As Joe Horton reported, he showed up at my place early Friday and put in two solid days of hard work getting my plane in shape to fly to the Barnwell South Caroline Corvair College. It was fantastic to have Joe helping...he did the engine installation perfectly, and with no direction from me at all. It was amazing. He also replaced a control cable that got dragged 40 miles down the highway to probably within a 64th of an inch of the "go-by" aileron cable. That's not as easy as it sounds because my installation (which is far from "maintenance freindly) doesn't allow for measuring the cable because it wraps around an inaccesible pulley out in the wingtip. Thanks again to Joe...it would have been a month before I was flying again had he not shown up to help.
There are lots of stories to tell about that whole affair, but the biggest one that might help others is the ELT incident. Apparently when I set the tail down off the saw horse to roll the plane out of the hangar, I dropped it hard enough to set off the 406Mhz ELT. It wasn't until a half hour later that I put on my headset and heard the 5 watt bleed-over warbling sound of the ELT did I check the ELT and turn it off. So you can imagine the chain of events after that...an Air Force major from Air Force Rescue calling down my list of contacts, which started with my house (got the sleeping son and also got his attention), who called my wife at work, then the AF major called my father, all with the phrase of something like "we have an emergency locator signal from N56ML and are trying to contact Mark Langford". For the first time, I got a real tone of concern when she called me on my cell phone. She got a lot happier after I told her it was a false alarm, but the moral of the story is put YOUR cell phone number first on the list, because chances are that it'll be set off accidently way more times than due to a crash. If they can contact you first, it'll save a lot of concern in the family! The other takeaway is that this system really works, and it's FAST! It was another great Corvair College though, with several new CorvAircraft engines roaring to life for the first time. The test stand was in constant use, with a waiting list to run new engines. It was great to see everybody again, and I apologize for getting there late and leaving early. I was trying to beat weather on my end, and I came very close to spending the night in the same town I stayed in on my way the CC a couple of years ago... Mark Langford n5...@hiwaay.net website www.n56ml.com
