Well, what an incredible month! The weather has been fantastic, and I’m sure that there have been many flying adventures throughout September. There had been a number of events scheduled this month, and I was able to take in two of them. The first occurred on September 25th at Bob Kirkby’s place, where he hosted a “Fly for Pie” event. This was a well-attended event, with a number of interesting aircraft showing up, including three amphibious aircraft and four biplanes! OK sure, one of the amphibians WAS a biplane, but it still counts! Bob sent along the following comment:

“The first Fly-for-Pie event netted $305 for the COPA Freedom-to-Fly Fund. We had about 20 aircraft, 10 cars and 2 motorcycles. We sold about 80 slices of pie.

Credits: 
– Pies home-made by Elsie O’Keefe
– Pie, ice cream, and coffee served up by Barb Roberts and Louise Nesterenko.
– Aircraft marshalling by Stu Simpson and Carl Forman

Thank you to everyone who helped out and to the people who came for pie!”

Pat Cunningham and I flew down from Carstairs. Pat had his Cessna 120, and I was in the Christavia with my wife, Renée. The weather was quite pleasant, if not a little cool, with a temperature of only 8°C. The calm winds lulled us into complacency as we took off and climbed to 4500’. I quickly realized that the conditions had changed. First, the GPS was only showing 48 knots instead of the 90 knots normally expected. Secondly, I had a sudden hot flash! A quick check of the OAT showed that the hot flash was not due to a hormone issue, but rather an outside temperature of 25°C! It took over 45 minutes to cover the 35 nautical miles. Of course, the trip back was only 18 minutes!

The next Saturday, October 1st, the COPA for Kids day was scheduled. The night before, the TAF called for rain, and basically a dreary day by 10 AM. We postponed the event until the following day, and of course, Saturday was actually flyable. OK, it did rain a bit, but it was not the torrents forecasted.

Sunday was a beautiful morning, although a bit cool. The temperature at Carstairs was 0°C when we pulled out the planes. However, we were dressed for the day and were quite comfortable. I did forget to swap out the memory foam cushions for the normal ones. This meant that the seat was rock hard and my head was bent over to avoid the upper cabin structure, but it only took about 20 minutes to soften up and conform to my generous butt.

That was not to be the only issue caused by the cold. Once we all assembled in Chestermere, Bob Kirkby called the pilots and ground crew together for a briefing. Twenty minutes later, we were done and arranging for our first flights. As I was admiring the fresh paint job on the RV-10, Troy pointed out a layer of frost forming on his metal wings. Sure enough, all the planes had formed a nice layer of frost. We quickly rearranged the planes so that they were all pointing west to allow the sun to melt the upper surfaces of the wings and tails (all but two were taildraggers).

That wasn’t the only bit of excitement for me this week. It was a bit slow at work, so I took a couple of days off and went to work on the Buttercup. This was the first bit of work on the plane in about four months. I was finally able to get the landing gear installed. OK, well it wasn’t all that exciting, but I think it looks really cool.

Granted, the landing gear wasn’t without its challenges. You would think that a task like sliding the main wheel onto the axle should be a one-minute job. For me, it took two hours! It turned out that the axle was a couple thousandths of an inch too big. As I slid the wheel on, the bearing jammed onto the axle. I had to disassemble the wheel to get at the bearing and then find a way to pop it off without damaging it. It was then another hour or more sanding the axle to bring it down to size.

See you all on Thursday!