It didn’t happen

Today was earmarked as the big day – 28AAD’s first flight from the cow field just down the road from my house to Galinat, to check its landing characteristics and then onwards to Malbec.

I’d phoned the landowner and he had kindly agreed to allow me to take off from his field once again and Wim had also kindly agreed to give up his day to give me a hand. I’d emailed my insurance broker last night to ensure that the flight would be covered and there were just a few small things to do first thing this morning before moving the show down the road.

Before Wim’s arrival I’d made up another 5 litres of fuel from the mogas that I still had in my ‘cave’, giving a total of just under 25 litres, way more than enough for the planned flight, made up a little bracket to mount the pitot on, recovered the ‘missing’ length of plastic tubing for the airspeed connection from MYRO’s old left wing and also recovered MYRO’s old wing tensioning straps that are the ‘proper’ ones and much better than what were originally fitted on 28AAD.

So when Wim arrived, all we had to do was solve the wing retaining pin problem (done by following the manual and removing the wing battens), remove the wings and check-start the engine before transferring to the cow field. And that’s when it all went pear-shaped.

After having owned MYRO for about 8 years, having kept its starter key safely for over 4½ years and having used it extensively over the past few days, I couldn’t find the key for the engine anywhere. I’ve been keeping it with the keys to my other ULMs on the window sill but it was nowhere to be found. I searched high and low, but because I’ve always put it back in the same place, I actually didn’t have any real idea where to look.

So after a delay during which Wim even dashed home and brought back the Red Baron’s key to try (no, it didn’t…), we decided that all we could do was move 28AAD over to Malbec by trailer. So that’s what we did, in two trips, after stripping the sides, front and back off my trailer as I’d done when I first brought 28AAD down to Plazac.

It was such an anticlimax. We agreed that I’d have to go ahead and order a replacement key (luckily one of MYRO’s previous owners had made a note of its number in its old Owner’s Manual) and that we’d have to find a suitable day in the next week or so to reassemble 28AAD so it would be ready to fly when the key arrived.

After the second trip to Malbec, there was no need for Wim to return to my place so I went off home to tidy everything up. It took a while because I had to reassemble the trailer as well as take all the bits and pieces out of my car that I wouldn’t be needing again and put the tools, covers, stepladders and goodness knows what back from where they had come. It was while I was emptying my car out that I took out the torches to replace them in the drawer in which they are kept – and there, stuck to my spare car remote was the starter key.

Too late to do anything by that time, but I was still glad to see it because ordering a replacement by number alone could have created its own problems. How did it get there? I don’t really know – it certainly wasn’t supposed to be in that drawer. I can only summise that I’d used my spare car remote two days ago to unlock my car and then left it in my back pocket for the rest of the day.

I’d then dropped 28AAD’s starter key into the same pocket when I’d been clearing up at the end of the day two days ago and somehow it had become jammed in the fob tag or the keyring so when I’d dropped the remote back in its drawer, it had gone in too. And when I felt that the pocket was empty, I’d just assumed that I’d already replaced the starter key back on the window sill with the others, dammit!

Still, as Wim said when I phoned him up to tell him, ‘All’s well that ends well’. How true in this case – but how ruddy inconvenient 😐