Today was earmarked as the big day \u2013 28AAD\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
I\u2019d 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\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n
Before Wim\u2019s arrival I\u2019d made up another 5 litres of fuel from the mogas that I still had in my \u2018cave\u2019, 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 \u2018missing\u2019 length of plastic tubing for the airspeed connection from MYRO\u2019s old left wing and also recovered MYRO\u2019s old wing tensioning straps that are the \u2018proper\u2019 ones and much better than what were originally fitted on 28AAD.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s when it all went pear-shaped.<\/p>\n
After having owned MYRO for about 8 years, having kept its starter key safely for over 4\u00bd years and having used it extensively over the past few days, I couldn\u2019t find the key for the engine anywhere. I\u2019ve 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\u2019ve always put it back in the same place, I actually didn\u2019t have any real idea where to look.<\/p>\n
So after a delay during which Wim even dashed home and brought back the Red Baron\u2019s key to try (no, it didn\u2019t\u2026), we decided that all we could do was move 28AAD over to Malbec by trailer. So that\u2019s what we did, in two trips, after stripping the sides, front and back off my trailer as I\u2019d done when I first brought 28AAD down to Plazac.<\/p>\n
It was such an anticlimax. We agreed that I\u2019d have to go ahead and order a replacement key (luckily one of MYRO\u2019s previous owners had made a note of its number in its old Owner\u2019s Manual) and that we\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t 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 \u2013 and there, stuck to my spare car remote was the starter key.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t really know \u2013 it certainly wasn\u2019t supposed to be in that drawer. I can only summise that I\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n
I\u2019d then dropped 28AAD\u2019s starter key into the same pocket when I\u2019d 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\u2019d dropped the remote back in its drawer, it had gone in too. And when I felt that the pocket was empty, I\u2019d just assumed that I\u2019d already replaced the starter key back on the window sill with the others, dammit!<\/p>\n
Still, as Wim said when I phoned him up to tell him, \u2018All\u2019s well that ends well\u2019. How true in this case \u2013 but how ruddy inconvenient \ud83d\ude10<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today was earmarked as the big day \u2013 28AAD\u2019s 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\u2019d phoned the landowner and he had kindly agreed to allow me to take off from his field once again and … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12266"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12266\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12284,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12266\/revisions\/12284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}