: http://www.users.on.net/simon/pics/temora-20-oct-2001/lancair-temora.jpg (a stunning lancair, one of the fly-in aircraft) The shots of XDT (an RV-6) were mostly for one of my work colleagues, who used to have a share in this aircraft, and who I thought would find it interesting that refuelling stops for aircraft, like those for cars, continue to be places where you bump into old friends. In this case, old friends who are experienced at formation flying, hence the rather nifty photographs. The shot of the 'f1 rocket' in that web area is a homebuilt which I was told uses a Pawenee motor, or similar, shoehorned into something the size of an RV-4, with the net outcome being a two seater than has a VNE of 240 Knots (!!). Pocket rocket indeed! So. I'm really happy to have my aircraft back at last. Feels like being reunited with an old friend. I have something like 800 hours up in this aircraft, so I guess I've talked to it more than a lot of people I know :) The day before we flew back, Temora put on its standard brilliant soaring weather, and I test flew the falke under power, before switching the engine off and soaring up to 7000 feet or so under the beckoning sky that you can see in some of the photographs. Made all the waiting worthwhile. And that's what it's all about, after all. Regards, Simon Hackett -- --- Simon Hackett, Technical Director, Internode Systems Pty Ltd 31 York St [PO Box 284, Rundle Mall], Adelaide, SA 5000 Australia Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: http://www.internode.on.net Phone: +61-8-8223-2999 Fax: +61-8-8223-1777 -- * You are subscribed to the aus-soaring mailing list. * To Unsubscribe: send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] * with "unsubscribe aus-soaring" in the body of the message * or with "help" in the body of the message for more information.
