Taxying but…

After cutting the grass at Malbec a couple of days ago, the runway has had a brief chance to dry out a little bit and as the weather forecast for the coming week is for yet more rain, I thought that I’d see whether the runway was firm enough today to do some taxying in 28AAD, my Weedhopper.

I took a bucket and washleather to the airfield with me and after getting 28AAD out of the barn, I spent a few minutes cleaning off as much of the grime as I could that it had collected fom being tucked away at the back of the hangar for 18 months or so. Then it was time to pull it over to the runway and start its engine for it to warm up ready to go.

I’d already walked the length of the runway and although it was still a bit soft in places, I thought that I might get away with it as the Weedhopper is such a light aircraft. So after allowing a few minutes for the little Rotax 503 to warm up, I headed down the runway for my first taxy of any distance in the aircraft.

It went well except I could feel the softness of the ground under the wheels of the aircraft and I was worried about the depth of the ruts that I might be leaving in my wake, but when I turned round at the bottom of the runway there didn’t seem to be any real damage. So as I was at the bottom of the slope, I then had a chance to open the engine up to full power to get back up to the top again.

I don’t think that under normal conditions with a dry runway and short grass, the Weedhopper will have a problem taking off from Malbec. However, with the grass still being relatively long and the ground so soft, even after several attempts I couldn’t get 28AAD’s nose wheel to lift, let alone do a little hop on the runway, so that’ll be for later when conditions are better.

This time I had to content myself with getting the ‘feel’ of the aircraft, which seemed to be perfectly stable with a fast taxy speed, so that was encouraging. There was no point keep taxying up and down the runway any more as some ruts were beginning to appear, so after I’d returned 28AAD to the barn I walked the runway and trod the biggest ones back down again, so no great harm done.

Unfortunately, the weather forecast for the coming week is for yet more rain, up until Thursday. The longer range forecast is for the rain then to stop and from Friday up until the end of the following week, for a dry week with sunshine and no rain.

Let’s hope so, because as things are going, we’ll never get Malbec dry enough to use and I’m fed up of having three perfectly good aircraft ready to go and just standing idle and unflown. Time for some serious prayers to the weather gods, maybe 😉