Last Chance before the Salton Sea

1/13/06
Loveland….No Fly Day

We got to the field about 9:30am and watched Brian assemble his trike because he was having trouble with the electric starter on regular motor. Once it was all together he launched and came right back down due to turbulence. I had purchased a small canister of helium from Sam’s Club so we launched a pilot balloon and watched it duck and weave all the way up to 500 feet where it caught a northerly current which quickly pushed it out of sight. Doug and Brian had business in Fort Collins, so I was left at the field with Barton George to wait for the afternoon flight. Barton had driven up from Colorado Springs where he was a pathologist at Fort Carson Army Base. Like me, he was a new pilot and full of enthusiasm. So full of enthusiasm, that he could not stop talking about it. He showed me the devise he had invented to balance his propeller and copies of articles that he had printed off the internet. Nice guy, but the nonstop hanger stories from a pilot with less than five flights was starting to get on my nerves. Eventually I decided it would be a good time to work on the carburetor. Big mistake, when I tried to fire up the motor, the pull cord broke. There was nothing to do but take off the starter and repair it. I’m always intimidated by machinery the first time around but nobody was going to fix it for me, so I undid the harness and dove in. Expecting it to explode into a cloud of parts and springs like the first time I’d opened an old camera, I was delighted to find it was a relatively simple mechanism. I did put the Pawls in backwards and had to redo it, but other than that little goof, it was back together and ready to fly when Brian and Doug returned.

Barton was the only one to fly that afternoon. I remember his landing because he came down within five feet of the truck and the way he flared caused the wing to turn slightly causing him to do little dance on touch down. To his credit he stayed on his feet. When it was my turn I just couldn’t get up. The first time the wing came up crooked and I aborted. The second time I stumbled and went to my knees with the wing collapsing on top of me. The third time the motor died when I started to run so I packed up and drove home frustrated.