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There I was at 11,500' over Ojai Friday
morning, enroute to Casa Grande, when my O-235 gave a sharp BANG. Well, that
brought me up out of my autopilot-induced stupor, but I eventually dismissed it
as one of those things that sometimes happen. But when it did it 20 seconds
later, and 5 seconds after that, I decided some action was in order. Since I was
basically over Santa Paula and my friend Klaus' hangar, I thought that that old
phrase of "I'd rather be on the ground wishing I was up there rather
than up there wishing I was on the ground!" came to mind. After an
un-eventful landing, I sought out Klaus and his expertise. While standing around
getting in his way, an acquaintance at SP, Alex Kosloff, came wandering over
with a friend to see what the fun was about. He said to me that he wanted to
introduce me to his friend, Taras Kiceniuk, of Icarus hang-gliding fame! 'Shiver
me timbers! I had just been reading about Taras in an article on flying wings in
Sport Aviation. Taras, with Alex's help, is working on the concept of
Regenerative Soaring, as written up in the 2006 May "Today's Pilot". We
wandered off to Alex's hangar to look at Taras' radio-controlled,
proof-of-concept model, and talk about prop design. That also helped Klaus
to work his magic without an audience.
Klaus found that I had done a rather
sloppy job of making connection to a couple of coils, and after correcting a
number of wiring deficiencies that didn't accord with his Teutonic concept
of order, waved his hands over the engine while uttering Germanic
incantations, and pronounced the engine healthy. I didn't feel that continuing
on to Copperstate with a plane just out of shop was in my best interests, so I
elected to return to my home base of Santa Maria. I decided to climb to 8500'
over the Santa Paula, Camarillo, Oxnard, and NAS Point Mugu area
before setting course up the coast to first Santa Barbara, then to Santa
Ynez, and then home. (Notice that Barbara and Inez are preceded by Santa,
and Francis and John are preceded by San. What's that say about SanTA Klaus?)
Everything worked well on the return, but due to a late arrival, I held off
doing any more flight testing 'til the following day. I wanted to get in 1 or 2
hours more testing at various power settings before going cross-country, so
there went my Copperstate plans. So if any of you were hoping to hear my
forum talk about prop design and wanted to know why I didn't show up, here's the
answer. Paul
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