I came up to the airport after church today to fly the plane.
After sitting around for about an hour waiting for the winds to drop a bit I fired it up. Battery/starter is still sluggish even after having a tender on it all week so I’ll have to look into that some more. After some convincing it fired and warmed up.
I taxied down to the pump area and did my run-up. Just as I was about to take the active a call from another plane downwind had me sit off to the side and wait. He ended up doing a low and over then came back around to land. love watching the Yak land while sitting at the hold short line.
After he backtracked and cleared the runway I took the active, broadcast my intentions and firewalled the throttle. After those taxi tests last week, I counted to three with the stick all the way back, then with gentle right rudder coming in, I brought the tail right up, accelerated and was airborne.
Right away I knew there was still an issue with the airspeed indicator as I was climbing at 1200fpm (nice) but indicating 120mph… Since I was airborne And flying ok, I decided to do the approach stalls I had planned so I had a rough idea where the indicated stall would be even though it wouldn’t be very accurate. Three stalls later, it was consistently showing around the 70mph mark and the GPS was consistently showing around 40kts which is much more likely…
With that nugget in my head, I headed back to the circuit. Crossing midfield I joined downwind for runway 13.
I lost count, but I did 7 or 8 low and overs just getting the feel of it in the circuit. I teach at this airport, so I knew where the turns needed to be and could concentrate on things like trim and power settings at the various spots around the circuit. The crosswind was still blowing, but the intention was flying the pattern, not putting the wheels on the ground.
When everything was feeling good and stable (ASI reading 80mph and GPS reading 50kts) for two circuits to about 20 feet, I decided it was time to land and let it come down. Light but positive rudder input (short narrow runway) kept the runout fairly straight with no need to brake till turning it around at the end.
Nice slow backtrack to clear the active and the end of a great welcome back to the air in the spacewalker II.