aviator79's build

[tdldedcd]

Thanks for having the courage to share your story and lessons learned. Glad to hear you are getting close to get your best friend back up in the air. Can't wait to see a picture of that!!

[alexM]

I'll echo what others have said. Good on you for posting up and glad you're okay.

Best wishes on getting the plane back in the air.

[jiott]

I will add to the cautions about "dry" lake beds, having spent quite a bit of time at Oregon's Alvord Desert area and nearby lake beds. They never completely dry out, so you are always on some kind of a crust of unknown thickness and strength. Adequate crust in one year may be completely inadequate at the same time in another year. Crust is "usually" drier and thicker near the lake edges rather than out in the middle. I ditto the "look for other peoples vehicle tracks before landing" advice. Don't be the first guinea pig; an aircraft is much harder to extract.

[aviator79]

Since I had the pleasure of walking across that lakebed a few times, I can say that Jim is right. Near the edges of the lakebed, it was firmer and probably landable. In fact, while the surface looks completely uniform, I walked across patches where I'd sink to my calf, and others where I'd sink a half inch. If you have to land on an unknown lakebed, nearer the "beach" is the better idea. However, knowing what I know now, I'll never land on another lakebed without clear evidence of recent vehicle or airplane use, and/or very reliable local knowledge.

This particular bed's condition has little to do with rainfall and more to do with geologic water pressure. Apparently, ponds will spontaneously appear in the lake even after weeks without rain. There is no way to know whether any of it is safe to land on by looking at it from the air.

[Shadowrider]

Good info Brian thanks. Sorry for your mishap, but you will be back at it soon. I happened to bump into a local pilot and told him I was thinking of flying to a lakebed here in Utah. He told me that the lakebed was hard pan and can have standing water and you won’t sink, it’s like concrete. Then he told me not to be tempted to land at the next lake bed over as it looks dry, but you will be upside down before you know it. So I echo your suggestions of local knowledge is very helpful.

[aviator79]

What do you do when you're in the middle of nowhere with your upside-down plane all by yourself? Luckily, I had cell service, so I made some calls to let people know where I was and that I was okay. I also started contacting people who I know have been in similar situations to ask for some advice. One, a member of this forum, recommended contacting an off-road recovery outfit for help. I got in touch with a guy in Albuquerque who dropped what he was doing to come out and help. While I waited for them, I started walking toward a ranch I'd seen from the air. The couple that lived there gave me permission to cross their property to get to the plane, and gave me a ride to Estancia where I could wait for the recovery crew.

We made a plan to retrieve the airplane. We would take six sheets of plywood out to the plane. I'd seen people flip Kitfoxes over on Youtube, so figured it would be possible with three strong guys. If we could get it flipped over, we could put a sheet of plywood under each wheel, roll it 8 feet, put the other three sheets down, roll it another 8 feet, and repeat until we could get it within range of a winch. This plan was a miserable failure. The airplane was about 1500' from the nearest place we could get the Jeep. It took hours for us to get the plywood to the plane. You can't just throw it up on your shoulder and walk across the mud, so we dragged one piece of plywood at a time across the other 5. At this point, I was already getting skeptical that this plan had any merit, but I didn't have a better option, so we soldiered on. I thought one of the recovery guys, who was a bit out of shape, might die. We got to the plane sunburned and exhausted. This picture was taken a couple days later when I went out to retrieve some things.



There was no way in hell three guys were going to get it flipped over on the mud, and even if we did, after the effort it took just to get the plywood to the plane, there was no way we were going to move the plane across the lakebed on the plywood. Every 8 feet would have been a huge fight. I was forced to admit defeat. I googled "Helicopter airplane recovery" and actually got a hit in Santa Fe, NM. I called them up and they wanted $12k to fish my plane out. That's when I admitted that it was time to call the insurance company. That may have been the smartest thing I did. So far, my insurer, Starr, has been amazing to work with. They got me in touch with their recovery specialist who said he'd get out there to get the plane later that week with special recovery rig that could handle the mud. Well guess what? He got his rig stuck in the mud and spent half a day recovering his recovery rig.

It would have to come out by helicopter, and the chopper wasn't available until it had been on the lakebed two weeks. The helicopter did a great job fishing her out and setting her down very gently.





The recovery guy was there with his recovery truck and his plan was to hook his crane winch to the tailwheel and drive forward slowly while a friend and I guided the wings as it went over. This was similar to how I'd seen it done on the internet, with the added convenience of having a truck to do the hard work. Unfortunately, it didn't go as well as would have liked. This is why I'm not already flying again:



The recovery guy said that he thought the tail was going to come down on his truck and he gunned the throttle a bit. He wasn't pulling perfectly straight, so the tail came down sideloaded. So, lots of bent pieces to contend with there. I said many swear words at this point, and the recovery guy felt bad about it. In addition to being a lot more to fix than I'd hoped for, it also made it much harder to get it loaded and unloaded into a trailer. The trailer I had was just a hair too narrow, so we had to take a main wheel off, but we got it loaded and home.





She looks pretty sad in the hangar like that, but at this point I felt much better because all the unknowns had become fixed, and I could focus my attention on fixing things instead of worrying.

A couple notes to close out this post. While I haven't seen my renewal rate yet, my insurance company has been great. They were familiar with experimental aircraft, and not only are they fine with me doing all the work, they are paying me an hourly rate for my time. They very quickly sent out a partial advance payment to get me started on the repairs, and have checked in regularly. They asked very few questions, gave me some papers to fill out and that was it. Also, the Kitfox community really came through for me. Kitfox has been very helpful supporting me with parts and assistance. The community got a trailering kit out to me really quickly (Thanks Scott and Dustin!), and as word spread, I got a lot of calls and text messages offering kind words and whatever help they could provide. It takes a lot of the sting out of an incident like this to have a community rally around you.

Now, I've got some painting to go do. I'll do one more post about how bad the damage actually was and the process to fix her up.

[Shadowrider]

Great write up Brian. Thanks for taking the time to do that. Lots of valuable info.

[Clark in AZ]

WOW Brian! Incredible. Glad you're okay. Thank you for taking the time to recount the experience here. Lots of lessons to learn.

So, you built your plane, did the fly off, had an incident, repaired it and will have it flying again, all before I'll have finished my build for the first time! I need to get busy.

Thanks for the post, all the best!

Clark

[aviator79]

WOW Brian! Incredible. Glad you're okay. Thank you for taking the time to recount the experience here. Lots of lessons to learn.

So, you built your plane, did the fly off, had an incident, repaired it and will have it flying again, all before I'll have finished my build for the first time! I need to get busy.

Thanks for the post, all the best!

Clark

When you put it like that, I guess it's not so bad. And I got to spend most of 2019 flying all over the western US, and at least it's down during a fly-in season with no fly-ins. (Not that I'm happy about a global pandemic, but none of the fun things I did last year happened this year anyway.)

[aviator79]

Here's a damage inventory:
-damaged prop
-cracked windshield
-damaged lift strut
-some minor paint cracking in the cowls where they flexed going over the nose.
-That mud is either caustic or acidic, so my bare aluminum spinner was pitted and stained.
-The damaged tail from the recovery.

Most of this is pretty simple remove/service replace.
-I followed the Rotax prop strike instructions. CPS did the overhaul and NDT inspection of the gearbox. Prop flange and crank runout were within spec. CPS said it's quite rare for a clutch-equipped gearbox to damage the crank or fail the NDT inspection.
-Airmaster had me saw the blades off their roots and send the hub and blade roots back to them. They rebuilt it to new standards and shipped it back.
-I used the old windshield as a template to cut the new one. If I did it again, I wouldn't do this. It worked out okay, but I don't think it was significantly less work and the fit isn't as good as the original. I'll say that the very stern instructions from Kitfox should be followed for receiving the windshield. The first one LP Aero sent out was cracked all the way across. There was no significant damage to the box, so I'm glad I took the time to open the box and inspect it.
-Lift struts are being replaced with the airfoiled steel struts. (in progress)
-Sanded, primed and painted the cowls and spinner.

All that was no big deal. But repairing that tail took some work. I was hoping that just the tailwheel mount bracket was bent. Then I could grind it off and weld a new one on. Unfortunately, that was not the case.





The fuse tubes could be straightened, but that tailpost kink has to be cut out, and I that means that whole cluster weld at the tail has to be cut out. Also, there's no way to do this while keeping the bottom rudder mount boss and enough margin to do a proper aerospace weld on the tailpost. So I had a whole subassembly welded up that I could sleeve-weld in, and hope that I could get that boss located well enough to keep proper rudder function.

Here's what it looked like prepped for welding. Fortunately, I work with a bunch of welders and was able to get a couple guys with a generator and TiG welder to come do it. They tacked everything in place with the rudder on and a fixture plate to ensure the tailwheel mount holes were correctly located. The angles were difficult and space was tight, but they did a nice job.



Rebuilding everything:


Wrapping it back up:




So as of yesterday, the hard part is done. I still have to reassemble the plane and go through a punch list similar to a first flight, but the end is in sight. Looking forward to flying again.