January 7, 2010

Update

Things have been moving a little slowly in regards to getting setup for the “official” flight to break and set the altitude records, however we are making progress.

The USUA has had to regroup itself and it just happened to be at the same time that I was trying to get my credentials in order. We have worked through that finally, and the Rocket is now a registered Ultra Light and I have my membership reinstated.

With those credentials in hand I was able to get my membership reinstated with the NAA and purchase the Sporting License from the F.A.I. That should arrive in a couple of weeks. Then I can submit the applications for the sanctioning, and once approved, the NAA will work with the USUA to provide an official observer for the record attempts.

This may sound like a lot of hoops to jump through, but it is nothing compared to the actual rules and regulations that must be followed regarding procedures and equipment.

MGL Avionics has sponsored the Rocket with a new E1 Engine Monitoring System and a new Flight-2 Flight Monitoring System. These two instruments do so many things that I can’t list them all here, and they will be very handy. One of the things I like is the fuel flow meter with a bingo timer. Also I can now tell the true airspeed, density altitude and much more.

I was able to eliminate the Tiny Tach and built a new pod for the instruments. Overall the Rocket gained very little if any additional weight from the exchange. Here is a photo of the setup.

And finally the last bit of update is that the Rocket suffered a seizure last week. My daughter was visiting for the holidays on leave from the Navy, and she wanted to see the Rocket in action before she returned.

It was a cold winter day and the Rocket was performing great, actually a little too great. I was feeling good too and gave her one heck of a show with tight ground maneuvers and of course the full power, screaming straight up climbs.

After about 20 minutes of those maneuvers, I had just completed a full power climb at the greatest angle of climb that it has ever done before. My wife and daughter said it was darn near straight up, and I suspect it was actually around 80 degrees, at least momentarily. The engine just slowed down and came to halt.

I was at about 500’ agl and tried to restart, but it wasn’t happening. So, I spiraled around once to stay over my field and lined up for a landing. The landing was no problem and there was no damage done.

Upon inspection of the engine, we found that a very lean condition arose very quickly during the extreme climb and that one piston had begun to melt under the spark plug. These detonations caused the pistons to heat up and swell, causing the seizure. The lean condition was most likely from a combination of things happening all at once. Low octane fuel, cold air, the extreme angle on the carburetors, etc.

My good friend and fellow PPC pilot Mike helped me with tearing it down and we ordered the parts to rebuild the complete top end of the engine. Then it will have to go through the break in procedure again and I plan to do a few things different.

The carbs will be mounted on a slant forward, so they will not be so extremely tilted back in a hard climb. The fuel will be premium for the higher octane to help fight off the detonation. I am going to try running a richer fuel mixture too to keep the EGTs lower.

The other thing that I intend to do toward preventing this from happening again is to stay out of those extreme climb angles. When I do a full power climb in the Rocket, it needs to be at several thousand feet above sea level. For the record flight we will start out at around 5,000 rpm and work our way up to full throttle gradually on the way up. That way the sustained climb angle should only be around 45 degrees more or less.

As soon as I have a date set for the record attempts or there is other new news, we will update the story again.

Thank you for your interest in our quest to reach the heights!

Sincerely,

Steve Thomas