Since the weather was going to be as perfect as it could be this time of year I decided to sneak in an early morning flight before work today.  I had originally wanted to work on taxiing my trike.  This is where I would just drive along the ground with the parachute canopy (wing) inflated and practice steering it.  However, the winds, such as they were, were not aligned with the runway and I would be taking off crossways.  I made a deal with myself to quickly kill the engine and start again if the wing got out of control and set up again.  As it was the wing came up perfectly.  I throttled up and when the wing came up, I throttled back a bit letting it stabilize and steering to stay under it.  The wing looked nice and stable so I slowly squeezed the throttle and felt myself lifted into the air.

There was none of pendulum-like rocking I experienced on my last flight.  Just a nice stable ascent.  I climbed up to about 500 feet and levelled off.  I must have had my anti-torque strap adjusted correctly because I also didn’t experience any right turning tendency like usual.  I was able to stow both brake toggles and fly with my hands in my lap.  The brake toggles are what you steer with; pull the left one to go left, pull the right one to go right, pull them both to slow down before you land.

Sadly I did have work to do so I headed back to the field and landed.  Total time: 30 minutes exactly.  It was a practically perfect and peaceful morning at New Jerusalem Airport.  Something I very much needed after the recent news I received.  So how far can you get in a PPG going 25 mph?  Here is a map showing my ground track:

I decided to get in a quick flight before church this morning.  I made my way out to New J and found a couple other PPG guys out there and a hot air balloon.   Should have been a nice easy takeoff but it was a little crowded.  I should have moved farther down the runway.  I should have oriented more into the wind.  I should have a lot of things.  Don’t worry, nothing bad happened.  My pride got a little bent but nothing else.

As I was taking off my wing started to oscillate.  Rather than slow down and dampen it properly I fell back on my fixed wing roots and gave it full power.  I got off the ground but it wasn’t pretty.  So I need to go back to New J and just do some taxi practice.

If a picture is worth a thousand words then a video is worth a million…

I got out to New Jerusalem kind of late this morning, close to 8:30am.  When I arrived I found I had company…

It was kind of interesting talking to the pilot in the blue ballon as he drifted over about 30 feet above my head.  We spoke in conversational tones.  “I like your wind sock.  It’s the perfect size for us.”  “Thanks!” Came back my reply.  So odd not to hear the sound of an engine when an aircraft is climbing out of the airport.  I took care of the lack of engine noise.

The gentleman in the blue balloon didn’t fly much longer than I did.  The wind was negligable on the ground but very switchy and thermally about 100 feet up.  I spent a lot of time swinging back and forth.  I’m still trying to get used to this feeling.  I think I need to fly with more paramotorists so I know what’s normal and what’s not.  At any rate it wasn’t comfortable for either of us so we landed.

I put my rig away and then drove over to watch them pack up.  I offered to help fully expecint them to say no, but the joke was on me as I was employed as a third set of hand between the pilot and his ground handler.    I learned a lot about how they are constructed how they are flown and handled.  Very interesting.  I invited them to the High Sierra Fly-in.  I hope they show.

Just thought I’d throw together a quick and dirty video of flying over the Stanislaus River near the New Jerusalem airport.  The winter rains have made everything so green and beautiful.  But then God’s earth is beautiful.  It declares His glory.

Since I built two airplanes it’s kind of hard not to tinker on the Cruise Carbon Trike.  Ever since I had one pin fall out (on the ground) I’ve wanted to secure the pins holding the motor mount to the trike.  Because they are under shear compression I don’t think they’d fall out in flight but I don’t want to take that chance.  So I safety-wired all the pins in place.  The two front pins are covered in a previous blog posting.  The rear pin was a little more problematic to secure via safety wire.  If I attached the safety wire in the same way I did to the front two pins, the wire would rub on the fiberglass body of the trike.  To make sure the wire doesn’t scratch or otherwise damage the body I ran the wire through a plastic wire crimp butt connector and then put heat shrink tubing over that.  I plan to examine the fiber glass closely after the next flight to see if there is any rubbing that could damage the fiberglass.  If so I’m going to cut the safety wire off and try to find a new method to safety the pin in place.

The other thing I’ve done is to add a small tachometer/hour meter to the trike.  It was a simple install that took me 15 minutes total and most of that was figuring out how I wanted to run the wire.  I fished the wire down through the engine’s clamshell and then secured it to the spark plug wire via nylon tie wraps.  I then wrapped the remainder of wire around the throttle cable and then used the supplied adhesive backing to attach it to the throttle.  I only have to turn my hand over and I can see my RPMs.  It will display highest RPM per flight and total hours.

I haven’t gotten to fly it since added the tach.  It will be interesting to see what RPMs I’m hitting.

Well, I tried to get out to the airport before the breezes started up but I didn’t quite make it.  I took off and got up to about 100 feet off the ground before I felt the wind start getting shifty.  It didn’t feel like it was getting any better so I turned back to take a look at my wind sock and it was definitely standing up more than it was when I left the ground.  That was fast.  I circled around and landed.   Meh, it was a short flight but at least it was a flight.

After I got down I practiced kiting until the wind got too much for that.  At least for me.  I really need to practice that more.

Today I woke up early.  The promise of light winds and mild temperatures was just too much.  I loaded up my trike and wanted to get a quick flight in.  I also wanted to try out my new GoPro camera.  I got out to New Jerusalem and weather was perfect!  I unloaded my gear and set everything up.  I got my camera adjusted and got myself strapped in and took to the skies.  But… Something didn’t feel right.  There was no wind but the wing kept pulling to one side.  I steered the trike in that direction and the wing came up overhead just like normal so I went full throttle.  As soon as the trike left the ground it didn’t feel right.  It pulled to the right and set right back down.  I pulled on the brakes a little more and got airborne but then the turn to the right got even more pronounced and the climb rate was too steep and too slow.  I decided to set it down fast before something really bad happened and well… here is the video.

After a sock-soaking walk through the dew covered weeds three times… once to walk my wing out and a trip back to walk my trike back out… I spread the wing out on the ground to sort out the problem.  As I was coming in to land I looked up at the wing and noticed that back side of the wing on the right side looked like it was bunched up a little.  Something I couldn’t see on the ground or when I kited the wing.

I laid out all the lines and followed them back to the wing and then I saw it.  Two of the adjacent brake lines had tangled and formed a well-disguised slip not that was holding tension on the inboard right brake lines.  I untied the knot and freed up the lines.  Sadly I was out of time and was soaking wet anyway so was not able to test fly the wing to verify I got all the kinks worked out.  That will have to wait a couple of days.

I’ve added a few things to my trike.  First, I wasn’t really happy with just clipping my radio on to a strap with just the belt clip on the radio.  It wasn’t that secure.  So I ordered a radio case from 5.11 Tactical.  I have to pull the radio out to change frequencies but I don’t anticipate having to do this very often.  In fact, I usually use the frequency lock function of my Icom radio to make sure I don’t inadvertently change the frequency.  I mounted the case on the left side of the harness.

I also ordered a GoPro Hero4 Silver and a handlebar / tube mount.  I also put a mount on top of my helmet.  I tried mounting the tube mount in various locations but none seemed to work out that well.  The engine would vibrate the heck out of the camera affecting video quality.  I finally settled for mounting on the foot peg of the nose wheel.  We’ll see how this works out.

DCIM100GOPROGOPR0007.

I can either point the camera forward for flying video or point it upwards for shots of myself and the wing.  Next time out I’ll take a couple of flights with the GoPro facing forward, upward, and mounted to my helmet.  Just to see how the three points of view compare.