A Visit/Tour Through Sporty's, and Flying in the Appalachian Mountains!

lots of flying in this video first we go to sporties in Batavia Ohio and then Mountain Landing in Logan West Virginia on Canard Boulevard [Music] a beautiful weekend great for flying supposed to be perfect weather all weekend long so I needed to go down to Logan West Virginia got my plane out and decided on their way there I'm gonna stop at Sporty's because sporties on Saturdays has free lunch from 10 till two so I taxied out we're gonna be taking off our runaway 1-8 today we have no taxiway in my Runway so I had to tax the Back Taxi all the way down to the North End of the runway get ready for my takeoff run and it was a very hot day today so we did use a little more Runway than than usual but uh not too bad [Music] a little bit too hard on the stick there a little popped up just a little too quickly but uh recovered that just fine and we start the climb out gear up all the rest of it so I did call up Cleveland approach pretty much right away as soon as I was off uh to get flight following for this flight uh basically because it was a rather long cross-country flight we're flying over an hour you know over 200 miles per leg plus it gave me the chance to test out the new antenna wires that I installed this was my first test flight for those and they worked amazingly well I got to try out both antennas on both radios and the signal was loud and clear so it looks like that problem is well and truly in my back mirror I did also test out the trim that I replaced the whole trim system worked perfectly I uh pulled out the old trim actuator and it definitely had problems the brushes and commentator were worn in that so that was definitely the cause of the issues I was having so here I am just maneuvering around a little bit to stay underneath the Cleveland class Bravo and I picked up my flight following and off we go to Batavia Ohio the airport there is the home to sporties it is their actual distribution center is right there on the airport so when you order something from sporties.com or from the sportiest catalog that's where it comes from [Music] just an absolutely beautiful day outside a little bit of popcorn clouds here and there a little bit of haze but nice and smooth plane was flying perfectly just a lovely day for flying [Music] thank you so this footage you can see me flying along here I'm doing about 200 miles an hour but this is sped up by 40 times so this is what the world would look like if I was flying at 8 000 miles per hour wouldn't it be great if I could actually do that you notice the landscape is very flat this is a part of Ohio that is very flat you all you see is a lot of farmers fields and the occasional town and City here and there you'll notice also that I still have not leveled my camera it's still kind of making everything look cockeyed one way uh that's on my list but I've got some other more important things to deal with before then I did get handed off from several different controllers along the way and each of them was able to hear me very well and I heard them perfectly so thrilled that the radios are now working extremely well as you can tell the autopilot is doing the flying here based on the absolute perfect heading and altitude I was holding there [Music] foreign County Airport which is the home of sporties uh just getting set up to enter the pattern I passed over at the airport to turn down and enter on the downwind lots of student traffic in the pattern here they have a very large flight school and there was a lot of students flying in the pattern today so I did have to sequence myself in there up on and of course coming in here you know you're gonna have a decent sized audience watching you land so that does Factor hidden a little bit because they're going to be judging you on your Landing so you gotta make sure you got all your air speeds and altitudes and and everything just right and here the airport comes into view and if I don't know if you notice there or not I my my downwind to final turns are less squared off I typically will do a curve all the way from downwind onto final rather than squared off sections just because it's safer because doing a 90 degree turn low to the ground at low speed is just not a smart thing to do there's a reason why the military Pilots do that curved military approach into their final landing approach so here you can see I I don't think there's a vazzy here or anything but uh it it looks just about perfect this is a right attitude my AirSpeed was on I did keep a little bit of extra AirSpeed on just because of the gustiness and or at this point I'm I'm right full power back and just gliding it in now I did try to hold the nose wheel off on Landing there and as soon as the mains touched the nose wheel came right down but because I was holding a little bit of back pressure as the nose wheel did bounce up in the air and then come back down again for the second time and then I got on the brakes so I'm not quite sure what I need to do to get the uh the mains to touch and not immediately bring the nose wheel down maybe I need a little higher angle of attack I'll have to do some experimentation on Landings taxiing in uh right over to the sporties building they had ground handlers there directing me where to go and it was very hot so I did open my canopy to get some fresh air in as I was taxiing [Music] and as I pulled in I did in fact have quite an audience waiting to see my airplane nobody commented on the landing but they did have a lot of questions about my airplane and uh um a lot of interest everybody wanted to have a look at it look inside and ask questions about uh how it flew how fast it goes and everything all about it so very interesting [Music] they did give me Priority parking best spot to place right next to the sporty sign so I went over and got my free lunch hot dogs while I got refueled at the airport [Music] then I had to look through the sporty store and they have a lot of interesting things inside a lot of things you can actually look inside and then they have the store itself they have a little retail store that you can go in and look at all the different products that they have they've got uh not obviously everything that's in the catalog but they have quite a few different things in there they have different headphones you can try on a lot of different uh well you can see right there sunglasses and so on upstairs is where the flight school is they have a cafeteria with some well-stocked vending machines there's a lounge area with a simulator and then they had a cutaway Lycoming uh o360 or 235 I don't remember which one that was but they had a cutaway so you can actually look at the insides you can see there's there's what the camshaft looks like and the push rods in the top of your light combing and then they have a cylinder cutaway as well you can look in and see the valves in the spark plug down below they had this poor old Cessna 150 sitting out there and it was all torn apart so that you could look inside and see how everything worked which I thought was pretty cool foreign [Music] while I was inside this beautiful old wacko came actually is it Waco Wako I never actually knew what the correct pronunciation is but this beautiful airplane pulled up so I I did come out and have a nice look at it [Music] you can see all the different airplanes they have for the flight school and this air cam brand new air cam had just flown in this airplane had four hours of Total time on it is literally brand new a three-seater which I've never seen a three-seat air cam before and obviously still flying off its first 40 hour Phase One Flight regime it was flown there by the person who built it and the person who bought it was their checking being checked out in it I didn't get video of it taking off unfortunately but it was amazing it climbed like a rocket the uh the Builder said that it would climb over 500 feet per minute uh from a dead stop on one engine so now of course I have an audience uh waiting to see me take off I actually heard somebody say hey don't go yet I want to see this guy take off so I definitely had an audience for my departure out of sporties [Music] much better rotation no over rotation there nice and smooth at this point I'm now heading down to Logan West Virginia this was the location of the seventh annual Goldwing docks Gathering uh if you've watched this channel from the beginning you know that I also run the Goldwing docs website and YouTube channel I have done so for over a decade it is a a website and gold uh it's a website and YouTube channel that teaches Gold Wing owners how to ride and maintain their own Gold Wing motorcycles and once a year we have a convention where everybody rides in and does riding for a few days and and this year it was in Logan West Virginia obviously I didn't ride there because I'm flying there instead I wasn't able to get down there for most of it but I am getting down there for the dinner on the Saturday night so that's where I'm headed right now is the Logan West Virginia [Music] and as I start heading to the southeast you can see a little bit of a cloud layer and Haze starting up I did climb up a little bit higher to about 5500 feet which is right around where the cloud tops were so nice and smooth at that level it was a little bumpy below that if you watch the ground and the scenery going by there goes the Ohio River below me you'll see uh it changes very distinctly and there's another good view of the Ohio River as I'm going by the Ohio River delineates uh Ohio from Kentucky and West Virginia and as soon as you cross it things change you can see I have a nice 5500 foot altitude everything looked beautiful plane was running perfectly if you look at the ground there is no more Farmers fields and and the flatness is giving way to Rolling Hills which then gives way to just the most magnificent mountains magnificent to look at treacherous to fly over uh I I was talking to somebody from West Virginia at the airport and he said yeah if you uh if you have an engine failure out here you're basically eating trees all you can see as far as the eye can see is just mountains of trees and as you can see there are Towers there as well so you do have to keep an eye out for those Towers because some of those towers are quite High so we're getting close to Logan here uh Logan itself is uh 2600 feet if I remember call however with the Heat and the density altitude the density altitude was uh about 4 500 feet for this Landing so I was definitely keeping my speeds up and paying attention to Anglo attack and my turns because you really don't want to stall up here in the mountains on your approach so kept my speeds up as I'm approaching it [Music] the airport was actually not too easy to find it's carved out at the top of a mountain so if it was at the bottom of a mountain in a valley I don't think I would try it I don't think I'm familiar enough of this airplane yet but because it was on the very top of a mountain uh with meaning you don't have to fly down into a valley and then climb out of the valley it's actually not too difficult to get into other than the density altitude you do have to keep that in mind now I'm leaving a fair bit of this Landing in the video just because uh when I looked to do some research about going into this airport beforehand uh there are not very many videos of anyone going into this airport so I thought I would take this and and leave the full length of the approach and Landing just in case anybody in the future wants to uh reference this if they are planning to fly into Logan there was not much wind down on the ground but there was a fair bit of wind up where I was so you can see I'm getting actually blown around a little bit and anyone who flies gliders is going to be aware of what's about to happen to me here [Music] so you can see there's a ridge here that I'm about to cross and there is a little bit of wind that's coming across that that Ridge [Music] there you hear my engine coming up that's because I just flew across to the leeward side of that Ridge and uh that meant that the wind was flowing up the one side of the of the Ridge and then down the other and as soon as I cross that Ridge I got caught in that downdraft which gave me a little more sync than I was uh planning on so I had to add a little bit of power to counteract that sink it wasn't too bad because it wasn't too windy but I was you know close enough to that Ridge that that wind did affect my my sink rate also flying over this open pit blasting Quarry here which gave a fair bit of turbulence again keeping my speed up at this point because of the density altitude so uh I believe I'm I'm probably coming in here about 10 or 15 knots faster than I normally would in terms of ground speed and you can tell just from how things look that I'm going much much faster and you can hear the the front wheel definitely does not normally make that sound on Landing so I I landed with quite a bit of ground speed but regular AirSpeed and we're just talking all density altitude here but well within the performance regime of this airplane I did a lot of calculations ahead of time to make sure that the density altitude would not be a problem for this airplane going into this Airport and once again very hot very hot in West Virginia in August so uh canopy open for the taxi in I did manage to find a place to park it is pretty quiet here I did have a problem finding a ride into town I figured there would be Uber because the Uber app said there was but it turns out there is no Uber the Uber app lied after uh waiting for a little bit someone took pity on me who was working at the airport and gave me a ride into town to the hotel where all the motorcycles were I need a picture of all these bikes yeah yeah there you go and then here's Savannah they parked [Music] day two well I had the same problem trying to get a ride back up to the airport fortunately one of the uh the attendees was kind enough to give me a ride on his trike back up to the airport and while doing that I I just couldn't believe that I realized that in over three decades over 35 years of riding motorcycles this is the first time I ever rode on the back of a trike and I thought actually this is the first time I've ever rode on the back of a Gold Wing and then I thought actually this is the first time I've ever rode on the back of any motorcycle in 35 years of ride motorcycles so this is my very first ride on the back of a motorcycle just happened to be a Gold Wing trike through this beautiful mountainous Terrain in West Virginia so here I am at Logan County plane looks good got the cover off absolutely deserted here uh looking at this Runway there's there's no wind windsock is limp as you can see and if I look at this Runway taking off on uh 2-2 nice Runway directly into Rising terrain and trees so we will be taking off on o6 which just has basically a cliff and drop off at the end I was uh very desperate to get out of here while it was reasonably cool out because again density altitude and climb performance you have to out climb the mountains and you really want a safety margin when doing that that's what I was actually nervous about in the morning was finding a ride that got me to the airport early enough that it was still cool enough that I could actually get out of the airport safely once again I did run the performance numbers and I knew I could get out of here with uh quite an acceptable safety bear buffer so no worries in getting out of here you do have to make sure that once you rotate and climb you don't level off you want to keep climbing because uh there are mountains and they are higher than the runway so as I was climbing out from this uh this Runway my radio my g3x was screaming at me terrain terrain pull up pull up because if I didn't I would hit that big mountain that you see at the very end there once again much higher ground rule speed to rotate because of the density altitude but the Cozy gets off with no problem at all with lots of Runway remaining at this point the g3x is screaming in my headset terrain terrain pull up pull up so uh I did exactly that and just continued The Climb [Music] once I knew I had outclined the mountains then I started turning on course [Music] absolutely beautiful day for flying today as you can see there's still a little bit of haze not as much as the previous day and you can just see mountains stretching tree covered mountains as far as you can see to the Horizon in every direction absolutely beautiful country to fly in and the people in West Virginia couldn't have been nicer [Music] [Music] I did take this footage out the side window just because I really wanted to try and capture the beauty of these tree covered hills and mountains you can see the airport in the background as I'm climbing out now that I'm on course [Music] so the weather forecast was basically this clear no clouds just beautiful and uh you know as I do I'm working with the avionics I'm I'm still learning all the nooks and crannies of all the functionality of the avionics and uh as I did I I brought up a weather page and had a look at as I was crossing the Ohio River here I had a look at the weather all the way to my home destination up in Cleveland and I saw what looked like green I thought that can't be right that's not what's forecast oh there's a there's a coal-fired electric pan plant that I'm flying over there I saw quite a few of those so then I looked on the on the iPad and sure enough there's rain so I I called up flight following and said Hey listen I need to uh divert a little bit West there's the uh the rain that I was seeing on the iPad on my Garmin pilot application so time to turn a little bit West and let that weather get out of my way so by the time I turn back in I'll have scooted in behind it and uh not have gone through it and as I got closer I could definitely see the build up starting to appear the controller I was talking to actually asked for a pie rep a couple times because I guess he didn't have many people up there so he wanted to know what levels it looked like and if there was some vertical development or not which there was a little bit but not much there you can see that's about 60 miles out you see a little bit of vertical development there and some rain so not not horrendous but still not really something you want to fly through so I didn't I saw some beautiful things on this flight some nights and cities and towns there is a another power generation station I saw this really cool bridge over top of the Ohio River it was just a beautiful flight nice and relaxed nice and stable the plane ran just like a top just perfectly purred along the entire trip [Music] the only real problem I still have is uh cylinder head temperatures are a little hard to manage I could keep them in in check but uh I wouldn't mind if they were a little bit cooler that would allow me to lean back and get some better fuel efficiency so that's something we'll work on as I'm getting close into my home airport you can see I'm descending underneath the the Cleveland class Bravo and here's where it doesn't really go as well as I would have liked I'm coming into my home airport and uh coming my my downwind was a little bit too close and for that reason then when I turned in uh onto final I overshot final you can see here as I come up there's the runway up ahead and I've definitely overshot so I've got to turn a little bit left and fly back to line myself up with the runway that wasn't good and I knew as soon as I established on downwind I was too close at this point I also realized that now I am too high too fast I really should have just said you know what this approach is not working I should go around and start again but unfortunately I also really had to go to the bathroom so I thought well you know what I can rescue this so it's it's I can lay in safely it's not going to be great because I know I'm fast and high but uh let's see what we can do so I stepped on both Rudders to help slow me down I had the landing breakdown the altitude is pretty good but I I'm definitely coming in here too fast definitely too fast so you can see I'm floating here I touch down nose wheel comes down bounces up and then back down and on the brakes so not the most wonderful Landing um definitely too fast so not too proud of that but we'll leave it in here because hey it is it is what it is not gonna lie and say that I do a perfect Landing every time I do think I know what the problem with the stuttering on the video is I'm pretty sure it has to do with a memory card so I will look at getting that fixed I thought it might have been with a radio transmitter but I did some tests and that was not the case so A beautiful flight I had a great time both at sporties the people there are very nice and uh the Goldwing docks gathering in Logan Virginia everyone in West Virginia couldn't have been nicer really enjoyed the flight really enjoyed have you along with me if you like what you saw hey maybe click like And subscribe to this Channel and and that way you'll get to see the next time I post one of these trips online if you have any questions or suggestions or comments please leave them in the comment section below I read them and really enjoy and appreciate all the interaction and comments that you guys leave that's it thanks for watching

Channel: Canard Boulevard

Views: 8,215

Keywords: Flying, Canard, Cozy, MKIV, MK4, Sporty's, Mountain, Landing, Logan, WV, Batavia, GoldwingDocs, motorcycles, 6L4, 4G8, I69

Id: Z7MlIsXn91s

Length: 30min 14sec (1814 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 26 2023