Early July and the warbirds are out at Perth…
For a small fee you too can have a ride in a two-seat Spitfire Mk IX. Check them out at http://www.spitfires.com – we thought it would be a good idea to get some photos of the two warbirds together, so the Cub was wheeled out:
Both aircraft are single-engine taildraggers, with tandem seating for two. They have D-Day markings, and both have evidence of bullet holes. Virtually the same, but they wouldn’t let me take the Spitfire for a wee flight..!
Meanwhile back in the workshop at home, the SSDR Eindecker got a new ignition switch:
And silly me lost the wiring diagram and the photo of the old switch in situ so it took a morning of trial and error to get the leads on the correct terminals. Got there in the end…
Quite a bit of RV flying thrown in, trying to find “hand gesture shaped” cloud formations, with limited success. Here’s the only one…
The Cub is now out of annual, as we are in the process of moving it from a CofA to a Permit to Fly. There are several stages, one of which is an aircraft reweigh. The aircraft is rolled up these ramps:
And then on to the special scales:
The tail is lifted until the fuselage is level (pic shows ramp but no scales yet) and then the weights are recorded for all three wheels.
After that there’s a bit of calculation magic to determine empty weight and CofG.
Next stage will be the aircraft inspection, plus there’s a bit of a paperwork sift to check that various service letters, service bulletins, airworthiness notices etc have been complied with.
A lot of the notices are from pre 1980, and should have been complied with when the aircraft was rebuilt in 2014, but we still have to check:
After this picture was taken and the cowlings were put back on, I got home to the paperwork and found that there may be another AD on the carburettor, depending on the model. So now I have to take them off again to check. Life is hard.
And finally a wee trip in the back of a BA A320 from Edinburgh to London for Uncle Johnny’s 80th birthday celebration- at a pub just visible in the photo on the south bank of the Thames in Greenwich.
Whoever said retirement was full of free time was full of it themselves…