I Love My Skymaster!

all right my name is Tom Comet and today I'm going to take you on a tour of my 1977 f337 Sky [Music] Master hello and welcome to another episode of Tom air I love this airplane this is my plane this is what I fly this is what I'm going to be flying for most of Tom air so you might as well learn a little bit about it if you might have already noticed the sky Master is a unique design it's actually a twin engine aircraft it's got two engines but it's not a conventional twin in the sense that it has one engine on One Wing and one engine on the other the engines are mounted in line there's an engine on the front of the airplane and there's an engine mounted on the rear of the fuselage as well so one is a tractor style prop that pulls the air the other is a pusher style prop that pushes the air what they call this is Centerline thrust configuration now stick with me there's a couple very good reasons to put the engines in in line like this okay some of those reasons are on a conventional twin airplane when you have an engine on one wing and an engine on the other Wing if one of those engines stops working you have what's called adverse yaw okay so that the airplane starts to turn towards the dead engine that gets a little tricky to deal with the other thing that happens in a conventional twin airplane when you lose an engine is you stop you don't have you don't have lift over the over the wing where the engine was spinning and is no longer spinning so you have adverse yaw and you have Wing drop so you got all these things to deal with in a conventional twin engine airplane in an engine out type situation in a Centerline thrust aircraft like the sky Master where both the engines are in line one of your engines stops spinning not much happens you just have less thrust you don't have adverse yaw you don't lose lift you do lose power and you got to deal with that you get all the benefits of twin engine redundancy and the safety without any of the headaches so it's a pretty awesome awesome deal this particular aircraft Charlie golf Romeo Bravo Romeo is even more unique than most Sky Masters out there as she's a French girl Believe It or Not Romeo Bravo Romeo was built at the Reams Aviation Factory in Reams France in 1977 under license by Cessna she is very similar to the us-built sky masters with the exception of the original altimeter which was in millibars and the original engines which were branded rollsroyce Continental engines as opposed to The Standard ental engines that the US models received I have since replaced both those items so she's basically identical to the US models but I still find she's a little special and sometimes she smells a little bit like fancy cheese inside especially after our long cross country trips this the French girl in her cesna USA built 2,993 of these unique airplanes before stopping production in 1982 532 o2s were built for the US Air Force and there are 69 Reams model branded 337 Sky Masters that came out of the factory in France 29 of which were the G model like mine here today Romeo Bravo Romeo is lucky serial number 0083 this particular Sky Master spent the first part of her life in the Netherlands registered under the call sign Papa Hotel alpha x-ray Tango in 1984 she was imported to England and re-registered as golf foxtrot alpha Sierra Tango which has to be one of the best call signs ever I still have the golf foxtrot alpha Sierra Tango keychain that came with the airplane though funnily enough Sky Masters don't actually have keys so I just keep my hanger keys on here during her time in England she was based in Lancashire and leads from my understanding I have the log books the log books go right back to the beginning unfortunately the original the log books pre going to the United States they're all transcribed from the original log book so there's not as much detail there as I'd like to have it still tells me where she was when but there's not a lot of detail for the first 20 years of her life in Canada the plane was based in Collingwood Ontario where she was kept in a nice warm hanger but unfortunately she didn't fly much during that time I purchased Romeo Bravo Romeo in October of 2017 and believe it or not this was actually the first airplane that I owned after getting my initial Private Pilot training now I'd flown a whole bunch of 172s I was sort of a partner on a 172 for a while so I flew that around a whole bunch but somehow I was already starting to use the airplane for personal transportation and for work and to get places and to do things the 172s were never big enough fast enough could carry enough gear were capable enough could go over open water all the stuff that I needed to do with the aviation that I was doing so right away I was looking for something that was a little bit more capable rbr came on on my rad on my radar um it was a good fit I took the risk I bought it and I'm so glad I did I've never looked back it's been an incredible airplane for me it's been a perfect fit for my mission profile and I love it all right so the skym by the Numbers it's got the io 360 engines which generate 210 horsepower while burning a meager 9.5 Gall per hour per engine so that's not a lot of fuel for for that that size engine Cruise speed is about 155 knots indicated service ceilings 18,000 ft she's actually got 148 gallon fuel tanks on board so 74 gallons aside which is amazing because at a at a reduced speed that gives us a maximum range at a low power setting of 9.3 hours and I can go 1235 nautical miles if you can believe it maximum range at 75% power setting is 7 hours and that's about 1,000 nautical miles so from my base here in Branford Ontario I can make it to North Florida on a tank of gas I can make it past Winnipeg in the middle of Canada or I could make it all the way to the maritimes I could make it past James Bay if I went North from here so I've got a huge operational range the service ceiling is 18,000 ft I've never had my sky master that high we've been up to 14,000 ft we were flying to Winnipeg for a job one time we had to get above the ice it was the only way we could get there and we went up to 14,000 ft obviously it was the winter so it was cold we had good density altitude she climbed up to 14,000 feet like nobody's business I've never had her higher than that but I'm sure I'll go higher one day stall speed no flaps is 70 knots indicated stall speed full flaps 61 knots maximum takeoff weight is 4,630 lb useful load 1,700 lb so that's the great thing about the sky Master she can take a lot of weight she can go a long distance at a good speed and she doesn't burn a lot of fuel this makes it the perfect combination for me all right let me show you around my amazing Sky Master come on all right so up at the front we've got the constant speed full Feathering propeller so these are these are actually 78 in diameter propellers the propeller in the rear on the sky Master is 76 in in diameter so the front props 2 in bigger than the rear um the reason for this so you get additional clearance off the ground when you land okay because normally you don't have a prop in the back on most planes the sky Master needs to have a little more clearance so they made the rear propeller a little bit smaller if there's another reason for this I don't know what it is maybe you know it maybe you can tell me in the comments the engines they're IO 360 engines so Continental IO 360 these generate 210 horsepower okay so they're powerful engines nice IO 360s they're fuel injected horizontally opposed six-cylinder engines mine are normally aspirated so I don't have the turbo model there's nothing fancy going on on here but they're great I love them down here we've got the front landing gear front gear uh I'm going to show you how these doors open the gear is fairly complex on a skym so it's standard tricycle gear configuration three wheels one in the front two in the rear tricycle gear it's retractable and it's fairly complicated like even this front wheel for instance obviously I can't retract it on the ground or else we' we'd have a real mess on our hands but this front wheel in order for it to retract it turns side sideways these doors open the wheel turns sideways and it goes up into the front wheel Bay here so it's fairly complicated even that one in the rear gear is even more complex so in order to keep those big Continental engines engines running cool there's cow flaps there's a switch on the panel we can open the cow flaps for each engine independently so one of the things that's kind of unique about my sky master and it's one of the things that I actually really love about it is it's got full ice protection now that doesn't mean I can go flying into ice places where I know there's icing I stay away from Ice like everybody else but if I happen to stray into a little bit of ice I've got a little bit more time to get out of it and get safe so ice protection is a valuable thing to have when you're doing extended missions like I do up here in Canada in the winter I fly year around I want to have all the protection and all the safety margin I can get so the sky Master's got whole bunch of different ice protection up on the front prop we have these two heated boots on each side of the front prop so that'll keep ice from accumulating it always accumulates on the inboard part of the propeller that'll keep the ice from accumulating there another piece of ice protection' got the Hop plate so the Hop plate over the window over the front windshield ice starts accumulating on the windshield turn on the hot plate this little section here should stay ice free now it's kind of scary to imagine that just having a little wee window to look out if there's ice forming on your windshield but I'll tell you what I'd rather have a window this big that I could see out of then no no vision at all out the front of the airplane I've heard stories about people getting getting into ice right away their windshield ice is up and they can't see a thing biggest piece of ice protection that my sky master has is the pneumatic boots so you can see the Leading Edge of each of the two wings and the horizontal stabilizer in the rear the the Leading Edge of the horizontal stabilizer these have inflatable boots this is actually kind of a rubber on the front of these when I push a button on the panel it sends it it uses the suction system in the airplane to generate pressure that gets inflated into these boots so the boots will actually expand and then contract and if there's any ice you got to wait till the ice is actually built up a little bit which is kind of a scary thing to do the ice starts to build up we probably have some video of that and uh you inflate the boots and then the ice cracks off the boots and most of it will will fall off and fall away again you don't want to fly into ice you don't want to see this happening but if a little bit of ice starts to build up you at least have a way to get rid of it so that's kind of nice so the fourth and final thing I as far as ice protection goes the sky Master uh as far as pedo tubes go the sky Master doesn't actually have a pedo tube it's got what's called a pedo Port so that's this little hole that you see here Sky Master like I said earlier there was the military version that's the O2 well they made them all the same the O2 was designed to have stuff stuck on the wing and people would be down here sticking I don't know what rocket launchers and weird stuff on there so they didn't want to be have those folks bumping into the pedo tube because that usually sticks down and sticks out at a 90° angle so the pedo tube is Port rather is much more low profile easier to handle and as far as I can tell works just as well as a pedo tube we've never had problems with it this one's heated so if we do stray into some ice once again I've seen Ice start to form on this strut here there's always a little section there that's ice free and that's the heat from the from the PED Port that's keeping keeping that ice free and keeping the PED Port working properly giving us accurate air speed which is really important all right so one of the things that really attracted me to this particular Sky master was the fact that it came with a cargo pod you can put these on this one already had one like I've already told you I'm constantly hauling tons of gear around skym doesn't have a lot of room in the back seat as you'll see soon because there's an engine back there basically it's great to have the added space of a cargo pods let me show you what I mean I keep all kinds of stuff down here I keep oil spare parts Rags stuff for fixing things these are my tie down so when I'm camped in a field like at Oshkosh we've got these tie downs that we stick in what else do I have in here I've got my tools so I actually have my tool pack my tool kit here so I've got all the stuff I do for basic maintenance on the airplane believe it or not I've got all the stuff I need to actually change a tire here we've got some rigging for tying the airplane down again and uh something I would never fly without I've got a a bicycle down here so check this out this is a Nifty little folding bicycle this is so handy when you're at little airports in the middle of nowhere cruising around you want to go into town you want to get a coffee maybe you end up spending the night somewhere I've got one bike I can put in the cargo pod sometimes if there's more than one of us flying we'll take two bikes we'll put one in the back seat of the airplane and then one in the cargo pod but this one always lives down below all right so that's pretty handy here check this outo you know if I need to run over to the FBO the FBO is way the heck over there want to go talk to someone I want to run into town get a coffee I've always got my bike with me it's like it's so handy and it's always in in that cargo pod so it's never in my way what else do I have down there all right inside of this bag spare tire and Tube I've actually had two flat tires in my whole history with the sky Master it's never fun Sky master has a unique size tire they're hard to find I always carry a tire and Tube with me and in my tool tool kit here I've got all the stuff I need to jack this thing up and change the tire myself in the field including a little pump to Pump It Up wouldn't be a lot of fun but I could change the tire and I could get back on my way and not get stuck out there in the middle of nowhere with a flat tire cuz that would suck how cool is that all this stuff including the bicycle fits in the cargo pod and I on a big trip I can even fit more stuff under there if I pack it really tight all right so the twin tail booms are mounted on the rear obviously and they attach the two vertical stabilizers so we have two vertical stabilizers and two rudds which is very unique to the sky Master then in here in board a very large horizontal stabilizer and again this has the pneumatic boots for the ice protection on the front end of the horizontal stabilizer rear engine the pusher prop again like I said slightly smaller than the front engine same engine IO 360s this time they're mounted backwards because they're pushing so that makes everything a little bit different with this airplane it's the same engine but they've got to put some different guts in it in order to make it push backwards instead of pull I understand the bearings are a little bit different there's some other stuff going on in order to make all that happen um rear exhaust pushing out the back and then there's the rear landing gear which is quite complex if you looked at this thing from the side you'd think wow that's just normal gear like you'd have on a 172 this is actually full retractable landing gear this gear is quite complicated it's got four gear doors there's a gear door right here this is a big Gear door here as well so the gear doors open up the gear swings back and then it rotates up into the fuselage and Tucks itself away and those gear doors close up yeah so as you can see the gear the gear doors are quite complicated there's four gear doors these two shorter ones here are these two long ones here rather and then the two bigger ones on either side when you take off and you go to retract the gear these gear doors have to open they act like big sails so they really really mess up your air speed they slow you down a lot especially the big ones here you want to make sure with a sky Master you've got a fair amount of fair amount of altitude and you've cleared all the trees before you go to retract your landing gear otherwise you could be in for a nasty surprise you lose a bit of air speed you definitely lose a bit of altitude when you pop these gear doors open to retract the gear and it doesn't happen really fast so watch for that if you're flying a sky master all right so back here we've got cow flaps on both sides of the engine again for cooling we've got the intake on the top the big air scoop on the top the air is directed through the baffles inside the Eng engine and so all the air is focused down past the uh the cylinders to keep it the cylinders nice and cool and then if the cow flaps are open it all comes out through the cow flaps it's a nice feature of this because it's it's kind of hard to get a good look at your rear engine on a sky Master but you can pull this Rod off quite easily you can pop it open with a flashlight you can have a nice look around you can see your cylinders you can see all the nuts and bolts you can see if there's any oil leaks down there you can have a quick look at your exhaust manifold you can you can get a good look at your engine so usually when I'm doing my walk around if I haven't been with the plane for a while and I want to have a real good look at things I'll poke my head in here and make sure everything's good in the uh back here in the rear power plant do the same in the front in order to get that kind of access in the front I got to pull the cow flap or the uh the cowls right off so another one of the bonuses that happen when I bought this Sky Master it came with a radar pod smaller airplanes like this never have weather radar like the fact that this is a small airplane and it actually has weather radar is amazing yes it's only what do you call it monochrome radar like single color you can still see right into the clouds you can see what's going on it works so I haven't bothered taking it off might cost me a knot or two of air speed but it's well worth it if I'm in if I'm in some not great weather conditions in the sky Master another unique thing about Sky Masters they don't have conventional doors they only have a door on the right side of the airplane that's the main door and it's it's a little bit different than most doors on most airplanes it's an air stair style door so it's probably the smallest airplane in the world with air stairs but it's got air stairs you can call them that so it's a bit of a shuffle to get across to the pilot side like if I'm getting into the airplane we always push the pass we always push the first officer seat sorry Matt all the way back um and that makes it easier to get across and then quick Shuffle across boom I don't find it a big deal if I was a really big person it might be a bit of a hassle I'm not sure I find there's lots of room in here here for me if there's two of us in here there's still lots of room it is it's pretty good there is an emergency exit so this whole window on this side there's a little lever back here you flip this red lever and this whole window will pivot open and you can push it out so that's how you would get out on the pilot side in the event of an emergency or if you couldn't get out this door for whatever reason you'd be getting out that door so the sky Master is actually considered a six seed aircraft believe it or not when they came from the factory when Cessna first built these things they have the two two seats in the front two seats in the middle then they' have little Wii seats in the back I don't know who would be small enough to sit back there there's no room back there I actually have have this particular aircraft registered as a four- seat aircraft because it brings my insurance premiums down a little bit I don't have seats for back there there's not even seat rails back there and I always have equipment back there I would never never put six people in this um the nice thing about this though let me just show you we loading gear this seat obviously goes all the way forward this middle seat or this back seat in my particular Sky master so this folds up see slides out a little bit and there this is the way we normally fly our particular Sky Master we call this baggage configuration I guess so it means we can fit a whole bunch more stuff back there we've actually got a ton of room in the back of this airplane and if we need to put even more stuff in there's basically two bolts here two bolts here and we can take this entire seat assembly out takes about 5 minutes we lose a little bit of weight so we increase useful load and uh we've got even more room so it's pretty awesome that way going to show you around the cockpit a little bit uh we'll start with the throttle quadrant here um this is pretty well a conventional Cessna Twin engine throttle quadrant layout so two of every two levers of everything one for each engine um in the sky Master the right is the always the rear engine left is always the front engine so that's the way they do it in a conventional twin right would be the right engine left would be the left engine right um so here we have the throttles here we have the uh propeller pitch controls and the mixture controls here on the left we can loosen or tighten all of that so we can make it a little make it so they hold a little bit more or less with uh with this little lever on the side um so yeah the flap lever is over here flaps are up right now the flaps will actually um when I put the flaps down to flaps one or flaps two or flaps three the trim will adjust automatically for the flaps the trim levers are here here we have the rudder trim here we have the elevator trim here I use the electric trim tab here on the yolk so this electric trim will adjust those will adjust the elevator trim for me automatically nose up nose down trim so as far as the gauges go um it's a twin engine aircraft so the main engine instruments you've got two of everything okay so manifold pressure front and rear again the same front as on the left rear is on the right for the way the layout is on all this so that's manifold pressure RPM and we've got fuel fuel flow rather left and right uh cabin temperature controls so air heat defroster um our old analog gauges for fuel so fuel gauges one for each Wing tank oil pressure one FR each engine uh rear and front oil temperature cylinder head temperatures I don't really apart from the fuel gauges uh and keeping an eye on the oil pressure I don't use these gauges a lot because I when I near when I first got the aircraft I had the G4 engine monitor put in so that monitors with a lot greater Fidelity and detail all the stuff is going on the engines everything from cylinder head temperatures to uh exhaust gas temperature oil pressure um f it monitors fuel it's actually got a fuel totalizer built in so it monitors fuel much more accurately than the analog fuel gauges ever could it's telling me exactly how much fuel is burned so how much fuel I have left by how much has passed through the lines um so that's pretty great uh my backup attitude indicator here that's pretty that's sort of one of the old school uh instruments that we've kept with the plane I've done some panel updates quite recently and we'll talk about that in another episode but we'll just give you sort of the nuts and Bare Bones nuts and bolts of what's going on here GPS Navigators we got two of those the if I went with the avadine system it worked well with the autopilot on this plane worked well with with sort of what I was doing so I didn't go with Garmin I went with avadine I got the 54 uh the 440 down here 540 up top so dual G was GPS Navigators which is pretty good navcom uh we got the Garmin uh GMA 345 up here which is a great audio panel um it's pretty cool because I can I can sync it to my Bluetooth headset I can if I have to make a phone call if I've got a call and and cancel a flight plan or if I need to get in touch with Flight Services even in the air I can actually make calls on the Bluetooth headset in the air you could play music which I never do or podcast which I've I've never done in the air I wouldn't necessarily recommend that but you could do it another really nice feature of this audio panel it's got this little play button here so that'll actually play the last uh radio transmission and you can actually play I think it's up to like the 10 last 10 radio Transmissions you can scroll through them so you're like what did that guy say you can press play and it'll it's buffered that radio transmission and it'll replay what was said so it's great if you're getting an IFR uh readback from or IFR clearance from a controller and you didn't quite get that last part and you don't want to sound like an idiot you can press play you can replay it again quickly and then you can read it back to him with accuracy so that's that's a pretty great feature uh again old school analog instruments uh altitude the altimeter this was replaced this used to be the backup altimeter like I said the original altimeter was in millibars which wasn't very handy this one actually does millibars and inches of mercury the original one just did millibars so it wasn't very handy when I was given an altimeter setting for a field when I was when I was flying cross country I'd have to translate millibars to inches of mercury and then make my altimeter adjustment which was just there was possibilities for error there it was it took a bit of time it wasn't a good way to go I've since replaced that instrument this is the backup but my primary flight display now is the Aspen so I've got the Aspen PFD here as my primary flight display and I'm just that's again a fairly recent Edition I absolutely love it there's so much such notional awareness again I'll show you in another another episode we'll talk all about the panel upgrades there's so much going on in that thing it tells me so much information that combined with the two ifds it's just amazing how much information is right here at my fingertips between forf flight on the iPad and all of this the the new my little mini mini me you know budget glass panel that I've got going on I've got as much data at my fingertips as I have in in you know giant conventional commercial jet aircraft like it's it's just spectacular what what we have available to us in general aviation now so the tcad this came with the airplane Ryan tcad the traffic coll collision avoidance device the Ryan tcad it's actually a pretty expensive this little this little panel here is connected to a big box underneath the headliner what that does is it sees other people's transponders so it's before there was adsb um there was teat as far as as far as seeing other traffic in the air so the tcad allows me to see other people's transponders um and it tells me where they are how far they are away from me what altitude they are and which direction they're going in so it does the same thing as adsb does it's a little more analog shows you on on here and it actually overlays that data on the IFD as well so it shows me where traffic is cuz up here in Canada not everybody has adsb we don't have an adsb mandate where all aircraft have to have adsb yet so there's tons of guys flying around in old planes with no adsb um and that's a potential a potential problem like it's a safety concern you could bump into these guys so with the tcad as long as they've got their transponder on I can see where they are and which direction they're heading in what altitude they're at uh so that's very useful I also have adsb in and out in this aircraft so I'll see I'll see if they have adsb I'll see that on the iPad um and then we have adsb out of course cuz I fly to the states quite a bit you have to have adsb down there another very valuable tool that that comes with the skym my particular Sky Master the autopilot doesn't look like much this is sort of the the head of the autopilot down here is where I turn it on and then the mode selector so these nine buttons up here function in the autopilot my autopilot actually talks to my GPS my was GPS navigator so I can fly full couped VAV approaches I can fly ILS couple ILS approaches VAV um it's a very powerful it's an old autopilot it's very functional it's work worked great to date uh we had to rebuild a couple of the servos at one point but it's it's an awesome autopilot and I mean I can't imagine flying uh long trips like I do across Canada down to down to Florida that kind of thing I can't imagine doing those kind of trips or flying IFR without a without a good functional autopilot it just wouldn't be a sensible thing to do oh another thing I love is uh this is one of my favorite things Garmin gdl 52 um so what that does is it gives me adsb in uh the ability to see other airplanes see where they are it also gives me adsb data in so I could potentially see weather although up here in Canada we don't get a lot of adsb coverage from ground stations so I opted for the XM option on that too so my gdl 52 I have an XM subscription so that gives me full weather data in the air and all of that comes up on my iPad so I can see weather real time or within what do they say 15 minutes of real time I get to see weather here we have our monochrome monochrome weather radar uh we'll fire that up when we're in the air you're not supposed to use it on the ground cuz I don't know what it does I don't think it's good for you or I don't think it's good for it either um so we're able to see right into clouds and and see how much moisture content there is in clouds with this it actually works we've used it quite a bit and it's a it's a very useful tool in our toolbox as far as flying through in Clement weather all right well thanks for joining me on that little tour of my f337 G model skym I've had so many adventures in this airplane like I think back to the I've only had it since 2017 I've flown across Canada with my mom back in uh 20 2020 I flew across Canada she lives was out in BC went out to BC I picked her up the two of us flew back to Ontario together we camped under the wing at a whole bunch of little airports along the way we had an amazing trip sitting side by side for whatever that was the the 10 or so hours that it took to fly across this beautiful country of ours it was just an amazing journey that we had together flown out to the Mari times a whole bunch of times we just got back from a trip to New Brunswick where we went and saw saw my partner Rebecca's family spent some time with them um we flew to Oshkosh flying to Oshkosh you haven't done that you've got to fly to Oshkosh I flew the skym to Oshkosh it was amazing flew the Fisk approach absolutely terrifying so glad I did it not sure I ever want to do it again but it was amazing just a lifechanging event that whole that whole event down at Oshkosh there just nothing like it flying there in an airplane like the sky master was amazing there was actually three of us three different Sky Masters flew down together so that was fantastic there aren't many of these things so it's fun when we get together and there's a few other guys with Sky Masters and we can make a whole lot of noise together um some of the other Adventures we FL we flown to lots of jobs flew out to Winnipeg for a job this spring that was great flown to Winnipeg actually a couple times for jobs flown to uh the maritimes for jobs we flown up North for jobs I got to fly to the torngats in Labrador in this Sky Master to go and do a job out there one time the torngats in Labrador highly recommended amazing place it'd be impossible to get to without an airplane and you need an airplane like this something with some legs and some some ability to get there so can't recommend that enough went down to Florida with my buddy Andy this spring that was incredible thanks for joining me today I totally appreciate you coming along and seeing this fantastic tour of my sky Master I've said it a few times during this episode and I'll say it again I love my sky master I love this airplane thanks for watching don't forget to like And subscribe the channel see you next time

Channel: TomAir

Views: 206,117

Keywords: cessna 337, skymaster, cessna skymaster, reims skymaster, tom comet, tomair, brantford airport, brant aero, skymaster tour, general aviation, skymaster youtube, youtuber, general aviation youtube, tom air channel, push pull, airplane youtube, droneboy, aviation adventure, skymaster adventure

Id: cmMd_vN2XyQ

Length: 32min 6sec (1926 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 01 2023