Inspection - LongNoseThunder - Re-Reflight Ep 1 - Turbine Powered P-51 Thunder Mustang Kitplane

welcome to the long-nosed thunder re-re flight revisiting with an old friend and some lessons learned about cockpit decision making check check check i can't tell you how stoked i was to have this plane come out of the woodwork this was a project that was really important to me back when i did it you know back in 2016 and i felt terrifically lucky to have the opportunity to revisit the airplane and and move it to the next chapter in its life if you haven't caught up there are previous videos uh for this program on the youtube channel please go back and catch up now one two three four five six seven eight 10 11. in 2016 i was a freshly hired test pilot at uh the mooney r d facility in chino california i was excited to be getting access to an airport i've never really spent much time at before the chino airport and i was doing what we all do poking around the back hangers to see what was there that was cool i happened around a corner uh at threshold aviation there on the south side of the chino airport been around the corner and happened to come across this airplane did some googling and found that not only was it just as rad as it looked walking through the hangar doors but it was for sale so i reached out to the owner uh to the broker who was working on selling the airplane and just let him know that i was excited to help however i could i got lucky and the new owner when he purchased the airplane uh reached out and asked for me to help him get the airplane ready to ferry it from chino on down the line onto the owner's place it turned out that the airplane had never really finished its phase one program and so that meant that there was an opportunity to do a fair amount of flying and some real test work on the airplane in the event that i was willing to do all the rest of the work that was required so uh by the time we were done and if you've watched the previous videos you know uh we spent a lot of time with the hydraulic system uh after hours uh you know at mooney you know work ended at 5 30 or whatever it was and then you know i had an airbnb i was crashing at so i had a few hours there every night and i was more than happy to learn about thunder mustangs during that time [Music] i spent a lot of time on the brakes i spent a lot of time on the engine [Music] hey jim what are you doing watching an airplane ended up being a lot of uh uh late hand labor a lot of working on the airplane labor for the amount of testing that i got to do but it was a fantastic [Music] experience [Music] i ended up delivering the airplane to denver where uh the other test pilot lance's other test pilot took over and the airplane disappeared in the woodwork and i didn't hear anything about it since then well here we are in denver colorado this is a final stop for today's trip on to the next one airplanes are cool in the time that it was gone uh the airplane uh passed through a couple different maintenance shops it got a new instrument panel the engine was overhauled and eventually it ended up in deland florida uh at the home of of walter engines so there's a lot of things to get excited about about the long-nosed thunder one of which is the engine right the walter 601 is just it's a weird motor right uh and also there was a time when these engines were just becoming available from czechoslovakia where they were really cheap and they were getting used on a lot of cool home builds [Music] and it's not really well supported in the u.s so if you're gonna play with walters you're gonna end up in deland florida there's only a handful of outfits that maintain the 601 and they're all in deland in my personal experience when i was looking for information about the 601 i found myself coming across the same name over and over again uh cook john and then his son quentin are in the little bit of research i was doing back in 2016 they are the world experts so in the case of of 2016 we hired uh john quintin's dad to come out to chino to fix the fuel controller on the airplane uh before i started flying it he was there i didn't get to meet him uh certainly never got to meet quentin uh and so everything that i did uh to learn about the walter was done at a distance uh my favorite part about this project when lance reached out to do it it meant that i was going to get to go to turbine power technologies and meet the cooks to meet quentin which which felt like whatever was going to happen that was going to be an opportunity that was not to be missed arriving at turbine power technologies it's a you know a humble little building just a couple little hangers uh on the south side of the deland airport business park it's hard to imagine all the cool things that have come out of those hangars uh when you see sort of the the humble outside and when i say with the the stuff that's inside it really all centers around this man quentin cook i say cook his name is actually much more difficult to pronounce luckily he lets us call him cook so walking through the front door you walk through a small office but then very quickly you're on the shop floor with this sort of what you would expect for turbine engine maintenance going on uh but with just a really small team uh you know i saw four employees besides clinton while i was there i wouldn't be surprised if there was a couple more but uh when you take that four people that i saw and the fact that while i was there i saw maybe four or six engines get delivered uh for overhaul and i saw two engines besides the engine that i took off-site uh leave it's a pretty good indicator of a good healthy business in a strong walter 601 community which bodes well if you're interested in playing with the 601s which i am like so many things when you get to a shop like this you start taking for granted all the access that you're having right i mean uh there was a time uh two years ago where just taking the the upper cowl off the thunder i felt like i was getting to learn all sorts of new things about the walter and here i was in quentin's shop surrounded by all the bits that add up to a 601 gets easy to take that for granted walking through the shop you could see engines in various stages of overhaul everything from stuff that just come in that was just being disassembled to stuff that was being assembled to the engines that were actually on the uh the ground running truck when i say it's easy to take it for granted it's easy take it for granted because i was there for the long nose thunder so the the long nose had been there for the better part of three years again i'm paraphrasing the airplane showed up for some sort of relatively routine engine maintenance and some modifications underneath the cowling and then uh while it was there the engine was damaged and as a result the engine had to be overhauled and quinton did that work after it was overhauled lance had trouble getting out to the facility to pick up his engine and as a result it sat uh like i said for the better part of three years which is a long time so walking around the corner and seeing the airplane for the first time and yeah whatever just two years three years it had been a while uh i was sort of struck initially by the changes that had made been made to the airplane um so obviously you know time has passed and you know it's the airplane looked fantastic it was presented well in the hangar but also there were just there were changes so um the the first one that's most noticeable i mean if you look at the old videos of the of the work that we did on the airplane everybody wants to talk about the scoop you know the um i took a lot of flack on the internet for you know what kind of a would put the a gopro camera in the scoop don't you know this scoop is for engine cooling and the point was that the because the walter didn't require a radiator which maybe that's obvious uh that scoop on the bottom was there but it wasn't doing anything so the the front of it was open uh had the stock thunder mustang opening but the back of it the there was no exit door so it was just there was a screw-on panel that uh that closed up where the the exit would be behind the radiator normally like i said there was a lot of comments on the internet so if i was getting comments on the internet i can only assume that when lance you know travel with the airplane or show the airplane to people that was a common question that he got you know what's in the scoop and so you can see his solution that problem which is he uh installed two uh cool air vents and a taxi light and a landing light i'd never seen it before and it's an interesting way to use the space i i mean i think it's probably better than just having a big dumb hole there but cool uh the other thing was the changes that have been made to the panel uh so obviously you know big new garmin touch screen and then a backup uh touch screen below and in doing that they had to move some stuff around the fuel gauge that had been in the airplane all along was still in the airplane but it had been moved and then the new vr panel had been added with all the engines information summarized on an lcd screen rather than like uh it was like a type screen before and with this was probably the some of the bigger challenges that i could see coming in the project was that i was gonna have to interface with this panel in order to move the airplane some thousand miles from florida to texas and these were the tools i was going to have to you to do that so we get a lot of questions and one of the questions we get a lot is you know can i get your um inspection checklist first of all i consider our checklist proprietary but it's proprietary in sort of all the wrong ways where the reason it's proprietary is it's sort of if you read through our checklist you can see sort of the things that have bitten us on other programs right like the reason we have to make sure we look for x is because well on another program nobody did that and maybe we didn't catch it until uh later than we would would like to acknowledge uh so when we say the checklist really you need to be thinking about uh 43 in delta it's the uh the inspection criteria that's called out in every condition inspection on every experimental airplane out there and uh it's the basis of what we're looking for so when a customer asks what are we doing in the inspection i would say we're doing a condition inspection typically the inspection that we do takes a couple hours i like to plan for three or four uh we go through the paperwork you know we open up all the covers we look at the flight controls we obviously look at the engine we look at the fuel system we look at the electrical system we look at the radios etc uh make sure the pilot fits in the airplane make sure that the harnesses are safe in our geometry that's not gonna hurt the pilot if something happens uh make sure that the emergency egress systems work you know it's it's standard stuff but in the context of the flight test environment while i say that that's the checklist i think it's important to bring up what's actually going on so yeah we're looking for nuts and bolts and standard you know lefty loosey ready tidy stuff but what we're really doing is is a little bit deeper than that so um number one is it's an interview with the owner about what are the expectations of the day very directly you're brought out to do a thing you want to make sure you understand what what the owner meant when they told you do the thing right a lot of these cases during the inspection is the first time we're spending any face-to-face time with the owner so it's a great chance to sort of figure out what are their expectations what are their background right am i dealing with a bush pilot who's only dealt with fixed gear airplane you know rag wing construction or am i dealing with a you know an ex-military guy who's never flown anything this light before and what we're really trying to do there is figure out what are the blind spots of the program right a lot of times you know you can look at the airplane all you want but everything you need to know is from talking to the guy that spent the most time with it so and that's typically the owner so getting those expectations for what does he expect what does he know about what he expects what does he know about the risks associated with it does he fully understand what he's asking you to do and how that puts the airplane at risk and then therefore all of his investment uh and the inspection is a great time to do the last thing is going over limits and uh and envelopes and uh and starting to have the beginning of the conversation that would eventually end on a worst case day where you've melted an engine or crashed an airplane a great example is cht limits right so everybody knows that you can you know google your lycoming manual for your your lycoming 320 and you can come up with a number for a cht limit chd limits mean different things to different people it's not uncommon where you say to an owner you say oh what's your ch t limit that you want to use and they'll say uh well the book says 440 degrees now does 440 degrees mean you never want me to get to 440 or does 440 degrees mean if it gets to 440 but it's only on the climb and you're already pulling the throttle back that's okay does that mean you want me to land immediately does that mean we're going to tear the engine down does it mean that you're going to be annoyed if i taxi back and i'm like oh well it was 439 degrees and i didn't want to let it get to 440 etc and trying to establish what the bounds of those things are right and when i say the context of the the worst conversation which is that last conversation where you've you've damaged the airplane and you have to taxi back and they say you know you have to say well we set this expectation this is how i said i was going to manage for instance cht so i'm going to pull the throttle back i'm going to make sure the mixture is full i'm going to accelerate the airplane whatever the deal is and it did or didn't work but but again a lot of this stuff is about establishing you know what are the expectations what is acceptable so that you can effectively be the hands and and eyeballs of the owner in the cockpit while they're on the ground so uh first step was taking the airplane apart so here you can see uh jose it takes a step stool to take the cowling off the the long nose thunder so you can see getting the ladder uh take it out they're all quarter turn cam locks but they all fall out so you get it's a little bit tricky to get them out and get those all out pull it and then we're working together to pull the upper cowling so because of the longer uh the extended nose of the long nose thunder the cowling's longer and it's a little bit hard to manage with one person so once we get the cowling off of course you open the treasure chest you want to take a look so go in and take a look and very quickly it's obvious that some significant work has been done here the long nose thunder when i was first introduced to it had the same four battery pack set up uh it's a 24 volt system so you use two batteries gang together to make 24 volts but then it had two sets and the one set was mounted there on the firewall but the second set was underneath the engine and in the case of when i was operating the airplane those batteries were in a situation where they were getting really hot and there wasn't a lot of battery left they were really poorly located so you can see the work that clinton did to move those batteries back to the firewall the other thing that's pretty noticeable here in this first moment is the the header tank that quentin had installed which is the standard thing they do at turn power technologies that was invented my understanding is by quentin's dad john uh and what it basically is is it's a you know a can uh you know it appears to be steel uh mounted vertically and then at the very top of it is a uh a level uh indicator uh light so what happens is in the event that you drain a tank you have that much gas uh to go before the engine is going to flame out and the way you know in the cockpit is when that first you know it's about two inches down from the top of the can uh when that when that fuel comes down to that two inch level uh a light comes on the cockpit and you have you know it's on the order of 30 seconds to switch tanks or turn the boost pump on or whatever you're going to do to try to keep the engine from flaming out after looking around inside the cowling then i started just going through sort of standard cockpit stuff working through my checklist here you can see me checking the trims making sure that the uh the trims uh fire the right direction it's not uncommon for when the airplane gets taken apart or put back together for left roll trim to become right roll trim etc so it's just something that we check now i'm starting to work my way around looking at the flight control so here i'm removing the uh there's an access door there underneath the elevator elevator to look at the bell crank for the elevator so also through that access door you can see the uh down locks for the tail wheel and then all the associated mechanisms so the the tail wheel when it retracts there's gas struts that push the over center's in place so those gas struts push the over centers and sit place the hydraulic actuator pulls against those and then the tail wheel comes up when it comes up it hits a pad and that pad retracts the tail wheel doors more on that later but now here you can see i'm inspecting all that on the opposite side of the tail wheel is another access door which gives better viewing of the lock itself and then all the associated up and down locks again this becomes more important later uh here we can see looking at the brakes but you know standard stuff looking at the wear on the pads looking at the condition of the rotors and in this case uh the brakes are really critical because the airplane has so much thrust at idle uh so janna's spending a lot of time thinking about the brakes here we are up in the gear bay uh looking at the inner gear door locks so this was a major uh sensitive spot on the program back in 2016. there were several times where i was getting ready to dive the airplane to do the high speed envelope expansion as part of the phase one flight test and i would just start to lean the airplane over and i would get an inner gear door light and the pitch would show that the inner gear doors had come off the up stops and what it basically comes down to is there's a latch that's tied to the up the gear retraction extension handle in the cockpit and there's not a lot of spring power to pull that cable back so there's a little spring down at the latch and there's not a lot of spring power to pull that uh that bit of cable from the gear handle in the cockpit down to the latch to allow the latches to extend allow the gear to lock up again more on that later but it's a sensitive spot for this thunder mustang my understanding is there are some mods for it but this airplane doesn't have them here you can see i'm pulling off the access doors for the aileron bell cranks again this is like standard annual stuff it's not really associated with the specific work that been done on the airplane uh recently but this airplane's been sitting right and yeah it had a condition inspection but you know we're getting ready to fly across the country it's an easy thing to look at looking for slop in the controls looking for making sure the right kind of hardware is installed etc here we go back up underneath the cowling the big thing here is idle stop and then the beta mechanisms which we'll get to in a second then some cockpit cleanup stuff as i get ready to try the airplane on and make sure that all my stuff fits in the airplane and the concords etc uh the thunder mustang has surprisingly a lot of baggage well let me rephrase that this thunder mustang has surprisingly a lot of baggage i wouldn't be surprised if that baggage is limited when you have the radiator installed in the back obviously this airplane doesn't have that you can see i'm taking out all the seat cushions and getting the seat belt straight having a nice sterile cockpit is good for good flight test so on this side of the cowling is the hydraulic pump uh there's again more on this later but the high dog pump in this airplane my understanding is it's not stock this is not the standard thunder mustang configuration the pump is sort of an oddball pump it's a inexpensive pump but has been a problem on the program so here while i'm looking the airplane over it's a chance to get reacquainted with the compromises that are the hydraulic pump uh checking fuel levels uh and there was more but like i said it's typically three to four hours to do that inspection so there's a weak point on the walter 601 engine again i am no walter expert talked to quentin but the way it was explained to me is that there can be air in the fuel controller in the cockpit and a lot of times what happens is about the time you get you stand the power up release the brakes you're heading down range get airborne suck the gear up and about that time it flames out and that has to do with air in the fuel controller so the test associated with that is get the engine running and turn the fuel pump on and look for a change in engine rpm so we needed to do that test i personally am consistently concerned about the relationship between brake power and beta in this airplane uh the throttle geometry is not very good uh because of the narrow cockpit the throttle quadrant has to be really narrow and as a result there's some compromises there so it's really critical that you get the the beta set up right we'll get into it more in a second but fundamentally speaking in order to get more beta power zero thrust or negative thrust you have to make the engine more likely to pio when you're powering up to take off and the less beta that you have the more demand that puts on the brakes which obviously getting stopped at the end of the landing is key but also just steering uh it becomes an issue because the the engine can make so much thrust at idle so uh this test was about checking those two things here we did a quick uh walk around and then jump in the cockpit again i had never been formally trained by the these are the experts on the walter engine so i tried to take every every moment that i could to check that all my procedures were good i had what i remembered uh from the long nose i had the checklist that i had developed for the long nose i had the checklist that the owner had developed and now i'm in the presence of these folks at turbine power technologies who are all well they certainly have more time running the engine side [Music] so i'm showing 24 if volts drops when you go to start you want to watch that as well if it drops below 20 to about 18. so i'm seeing 20 here on the checklist so that that's reasonable yeah if it drops below 20 you know you need to recharge your batteries so that's uh dj on the left wing in the airplane he is the high time guy that works for clinton and uh he's walking you know i'm trying to ask uh stu intentionally stupid questions to try to trigger him to say things that might give me more insight into what's going on with the airplane so i apologize if it it appears really simple the questions i'm asking but it ended up being really useful and that's going to be the same abort that we talked about which is just going to be master off yeah you can just pull the condition lever off turn the fuel pump that's not going to be a big that's not an engine issue so it's not as urgent so uh sorry the reason i keep bringing that up is when i played this game before with this airplane this is a momentary switch you put the switch in the up position and it was like you could release the momentary and the start sequence would not stop okay so this has the the tslm timed start sequence okay so that should usually run about 20 seconds on its own and so that was just concerning to me you know as the guy responsible for not burning the engine i'd be like how do i stop it when i need to stop it right yeah maintain on that eht keep your hand on the condition lever that way if anything goes wrong you can just abort the fuel all by itself and you'll be fine all right so the start process for the walter starts with uh condition lever to the on position you're effectively just turning the fuel on and then you start the start sequence this has an automatic start feature which runs a timer and an automatic ramp up of fuel uh with the ignition sequence and then it has a manual bypass where there's a momentary switch on the panel so basically your you let the sequence start and then you watch the engine temperature and in the event that it looks like it's going to exceed a limit you have a momentary switch in the cockpit that you can cut off fuel and and let the engine cool down so here you can see me doing that [Music] once you get it started the it's a twin spool motor so the primary spool the internal spool the hot spool is running but the propeller is not so it's the you know the propeller is spinning but just only barely the blades on the propeller are feathered and it's just sitting there sort of free white wheeling at a real low rpm so then the last step is once you get the generator on is you pull the prop or push the prop from the feather stop to the fine pitch stop the blades go fine there's less drag which allows the engine to accelerate and then that allows that secondary spool to come up to speed you can see once the propeller starts spinning that's when the the wind associated with all that idle thrust which like i said is an issue on this airplane starts blowing by you can see dj sort of being blown back uh you can hear the wind noise around the camera and all that goes with it so the check for the air in the system is like i said it's a fuel pump off and then check rpm so you can see doing that and then i put the engine in beta in full beta and pull it all the way back into full reverse to see how the beta is functioning and it wasn't looking good it wasn't look like looking like we were going to have an easy day on the beta front all right after the beta check and the uh fuel pressure check we shut the engine down uh uh fuel pump and generator and then uh clinton showed up this is what i need to talk to him about because your beta light shouldn't be on unless you're in beta so that's actually that's the start timer that's what that's talking about right uh that i'm not sure and again i'm just trying to ask him every dumb question i can think of in the hopes that it may trigger him to say something else that ends up being useful and obviously no those lights also should be on that means we need to check our uh our chip detectors or the connectors themselves it looks to me like it's a lamp test situation like that i think it is it's like stuck on because it's very weird that everything is yeah cause you see the lights oh here's an important thing um this is a mistake that i made and again shows just trying to come up back up to speed with the airplane there is a hydraulic accumulator if the hydraulic accumulator is charged up it doesn't matter whether the the pump is on or off and therefore there's hydraulic power available and what happens is if you turn the master switch off it automatically takes the inner gear doors and signals them to the open position with power so they go and they go down right and then if you turn the master back on and they go close try cycle the power off and back on they stick down a lot and forward enough that you can see jose out in the front of the airplane is very close to those doors which i'm not proud of the fact that i wasn't aware enough of the fact that when i was going to turn that master switch doors were going to move and jose was standing in such a place that he could have been at risk what i should have done is said power coming on clear clear the gear doors or something to give him a heads up i was still getting used to to operating the airplane again i would say the start went well the start was very nice no i mean if anything you were kind of pushing the eht more too much but that's just being safe so i mean you didn't hurt it at all really i'd rather that than the alternative yeah well if you go too much you can also hurt it you'll you'll get it out of the momentum on acceleration and then it's going to want to hang at like 45 so that's why you got to do it enough initially just to kind of keep the temp down but then you kind of got to let it ramp up a little bit okay it's good news a good uh good to understand that so you can hear us talking about it there but just to be totally clear about what's going on there's a series of eyebrow lights across the top of the panel it has i'm just going off memory which of course is dangerous but it has two chip lights it has a hydraulic pump light it has a fuel pump light a start light the most important information closest to your line of sight and the assumption that your heads up flying and for the entire time that we were doing the engine run all the lights were on uh which i wouldn't have expected so coming out of that engine run the question was what what's going on with the system and how can we fix it the assumption was that it was stuck in the test mode so you know we've all flown uh airplanes so i don't need to tell you but i'll tell you anyway anytime you have a an indicator light if the light bulb fails you would not have any indication whether the system had failed so there's typically a test lamp light or switch and you hit the switch and it lights all the light bulbs so that you can be confident the light bulbs function before you start on your flight based on what we were seeing the system was stuck in that test mode so maybe there's maybe the switch is bad maybe the circuit's bad i don't know but it gave me something to look at okay hey is that you want to push real quick and then the lovely service of turban power they pushed me back in the hangar thanks guys i feel like somebody special now that's right good living so we pushed the airplane back in the hangar and i went to work i pulled the access door there's an access door right behind the the panel between the glare shield and the cowling i get in there and you can sort of see the wiring and stuff the the problem is that all the wires were soldered in place there were no connectors associated with the test lamp feature so i had to go get a soldering iron so i went and picked up this soldering iron from lowe's break the leads and then we could check for the functionality of the switch once i checked that the switch was functioning as it was supposed to then we knew there was a short circuit in the system and i started cutting into the wiring system it became clear pretty quickly that the number one it was going to be hard to fix the eyebrow lights to function as i thought they should which is that they should all be off except for the light that was having a problem what we ended up figuring out was that the um the lights functioned as they would be expected to function as long as their hydraulic system was functioning properly so in the event that the system the hydraulic system was below the set pressure and the pump was therefore signaled on all the lights would be on so something to do with the low pressure switch is sending power backwards through the test lamp circuit so we decided that that was an acceptable way to operate the airplane that being if you had a hydraulic failure uh you'd be quick to land anyway so the chip lights etc you know you're not going to land any faster than you can anyway so that was we were comfortable proceeding towards a test flight in that condition and that's where we left it so getting ready to uh to go up and do the first functional check flight of the of the day i climbed in the airplane got everything situated and uh before i started the engine i checked to make sure that the uh the radio was functioning uh and in doing so determined that the radio was not uh so it's an old problem with this airplane which is interesting because it followed uh there's new radios in the airplane now but it still has the same uh the same issue which is that even with the volume for the radio turned all the way up the uh the volume in the headset's very low uh part of it is that it's a loud airplane yes part of it is that maybe there's some static in the in the radio but there's also just like a general volume thing going on so in order to to fix that we aborted the flight and i went back and fixed my helmet just a quick overview in order to get audio com so that i can record what happened from an audio standpoint during the flight i have cords that connect in between my speakers and the airplane to give audio to the cameras so that takes a little bit of impedance then i have i run earbuds which take a little bit of impedance and then i run the two speakers in the headset so the idea is that in the event that you have an earbud failure which is actually pretty common um you can unplug your earbuds and then the speakers in the helmet will work you'll have something it's not great but you have something what i did to fix the radio was i just disabled one of the earphones so it's a dramatic the earphone is by far the biggest impedance draw on the system so by getting rid of one of the earphones you dramatically change the amount of overall impedance for the system and dramatically raise the volume of the radio and that was my fix and i know this because i know this fix because we dealt with all this back in 2016. so here's my second attempt at a functional checklist [Applause] [Music] um [Applause] so of all the things i did that day this is the moment that i i think i'm the most embarrassed about just an overview of what's going on talked about the balance between beta and brake being absolutely critical on this airplane i'm coming out of the chocks and and you can see it on my face i roll the airplane uh you know undo the beta lock draw the throttle all the way back to full reverse and there's still too much residual thrust i don't have enough brake power to steer let alone break and you can see multiple attempts where i'm trying to let the airplane accelerate to sort of a natural speed with full beta so with full reverse i would the airplane was still going to roll 20 miles an hour or so and then doing max effort breaks to see how much you know what would an emergency stop look like [Applause] uh and it was just it was not acceptable so that's going on number two is my radio is still not acceptable so i'm hearing 10 it's it's misleading in the video because the gopro did a better job of getting the radio noise than the headset was doing it sounds like the calls were a lot clearer than they were but i'm not hearing all that's going on and this air this airport is slammed with embry riddle traffic i've never seen anything like it it was like three or four waves a day you'd go from the airport being totally quiet like you'd expect for a little ga airport to like seven ten embry-riddle airplanes stacked up with students working on takeoffs and landings these are cessna 172s that are flying around the pattern at 80 knots and to be perfectly honest anything less than 150 in the thunder and i'm heads up at least it uh anyway so far so i'm getting ready to taxi out into this environment with unsatisfactory comms breaks that i'm not happy with and you look at how long it took for me to make that decision and that's embarrassing [Music] again i'm being overly critical and because you know sort of the way that we do business i have to i have to be run traffic at charlie we're gonna touch the uh i knew i knew within a couple seconds of coming out of the chocks that this flight was not that this flight should not proceed and i you know ran the engine for a good 10 minutes trying to convince myself that there was some way i could move forward uh and get the flight done make the customer happy move the project down the line uh et cetera it's that standard um success thing that we all uh that pilots in general struggle with and here you can see i'm struggling with it so finally uh i did abort taxi back shut the airplane down [Music] and um and quentin went to work problem so much worse than i remember them just compounded by the thing that i haven't seen i was pretty clear about the beta issue and there was some stuff that he could do again he's playing with that balancing beam where if he gives me more beta power more reverse thrust then i uh the throttle becomes more sensitive and there's more likely to be a pio during that initial power edition for takeoff but you know i made it clear i wasn't going to fly the airplane how it was and so he had a directive that allowed him to go work then i went and called the owner and talked to him about the radio situation to see if he had any insight on that so every time clinton would make a beta adjustment we needed to run the engine so we'd uh he'd make the adjustment we'd run the engine i'd start the engine up put it in full reverse check to see how much brake power was left shut the engine down he'd make another adjustment and we went through that three or four times so while we're doing that the upper cowl's off and they're working on the linkages and quentin's on one side and heath is on the other and dj and they're all in there and they're noticing that every time we start the engine there's more and more oil puddling in the lower cowling and kudos to quentin they called it and they said that they were uncomfortable flying the airplane that day they wanted to uh you know by this time it was getting late in the day the guys were ready to go home they said we're going to come in first thing and make sure that the oil lines in the bottom of the engine are correct uh and so that was our plan um at the end of day one sounds like we had a productive day oh [Music]

Channel: Elliot Seguin

Views: 84,356

Keywords: flight, aviation, taildragger, P51 Mustang, Thunder Mustang, Flight Test, Turbo Prop, Do It Yourself, Carbon Fiber, Experimental Aircraft, Walter Engine, Elliot Seguin, Quentin Cook, Turbine Power Technologies, Kitplane, Test Pilot

Id: sSdnEgUu42M

Length: 41min 50sec (2510 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 21 2021