Why do you fly? As much as Saint-Exupery wrote of the freedom from the tyranny of petty things, he had a cargo of mail to deliver. To the plumbers, electricians, miners, welders, and carpenters of Alaska, their plane is a vehicle to get them to their clients and the job site. To the construction companies, the geologists, the surveyors, the research scientists, policemen and fish and game wardens, the plane is both another tool and transport. To the commuter on the road system living with his family where housing is affordable, the plane cuts five hours drive around an ocean arm to a 45-minute flight across it. To lodge owners and guides, planes are the only way to transport their clients and their supplies, and to Native Alaskans who have left their ancestral village and come to the city to work, the only way home is to be flown. To many Alaskans who depend on fishing and hunting to supplement their diet, or for their entire diet, airplanes can take them to where the caribou herds are, or to the salmon runs - no longer dependent on foot or dogsled to get to the food, they can raise their families without famine.
In car terms, the airplane is usually the pickup truck of Alaska, not the candy-red convertible. Like any work truck, the owners of Alaskan airplanes prize utility, the ability to get into rough places, and to work in all terrains, under all loads, in all flyable weather. Airplanes with high wings that clear brush on narrow strips, often have tailwheels for increased short field and rough strip takeoff and landing capability, can work reliably from 80 F to -40 F, and can haul loads from sea level to mountain passes four thousand feet up, are the planes in demand up here. They fly planes from the Citabria to the Cessna Caravan, but rarely will you see a Cirrus, Mooney, or Lear up here. Most of these airplanes are roughly forty to fifty years old, and their avionics are rarely replaced until they no longer function - if, with the rest of the electrical system, they weren't ripped out to save weight.There are a good number of airplanes out there who have a handheld for an avionics system, at best with a cable running to an external antenna. Like most working trucks, the owners cannot afford expensive replacements - if they could, they'd get something that fit the exact same criteria with more hauling capacity.
Upgrading these planes to a modern IFR-capable avionics package will usually cost more than many of these airplanes are worth, which makes as little sense as putting cutom wood and leather interiors on a flatbed hauling freight. These avionics are designed to be cared for, usually only rated to ten degrees above zero - but they'll be sitting on the ramp and flown in temperatures far colder than that, and exposed to glacial silt, sand with a sifting of volcanic ash, dirt and dust every day - an environment they are as ill-suited to as a shiny new laptop on an old John Deere tractor. They are also expensive to maintain, requiring a new databases every 28 days, system checks every two years, and time on the engine practicing holds instead of going places and making money to maintain pilot currency
FAA officials new to this state try to avoid economic reality by pointing out how much safer they believe IFR flights are compared to scud-running, and by stating that all traffic in the IFR system is controlled and cared for. However, the lack of oversight and government control isn't what kills pilots; poor decisions by pilots in the face of the weather and terrain kills pilots. So-called "scud-running", ded reckoning, and mountain flying are skills that must be learned, practiced, and used wisely to be safe. Trying to fly low and slow without an understanding of your weather, terrain, and airplane limitations is akin to taking an average cell-phone-yakking driver and putting him in the next heat on a raceway track.
If you ask an Alaskan pilot why they don't fly IFR, though, the usual response has nothing to do with money in the wallet or the well-developed skills to fly without needing IFR. No, they focus immediately on the thing that'll kill them: Icing.
All icing can kill you, and will if you don't GET OUT. Even the lightest icing changes the airflow over control surfaces, lifting surfaces, and airframe, decreases lift, robs power while gulping more precious fuel to stay in the air, increases stall speed to an unknown (but definitely higher) speed and generally combines to ruin everyone's day. Forecasting it and finding it is an art and a science, but all it takes to make icing is cold air (or a cold-soaked surface descending into warmer air) and moisture.
The higher you go, the cooler the atmosphere gets, until you'll inevitably get cold enough air, anywhere on the planet. Icing levels are very, very high at the equator. In summer, in the lower 48, they're plenty high enough to let many private pilots go about their flights in and above the clouds. As the year progresses, they come down, until we experience ground-level icing, like frost and winter. At poles, on the other hand, the icing level is down to the ice cap. In the arctic and sub-arctic, not that far away from the pole, the icing level is often not that far away from the ground. In summer, icing can still be at five thousand feet.
"If you're going to find icing," pilots say, "you're gonna find it over the mountains." Mountains are physical barriers, lifting moist air when wind hits them, mixing and roiling air, cooling it over glaciers, cooling by lifting, or cooling by expansion after the moist air has screamed through the compressing funnel of a mountain pass, all of which create plenty of opportunities for ice at lower altitudes than forecast. Alaska has many mountain ranges, and to pass between any two major or minor population centers, you must go over or through the mountains.
IFR routes choose to go over the mountains, requiring both a Minimum Obstacle Clearance Altitude (MOCA) and a higher Minimum Enroute Altitude (MEA) on each airway, to provide communication via repeater with air traffic control. To maintain line-of-sight communication with ATC through a repeater, in a state that has North America's highest peak, the MEAs can be higher than the service ceiling - past the performance limit of most of the aircraft in this state can fly. They will, as well, be at or above the icing level for most if not all of the year.
So, when a pilot has the choice between taking an affordable plane modified for the working environment and using the navigational skills adapted to that environment he has been taught, or spending more money than the plane is worth while reducing payload and performance in order to navigate airways high enough to kill him with icing at almost all times of the year, the choice is obvious.
Friday, September 18, 2009
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
As long as we're here...
Right wing is trammelled. My mentor and A&P with Inspection Authorization was going to use that authorization, with his wisdom and judgment, to inspect the wing Saturday. Unfortunately, Saturday he sounded like Death on burnt toast and was too sick to get out of bed. But moving forward anyway - Flying Buddy and J of Call to Wings came by, and when I aired my crazy idea of moving the wing up against the wall and putting the other one together this week so my IA would have to wings to inspect, Flying Buddy actually has the power tools and the know-how to take scrap wood left from building sawhorses and knock together impromptu solid supports to hold the wing vertical. I immediately set about baking banana bread for him as soon as he left with the wood. Yay for friends!
A note on the scrap wood now storage rack: this is yet another example of the prime rule of restoration: NEVER THROW ANYTHING OUT.
As soon as J has the free time, we'll lift the wing off, secure it, and start on the left wing. I expect several "Hey! Where did we put this part? And where did we stick this? And did we use all those length bolts on the right wing, or do we have some left for the left?" moments ahead.
Building on the experience of others, I shall keep in mind the wisdom passed to me: "You are building symmetrical wings with identical parts. Lay out your parts carefully, or you'll end up building two right wings, And Don't Ask How I Know."
A note on the scrap wood now storage rack: this is yet another example of the prime rule of restoration: NEVER THROW ANYTHING OUT.
As soon as J has the free time, we'll lift the wing off, secure it, and start on the left wing. I expect several "Hey! Where did we put this part? And where did we stick this? And did we use all those length bolts on the right wing, or do we have some left for the left?" moments ahead.
Building on the experience of others, I shall keep in mind the wisdom passed to me: "You are building symmetrical wings with identical parts. Lay out your parts carefully, or you'll end up building two right wings, And Don't Ask How I Know."
Saturday, September 5, 2009
Trammelling now
Getting there. Trying to hold onto round wires while tightening nuts that are grudging and grumpy about turning is a pain the the... fingers. Did I mention that the way these things are made, if you simply turn the wire, you screw in the nut on one end, and unscrew the nut on the other?
I want to go outside and play...
Friday, August 28, 2009
She's a Material Girl - Part I, Aluminum.
In 1855 Aluminum was so precious, rare, and hard to smelt that it was displayed in an exposition next to the crown jewels of France. Any man on the street could have told you that it was a semiprecious metal, priced roughly the same as silver. Plastic did not exist. People could not fly.
Thirty years later (1886), two people on two different continents, building their own batteries and using the power of electricity, managed to create a process to smelt aluminum. In 1888, the first commercial smelter had been built, in Pittsburgh. Aluminum cost $8/pound, or roughly $118/lb in today dollars.
This was only fifty-three years before my airplane was built - less than the lifespan of my plane to date.
December 17, 1903 - on a windy beach, a flyer powered by a hand-built exotic aluminum motor (light enough for the purpose) lifted off its rails on a beach and flew.
This was only thirty-eight years before my plane first flew - a span of time almost less than half her current life.
In 1914-1918, The war that engulfed the world came to aluminum production. 90% of capacity was devoted to wartime material, and it was regulated and controlled by the government. At the end of the war, there was a lot of surplus capacity for making cheap aluminum, and a whole new market of soldiers exposed to the material.
The War To End All Wars, as they called it, ended only twenty-three years before my plane was built.
In 1937, Alcoa produced 90% of the aluminum in the world - and this grave error of being first and best, regardless of intent to monopolize, meant the FTC filed one of the longest running antitrust cases against Alcoa. The company would come dangerously close to being put out of business by judicial fiat - including a special act of congress giving the 2nd Circuit court of appeals higher standing than the supreme court after they were found not guilty on all 130 counts, so that the government could win on appeal.
Clearly, the government intended to put Alcoa out of business, no matter what facts or truth might be. And with the War to End All Wars now reduced to being called the Great War as Europe was burning, the military was starting to monopolize the aluminum supply in preparation for our entry into that war - not If, but When. Aluminum, never that plentiful, was expensive and scarce.
So when I say my ribs are aluminum truss, stop and contemplate the marvel of using a new, rather unfamiliar material, which while much less expensive than it used to be, was still expensive and hard to acquire in mass quantities. Each rib of my airplane is a work of art, in which a thin sheet of this highly expensive material was folded to increase stiffness and rigidity into a T-shape or a W-shape. Then, very like assembling a bridge for cohesion, strength, and resistance to all twisting forces from any side, the pieces were riveted together with the least amount of metal possible, using the same mathematics that led to the creation of truss bridges that spanned formerly impassible gorges and carried rail freight across the land (And those marvels the rib imitated on smaller scale were less than a century old themselves.)
My leading edge was formed of aluminum so thin it could not withstand the impact of a fly on its own, but used as a reinforcement for doped linen, it became tough and strong enough to hold its own. More very thin, very expensive, aluminum was carefully spared to form an arrowhead-shaped trailing edge and the curved aileron cove that held the fabric in a concave shape so the aileron might nestle into the wing.
This presents problems - today, in a world where aluminum is so plentiful that people use it for their drinking containers and throw it in the trash when they're done, there is no need to stretch and conserve aluminum so tightly. Therefore, I literally can't find aluminum in the proper alloy thin enough to replace my leading edge with what it used to have - and the material to remake my aileron cove had to be sought, specially found, and shipped up on the barge. Atlee Dodge tried to make the complex bends out of the thicker, more common material, only to find that the design created to stretch this once-rare, once-expensive metal also took every advantage of its flexibility and lightweight nature - and the thicker alloys crack when they try to fit the same tight bends. In some parts, I can sacrifice her lightweight nature and hurt her performance by using modern thickness - but sometimes I must search and search for what was once everyday.
So when you see her ribs, understand that thinking of them as fragile, flimsy things is to see them with eyes blinded by modern culture - and to step back and see them in the context of history and design, they are each a work of art, crafted by the hands of women in a factory where the only men left were too old, too valuable, or too broken to be drafted into military service. Dolores said, once, that "They liked the girls to make the wings, as we had smaller hands. By day, the men - what men were left! - would put the frames together, and at night, we'd build the wings."
October 13, 1941 - She flew for the first time.
December 7, 1941 - She was grounded, as were all airplanes, for word came that Pearl Harbor had been attacked by enemy planes. The world had gone up in flames, and no longer would we build forces and worry - we were at war.
Thirty years later (1886), two people on two different continents, building their own batteries and using the power of electricity, managed to create a process to smelt aluminum. In 1888, the first commercial smelter had been built, in Pittsburgh. Aluminum cost $8/pound, or roughly $118/lb in today dollars.
This was only fifty-three years before my airplane was built - less than the lifespan of my plane to date.
December 17, 1903 - on a windy beach, a flyer powered by a hand-built exotic aluminum motor (light enough for the purpose) lifted off its rails on a beach and flew.
This was only thirty-eight years before my plane first flew - a span of time almost less than half her current life.
In 1914-1918, The war that engulfed the world came to aluminum production. 90% of capacity was devoted to wartime material, and it was regulated and controlled by the government. At the end of the war, there was a lot of surplus capacity for making cheap aluminum, and a whole new market of soldiers exposed to the material.
The War To End All Wars, as they called it, ended only twenty-three years before my plane was built.
In 1937, Alcoa produced 90% of the aluminum in the world - and this grave error of being first and best, regardless of intent to monopolize, meant the FTC filed one of the longest running antitrust cases against Alcoa. The company would come dangerously close to being put out of business by judicial fiat - including a special act of congress giving the 2nd Circuit court of appeals higher standing than the supreme court after they were found not guilty on all 130 counts, so that the government could win on appeal.
Clearly, the government intended to put Alcoa out of business, no matter what facts or truth might be. And with the War to End All Wars now reduced to being called the Great War as Europe was burning, the military was starting to monopolize the aluminum supply in preparation for our entry into that war - not If, but When. Aluminum, never that plentiful, was expensive and scarce.
So when I say my ribs are aluminum truss, stop and contemplate the marvel of using a new, rather unfamiliar material, which while much less expensive than it used to be, was still expensive and hard to acquire in mass quantities. Each rib of my airplane is a work of art, in which a thin sheet of this highly expensive material was folded to increase stiffness and rigidity into a T-shape or a W-shape. Then, very like assembling a bridge for cohesion, strength, and resistance to all twisting forces from any side, the pieces were riveted together with the least amount of metal possible, using the same mathematics that led to the creation of truss bridges that spanned formerly impassible gorges and carried rail freight across the land (And those marvels the rib imitated on smaller scale were less than a century old themselves.)
My leading edge was formed of aluminum so thin it could not withstand the impact of a fly on its own, but used as a reinforcement for doped linen, it became tough and strong enough to hold its own. More very thin, very expensive, aluminum was carefully spared to form an arrowhead-shaped trailing edge and the curved aileron cove that held the fabric in a concave shape so the aileron might nestle into the wing.
This presents problems - today, in a world where aluminum is so plentiful that people use it for their drinking containers and throw it in the trash when they're done, there is no need to stretch and conserve aluminum so tightly. Therefore, I literally can't find aluminum in the proper alloy thin enough to replace my leading edge with what it used to have - and the material to remake my aileron cove had to be sought, specially found, and shipped up on the barge. Atlee Dodge tried to make the complex bends out of the thicker, more common material, only to find that the design created to stretch this once-rare, once-expensive metal also took every advantage of its flexibility and lightweight nature - and the thicker alloys crack when they try to fit the same tight bends. In some parts, I can sacrifice her lightweight nature and hurt her performance by using modern thickness - but sometimes I must search and search for what was once everyday.
So when you see her ribs, understand that thinking of them as fragile, flimsy things is to see them with eyes blinded by modern culture - and to step back and see them in the context of history and design, they are each a work of art, crafted by the hands of women in a factory where the only men left were too old, too valuable, or too broken to be drafted into military service. Dolores said, once, that "They liked the girls to make the wings, as we had smaller hands. By day, the men - what men were left! - would put the frames together, and at night, we'd build the wings."
October 13, 1941 - She flew for the first time.
December 7, 1941 - She was grounded, as were all airplanes, for word came that Pearl Harbor had been attacked by enemy planes. The world had gone up in flames, and no longer would we build forces and worry - we were at war.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Aw, nuts...
What's wrong with this picture?
AC 43.13 B states that a bolt must have at least one thread past the end of the nut. If I had a set of blueprints that stated what bolts I needed, this wouldn't be an issue. On the other hand, since I don't, this means that my method of choosing hardware is to find something for the correct size hole, cross-reference with the old hardware, and get what looks like the correct length. Unfortunately, any time you put a fitting on wood, especially when other fittings fit on top of that fitting, and not all fittings are the same thickness... you get the goldilocks method of finding the right bolt length.
Well, why don't you just choose bolts that are too long and that way you have enough? Because it doesn't work like that - there's usually a fixed length of thread, and then a thicker shaft on each bolt. The longer the bolt, the longer the shaft, not the threaded section. If the shaft protrudes past the fittings, the nut will only tighten to the shaft, leaving the fittings wobbly-loose and the bolt freely rotating in the hole. Bad idea. So, time to do the boltey-pokey. We put the short bolt in, we take the short bolt out, we put the too long bolt in, and we wrench it all out. We put the slightly longer bolt in, we take the slightly longer bolt out....
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Progress, regress, but at least it's not congress...
Right. That whole trailing edge rib fitting works better when you finally realize the piece you thought was the original, wasn't either. It was simply a better-modified but not completely matching replacement version. And the original pair, when you find one, matches enough with the pictures to be for the other wing, which you haven't started assembling yet. The other half of the original pair? Long lost - may not have ever had in the first place.
Back to sanding and repairing, cutting and drilling. Priming and bolting to follow!
Back to sanding and repairing, cutting and drilling. Priming and bolting to follow!
Friday, August 7, 2009
Eureka!
My wings came to me in twelve totes and bundles, without blueprints. This means sometimes I get fairly far along before realizing that there's a little piece that should go right there. In this case, I finally got all the main ribs and noseribs on my right wing, and started fitting compression struts when J of Call to Wings lifted up a primed part and said "Where do these go?"
In her hand she held two trailing edge ribs. Which, in the year I've had this project, I've obviously sanded free of corrosion and primed, but then forgotten about. Where do they go? There are two different styles, too, so am I looking for another set for another wing? This sounds fairly simple to look at the photos of wing prior to disassembly and see - but it turns out that since the aileron cove was nailed to the rear spar with plenty of supports, it's really hard to tell trailing edge rib from cove support.
Today, after much scrutinizing of the old spars at lunch, I suddenly understood - it's the nail holes that tell the story in varnish. There's only one trailing edge rib, which only nails to one side of the spar! The reason the second trailing edge rib doesn't look the same is because it was cut from a full rib, and never fully modified - the second piece of metal for nailing to the spar removed, a third of the remaining piece that gets nailed to the spar cut and flattened to fit under the strut support!
Tomorrow, I shall modify the second trailing edge rib - because it's better to modify it now than to wait until the first is nailed to the wing and not able to easily examine!
Progress continues...
In her hand she held two trailing edge ribs. Which, in the year I've had this project, I've obviously sanded free of corrosion and primed, but then forgotten about. Where do they go? There are two different styles, too, so am I looking for another set for another wing? This sounds fairly simple to look at the photos of wing prior to disassembly and see - but it turns out that since the aileron cove was nailed to the rear spar with plenty of supports, it's really hard to tell trailing edge rib from cove support.
Today, after much scrutinizing of the old spars at lunch, I suddenly understood - it's the nail holes that tell the story in varnish. There's only one trailing edge rib, which only nails to one side of the spar! The reason the second trailing edge rib doesn't look the same is because it was cut from a full rib, and never fully modified - the second piece of metal for nailing to the spar removed, a third of the remaining piece that gets nailed to the spar cut and flattened to fit under the strut support!
Tomorrow, I shall modify the second trailing edge rib - because it's better to modify it now than to wait until the first is nailed to the wing and not able to easily examine!
Progress continues...
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