27 SA Flyer MagazineSomeone once told me
there’re two happy days
you have with owning an
aeroplane – the day you buy
it and the day you sell. I’m
here to tell you that’s total
bullshit.I
once owned a game farm. Not
quite a game farm in the formal
sense, more just a stretch of
Waterberg bushveld populated
by whatever decided to settle
there, augmented by whatever
pilgrims were passing through.
Animal husbandry was never my
thing – I just wanted a piece of the
planet untouched by and hidden
from Homo sapiens, whereas my old pal
Fred owned a proper game farm: a fenced
off area filled with trapped animals, to be
killed for fun and profit. He told me about
the two good days with game farms – the
buying and the selling thing, and I agree in
principle that those are certainly the high-
points of land ownership, though my joy
was tempered by my buyers being a smug
pair of melon-splitters planning to fence the
place off and fill it with trapped animals to
be killed for fun and profit.
With aircraft it’s a whole different
narrative. When you buy an aeroplane, you
initially hate the thing and suffer buyer’s
remorse on a grand scale. I never bought
anything with less than 1,500 on the Hobbs,
and I once bought one with more than
6,000 hours on the clock. I hated them both
and all the others in between as well. The
reason for this initial antipathy is twofold:
firstly, the new acquisition comes with
all sorts of unanticipated baggage and,
secondly, love for an aeroplane grows with
a harmonious fusion that only builds over
hundreds of hours.
Aircraft have the inexplicable ability
to signal their displeasure at having
their ownership transferred, by allowing
embryonic snags or defects held in stasis
for years to flower into troublesome
maturity. My Turbo Arrow, which flaunted
a Collins stack, the best money could
buy, somehow acquired the capacity to
accumulate a huge electric charge when
flying through ionised air in the vicinity of
thunderstorms. At odd intervals, the audiooutput from the audio panel would then
start a prolonged screech that drowned
out any other source, be it voice or ID
signals. I could never establish whether the
transmitters still worked at times like this
because any response would be inaudible.
I had every earth strap checked a dozen
times and added static wicks until it looked
like a flying porcupine, but I never solved
that problem.
My Cessna 206 was fitted with a 14V
protection device that was intended to
prevent the alternator from over-charging
the battery. Being a sensitive semi-
conductor device, it would periodically cook
itself, block the alternator’s field current
and stop all charging of the battery until it
was excised or replaced. The piddling little
weight-saver batteries they put in those
aeroplanes had so little capacity that the
radios would run them down in minutes,
which didn’t endanger the flight particularly
in VMC – you just leave controlled airspace
by the shortest route – but getting out of
IMC without avionics can be difficult anddangerous. After the second or third failure,
I just went under the panel and cut the thing
out of circuit. No AMO had a clue as to how
to solve the problem, but they were quite
happy to sell me as many replacements
as I needed. Eventually the short between
a wire and its RF screen proved to be the
culprit, but that was years after it ceased to
matter.
Though there’s knobbly stuff sticking
out in the slipstream all over a 206, Cessna
decided they just had to have these drag-
free flush fuel caps. These were cone-
shaped plugs fitted with two hopeless
nitrile O-rings, one around the closing tab’s
spindle, and the other encircling the wide
end’s circumference, that started leaking as
soon as they’d been sufficiently hardened
by immersion in Avgas. With the cap seals
fatally compromised, fuel could gush outinto the relative vacuum above the wing
while in flight, and water could dribble into
the tanks when the wings were rained on
while on the ground.
Added to that, the rubber fuel bladders
filling the wing cavities would expand their
girth and form ripples where they outgrew
their housing. These ripples would trap
water attempting to reach the fuel drains
until such time as the wing rotated on
takeoff and all the accumulated water
bodies over-spilled their little barriers
and swarmed down to be sucked into the
engine, which would stop abruptly and
without any hope of restart before a lengthy
purge of the fuel system was done. There
was an effective permanent fix available for
that one – effective but expensive, and it’s
hard to forgive an aeroplane that silently
tries to kill you.
A newly acquired aeroplane brings with
it a multitude of mysteries and novelties:
how hard to slam the doors; how to get
the engine going when cold, or hot, or
in between; how to get the oil in withoutdrenching the engine; how to inflate the
tyres through the spat. The list is long,
but not endless, and with every fresh
encounter, man and machine get to know
each other more intimately and grow
towards a seamless unit.
Many years ago at Rhino Park, I was
watching the locals flying their endless
circuits using a runway that had a deep
puddle in it from an earlier rain shower.
What was noteworthy and had me thinking,
was the large proportion of pilots that
managed to land right in the middle of that
puddle, though it was easily avoidable. The
upshot of this episode of pensation was a
revelation: you tend to land on what you’re
looking at.
Today I have a large, snorting motor
cycle which I regularly thread between the
bicycles and buses that throng Chapman’scolumns
Aircraft have the inexplicable
ability to signal their
displeasure at having their
ownership transferred