Nice surprises just keep on coming

I decided that I’d change the plugs and give the X-Air’s engine a good once-over today. Before I took the covers off I took a pic of the new prop cover that I made yesterday, and here it is. I just hope it isn’t an anti-climax after my ravings about it in yesterday’s post 😆

After changing the plugs, topping up the rad and checking the gearbox oil level I gave the engine a run. It started easily and ran very smoothly but there was still a mag drop of about 400 rpm on one side that I didn’t much like as Rotax give a limit of 300 rpm. I guess I’ll just have to watch it and see if it improves when the engine has been run for a bit as it’s been standing without being warmed up much for about ten months. I also wonder if burning old fuel (over 11 months old) is helping and I’ll make sure that as there’s no easy way of draining the tanks, before Saturday I add 20 litres of fresh fuel to the approx 10 that are still in them.

It was just after I’d been running the engine that I had a pleasant surprise. I was coming back out of the house when I bumped into a very friendly French guy in my garden who’d seen the aircraft on my lawn several times when he’d been passing and couldn’t resist coming in for a chat when he heard the engine running. Maybe not something that you’d expect in England where the general public is anti anything to do with private flying and light aircraft, but France isn’t the same and these things happen here. We chatted for half an hour or so and I gave him a general rundown of my plans for this coming week end. It turned out that he is a neighbour from down the road, but not just any old neighbour. His house adjoins an enormous field which is usually home to a herd of Charolais cows, but which is empty for the moment as the herd is elsewhere, probably because they’ve munched the grass too low and they are waiting for it to grow back again.

When I told him about my reservations about (a) taking off on Saturday from a short runway and (b) possibly having a tail wind to boot, he suggested that I might like to think about taking off from the cow field. Well, I almost bit his arm off. Wim and I have eyed up this field on many occasions and talked about how it would make an excellent ULM field for landings and take offs, so this was too good a chance to miss. Jean-Claude told me later on that the field is over 600 metres long, so you could easily land or take off in either direction depending on the prevailing wind. It seems that my neighbour doesn’t own the land but knows the owner very well as he bought the plot from him on which he built his house, so we left it that I gave him my phone numbers and he will ring me back ASAP before tomorrow afternoon, when he’s spoken to the land owner.

This is brilliant news and it will be excellent if I can use the cow field as it will overcome all my reservations and ensure that my short flight across to Galinat is also as safe as possible 😉