Beautiful sunset flight with Craig and Marek. 
This year at the Salton Sea Fly-in I traded in my beautiful little FB Simonini Trike Buggy Classic for a hybrid CT Thumper Briggs & Stratton 4 Stroke on a Trike Buggy Deluxe. I’ve done some bone headed things before but this one is the worst.
I should have known this wasn’t going to work that first day on the Salton Sea. On the maiden flight I parablended my favorite cap right there in front of everybody. The 4 stroke was so quiet I didn’t think to put on my helmet and ear protection. Imagine….A machine so quiet you don’t notice your not wearing ear protection… until your cap goes through the prop. That’s a dangerous machine! Yea, I did go to idle the other day to use the cell phone… but so what?
Every day I find another flaw in this crappy machine. I used to love driving out to Centennial Airport for AV Gas. They let me drive onto the tarmac with the GA guys so I could fill my two 5 gallon gas jugs. I’d drive to the back of the line and wait my turn. Sometimes it took awhile to fill those big birds and when I got done reading the latest issue of Ultraflight I’d get allot of good thinking done sitting in the truck. Now, I don’t even need the jugs, I just stop at the gas station on the way to the field and fill the buggy right there in the truck. Where is the romance in that? And that reminds me of another thing. What am I going to do with those cases of TTS in my garage?
And speaking of the garage….my “Man Cave”… I haven’t had a good night working on the machine in months. Yeah sure, I can re-rig the footsteering or mount a strobe but mostly I just sit there and gaze at the machine. No changing tension springs on the exhaust or rebuilding the carb. Heck, I’m having a hard time finding a place that needs a little safety wire. It just isn’t the same I come in after 3 hours in the garage and I don’t even need to wash my hands. It just sucks!
And the flying is different too. Gone is that element of uncertainty, I sit down, buckle the seat belt and turn the key. There is no sense of accomplishment in that. No fooling with the carb or pulling on the starter till I’m bathed in sweat. The other day I flew 15 miles from the LZ and didn’t think once about what a drag it would be if I had to land out. Sure, I still keep an eye out for emergency landing sites but it’s really just an exercise anymore. I can still remember the thrill of an engine out, what a rush!
So take my advice, if you love the lifestyle, don’t by a 4 stroke.
I launched into light Westerly breeze just as the sun was coming up. The lift was amazing, 150 to 250 ft/min climb everywhere I went. I was thinking I shouldn’t have ordered the Power Fins, but no…if they can give me a 25% increase in thrust, it’s going to be well worth it. Conditions like this morning are few and far between. 
In situations where the field is bumpy or overgrown with weeds, I lay out my 
Light breeze from the NE…very unusual. The air was pretty good except directly south of the High School where it was bumpy. Might be the air is picking up something over all that concrete and brick. There was lots of lift everywhere I went. Over the Golf Course and Damn I encountered flat air but I never seemed to get any sink.
For awhile I practiced diving the glider by slowing down the wing with some brake and letting it surge ahead. It will be interesting to see how far I dropped on each mini dive. Next time I’ll try it a little lower so I can gauge the amount of drop by eye, from 1000 feet I could see the nose wheel drop and could feel the decent in my gut but the GPS just isn’t fast enough to read in real time. The dive doesn’t last long and if I power up I’ll swing ahead in a steep climb which I could turn into an even steeper dive by cutting power at the top. Next time…
The landings keep getting better, it was almost like the Eden during final flare, I was able to control the float longer than I ever have with this wing. It’s all about getting the brake line past the point of maximum pressure. It might be a leverage point where it feels easier but the pressure is the same, whatever it is…I feel it bump into “Float” and then it’s fine movements that control the sink and lift. Done right I should be able to do the “low and slow” for a long long way.Chad talks about bringing the hands all the way under the buggy but unless I want to collapse the wing I don’t think it’s helpful. The question is how much brake will stall the wing in normal flight with power and without. Tomorrow I’ll try it with the trimmers open.
The low pressure is gone and we are enjoying a couple of days of “High Pressure System” Bliss. At 6:00am the wind was too high to fly but it came down nicely while I set up. Simms has dried out and there are patches where the grass/weeds are low enough to launch the trike.
The launch was allot like last night, I got up to speed and used a little brake to get me out of the weeds. Of course, when I do this I’m going to float at 5 feet for awhile before I start climbing. This time was no different except that I felt an obvious pull to the left. When I looked up there was a fairly large tumble weed caught in the lines, up high, near the left tip. I have no idea where it came from. I’d policed the area and relocated several large twigs during set up but somehow it found it’s way into my flight. I couldn’t tell for sure but it looked like it was distorting the lines and possibly drawing a few together. I noticed a slight pucker in the airfoil and that was enough to convince me to abort the flight.
The air was moderately bumpy, but I still took two laps before landing. The landings are getting better. I just have to really muscle the brake during the final flare.
Last Wednesday at Simms when we stood around and watched the grass blow and today when I discovered that two of the trike tires were flat. I picked up some new tubes and after much cussing and found that bicycle tire irons were not going to work getting the tires mounted. So… I stopped at the local tire shop and they were more than happy to do it for 6 bucks a wheel. The tech over inflated them but that was no problem, I’d set the tire pressure when I put them on the trike. Later that afternoon at work we heard a loud bang and one of the guys in the shop saw a black saucer shaped object fly past the second floor window. I’d left the tires stacked in the bed of the truck. Apparently they were inflated correctly for the tire (60lbs.) but the wheels were only rated to 2 bars (about 28 LBS.) The bottom tire had blown after heating up in the truck, and when the bead broke it threw the wheel on top across the parking lot. 
Luckily, nobody was injured but I had to go back to little wheels where I learned how to mount my own tires. It’s not tools…it’s leverage and technique
( Pilot’s eye View )
Mike Bennett said he would be at Dick’s at 6:30… I arrived and unloaded at 5:30 so I could launch before the sun. It was 57 degrees and the wind was steady from the SSW at 5mph.
I set up and launched with only one issue. …….
Last week Mike Savino commented on my Facebook ….Check Lists …Check Lists… Check Lists… Well…. Today, the little thing I missed was the trimmers. I’d left them open after kiting in high wind on Wed. The buggy got up fairly quickly but the climb was terrible. I closed them and did a couple of laps for altitude. The plan was to traverse the new neighborhoods high and then descend to 150 feet and circle the old tower at Stapleton. If all went well I would get a trophy shot of my shadow on the tower, unfortunately there were three or four police cars spotlighting an apartment building directly between me and the tower. I could probably have pulled it off because I doubt they could have heard the 4 stroke from 1000 feet but…No good would come from getting their attention, so I decided to abort on the side of discretion and save it for another day. On the way back after crossing the highway I explored the southern field from 150 feet. Lots of trees but plenty of room to work with.
When I got back over the field Mike was setting up and Paul Dillon pulled in shortly after I landed. By the time I went up for the second flight Paul M., Dan K. and a couple of new guys were there. Shortly after Paul launched a Gov. type showed up looking for a fight. Apparently we had crossed into the Rocky Mountain Arsenal. I don’t think any of us was ever more than 600 feet inside the fence but from his perspective it could have looked like we were much deeper into his turf. After pleading ignorance, begging forgiveness and promising to brief the “new guys”, he cooled down and and left. 
( Photo Mike Bennett )
I set up on the entrance road to avoid the low clinging weeds and launched behind Dan and had a great flight.
( Photo Mike Bennett )
The last time I was in Cozmel it was twenty two years ago and I was on my honeymoon. It was a Mexican Resort in it’s prime. Megatels, boasting five swimming pools and four restaurants were going up at the rate of two or three a year. It was all good, everything was clean and new and everybody was enjoying a measure of prosperity.
I was a man on a mission, and justifiably left my bride in the hotel with a raging case of Monezuma’s Revenge to dive on a freshly sunken airliner 200 yards off the beach. Even though I hadn’t logged a dive in more than a decade there was no trouble renting a dive rig from an independent business man, sitting in the shade of a palapa hut on the beach. I remember some moron had painted the name “Enola Gay” under the pilot’s window by scrubbing the marine scum that was beginning to cover the fuselage with a green patina. The entire area had been declared a marine sanctuary and this desecration was just low class graffiti.
In 1969, I was 13, we had just landed a man on the moon and Lloyd Bridges was on TV every afternoon after school. The entire tourist industry of the island consisted of: 3 dive shops and 2 one story hotels. We would spend the morning spear fishing and cook our catch for lunch. No worries about rising sea temps or damaging the coral. I was immortal and so was everything else.
Oh but how times have changed…The reef is 90 percent dead and there is a MacDonalds where Aqua Safari used to be. I wonder what it will be like when I’m 73?
Powered Paragliding. A most Personal form of Flight 
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