In March, the world started to go a bit crazy. At the very beginning of the month, I did a nice solo flight along the CT shoreline, doing some maneuvering flight, including steep turns and stalls.
A week later, I flew over to Farmingdale to pick up Milton to do some instrument approach practice. As we took off to head northeast to Chester, CT and one of our favorite spots for doing approaches, the alternator light came on, indicating that we’d had an alternator failure and that all of the airplanes electrical systems were now running on the battery. I recycled the master switch a couple of times (it’s a split rocker switch with a BAT side and an ALT side), but I couldn’t extinguish the light.
Given we possibly had only 30 minutes of battery time available before the radios, GPS and lights started going off, we decided to head straight back to Bridgeport, rather than try to land at Farmingdale, drop Milton off, and then wait in line to take off again back to Bridgeport. If I was going to have a mechanical issue, I’d rather have it on the ground at Bridgeport where my mechanics could take care of a sick bird.
We landed without incident at Bridgeport and I tried to help Milton figure out getting home on Long Island. The folks at Signature were very helpful trying to line up a one way rental car, but at the last second it fell through on availability. Ultimately Milton ended up having to Uber home...never a happy way to end the flying day.
When the mechanics went in to fix the plane, they found that it wasn’t a failure of the alternator—rather, it was the alternator belt that was slipping off its track and frayed, causing the problem. That was the good news. The bad news was that when they took the propeller off to access the belt and alternator, they found a hairline crack in the aft-spinner bulkhead plate. (The propeller assembly (broadly speaking, the spinner) is held onto the airplane by a sandwiching pair of bulkhead plates—a crack of that fast spinning plate could quickly worsen, separate and throw the propeller out of alignment, which can then damage the engine.). Of course, the bulkhead spinner is not a cheap part, nor one that the shop kept handy, so they had to find and ship one in. They did quick work though, and a week later, I took Gwaihir up on a short shakeout flight along the CT shoreline, staying within gliding distance of the shore. The plane performed beautifully.
And then the world shut down. For a couple of months, starting in China with news of a mysterious illness quickly spreading, we’d been hearing more and more about Covid-19 and then its arrival in the US. After seemingly starting out in the Pacific Northwest, Westchester County and NYC quickly became the epicenter and the Northeast region shut down. A birthday party in Westport, CT, the next town over from us, at the beginning of March, before Covid was on people’s radar, turned out to be one of the first super-spreader events.
We were just starting to hear about Covid in mid-March when my wife came down with it. We’re not sure where she contracted it, nor, because she was only symptomatic and not needing hospitalization, could we even get a test at the time. Luckily her symptoms didn’t worsen too much, though she had some mild difficulty breathing for a few days, which was certainly worrisome. So we hunkered down with the bit of toilet paper we were able to find and, like everyone else on the East Coast, started to try to wait it out, not leaving the house except for grocery shopping.
After a month of isolation, and as we learned more about what we could do to be safe, I ventured out to the airport to do a solo flight, carefully avoiding everyone and anyone. However, I found that while all of us humans were hunkered down in our homes not going anywhere, nature had taken the opportunity to remind us of her supremacy. A pair of Robins had managed to make their nest in the cowl flap (a U-shaped hatch under the engine that allows more air to flow over and cool the engine). I spent the better part of 40 minutes removing the nest and, unfortunately, breaking some eggs in the process, since I couldn’t see them wedged up in there. I actually took the two top covers off the engine compartment to ensure that nothing else was inside and borrowed a leaf blower from the line crew to thoroughly flush out any remaining straw debris. (That kind of dry tinder, in an engine compartment, will catch fire in a heartbeat and cause all sorts of bad days, healthwise or financially!)
PHOTO UPLOAD ISSUE
Once the nest was sorted out and the rest of the airplane meticulously pre-flighted for any other feathered friends or rodents or bug nests, I was finally back into the air. To say that it was exhilerating and refreshing would be an understatement. The worry and dread and uncertainty of the last month and whatever the future held melted away as I focused on flying, breathing deeply and soaking in the fresh air. I did some more maneuvering flight along the CT shoreline, just relishing the feel of the airplane going through its paces.
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