I'm running a Corvair
instead of a rotary, but I thought you guys would be interested in how I seem
to be chasing Ed's gliding time.
Monday, I started the day with 3 hours of
fuel, plus an hour's reserve. The plane had been down for 2 months while I did
some upgrades, and I went out and did all sorts of interesting flying for 1.7
hours. The weather was beautiful, and the plane was performing better
than it ever has. I was reluctantly headed in for the day, when the
right tank ran dry. I tried to switch, but the left tank wouldn't come
online. I called an emergency on KTTA's frequency, since I had been circling
their airspace the whole time (just in case something happened). It was nice
to get that support from other pilots over the air, even if there was not one
dang thing they could do. I was 12 miles out, with the airport clearly
in sight. I headed straight for it as I continued to play with the
selector switch. My dual electric fuel pumps make a clackity racket when
they're running dry, so I kept moving the handle back and forth hoping for the
noise to turn into that deep guttural sounds that lets me know fuel is
flowing. I got nuthin', and TTA kept climbing up my
windshield.
I turned toward highway US421.
It was covered in cars, and it soon became apparent that it wasn't going to
happen either. I looked around, picked a field, and set up a pattern to
it. Initially, it was a tobacco field, but I had come in to hot. I
had been afraid of extending the pattern to far. There was a gravel road
running beside it, so I swung over, but it took a sharp right about 100yds
ahead. I didn't think I could make the turn, so I banked left into an
open field. The clumps of
grass were about 8" high. The nose wheel caught, folded under, and I slid
along on the cowl.
I've spent the past
week pulling airplane parts out of the farmer's field, and today I got about
the business of determining what happened. The gascolator had a few
pieces of trash in the bottom, but I'm not sure from where it came from.
I took the selector valve apart, and there didn't seem to be anything going on
with it. It turned smoothly, if not somewhat stiffly. Then I
played with the rod that connected the selector handle to the valve. It
was made from a 9" length of threaded rod. An adaptor pinned it onto the
valve's post. Another adaptor connected to the inside of the
handle. Without turning an allen wrench pushed through the pin hole, I
could turn the selector handle 90 degrees. The rod just twisted like
bubble gum. Apparently, with two months of sitting, the valve had gotten
sticky enough that the rod gave before it did.
I was completely
unharmed. I've suffered more damage getting the plane out of the field
than I did putting it there. The nose gear, firewall, forward belly and
left side skin are trashed. The rebuild starts tomorrow with building a
stand to hold the engine while I work the aluminium.