Piper Cub First Flight
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- Category: Quickheads BLOG
- Published: Friday, 18 April 2008 12:24
- Written by Dan Yager
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Well, yesterday I fulfilled a lifelong goal of flying in a Piper Cub! To make things even better I was the Pilot In Command, and it was awesome!
I took the afternoon off from work and I couldn’t have asked for better flying weather. The sky was clear and sunny, and the temperature was a beautiful 75°F. I had never been to Skyhaven Airport (76N), so I made sure to download directions from Google. But, let me tell you, Google directions suck! They told me to “Turn Left on Rt 29” but failed to tell me whether I was supposed to go North or South. I got to “Rt 29” and the sign pointing to the left headed south. I set the trip counter and when I went the required 8.1 miles down Rt 29 something didn’t seem right. “What the heck were all these trees doing in the middle of where the airport should be?”
Eventually, I noticed a woman doing yard work, and decided to ask for directions. Sure enough, I had to turn around and head 16.2 miles in the other direction. When I got to the junction where I had turned left, it was apparent that if I had simply kept going straight, 309 would have transmagically become 29N with no need to turn at all! No Google was going to keep me from my dream! Damned them!
When I finally arrived at the airport, I was amazed to see all of the activity going on. There were kids flying R/C planes, a great number of experimental planes on site, and three beautiful Stinson Reliants on the field in various paint schemes and stages of restoration. I am used to flying out of a VERY sleepy airport, and it was really good to see so much aviation related stuff going on.
At any rate, I went inside the office and I was told that my instructor, Lloyd Burton, was out flying. So they told me to look over the Pilot's Operating Handbook (POH) for the Piper Cub, which to my delight, was the little pamphlet that I talked about in my last post, namely “How to Fly a Piper Cub.” Boy times have really changed! I flipped through the booklet version they had, but didn’t take it too seriously, since I had already read it.
When my instructor walked in I told him that I had read the POH, and he replied, “Ok then, what speed do we takeoff at?” I liked him immediately! (That speed wasn’t listed in the POH.)
He was finishing up the paperwork with his previous student, so I took a moment to look at my log book. The last entry was at the bottom of the page, so I took a minute to add up the page totals, and add them to my final tally. To date, I’ve made a total of 201 landings and take offs, in a total of 96.4 hours. With the exception of my Bi-annual I hadn’t flown in over 16 months. It was nice to finish another page in my log book, and felt like I was writing a new chapter in it, one that began with a taildragger.
We went out to the plane and he showed me how to pre-flight the Cub. I was amazed at how simplified everything seemed. There was no electrical system, and barely any instruments. Even the fuel gauge was idiot proof. There was a stick coming out of the fuel filler cap on the nose of the plane. That stick had a cork at the bottom of it. If the tank was full, more of the stick was showing.
When I looked at the ailerons, I noticed that they had two cables going to each. One on top, and another attached to the bottom. I saw that the lower cable ran down along the wing strut, through the fuselage, and back out to the other aileron. I couldn’t figure out where the top cable went, so I asked, and was shown.
The top aileron cable is connected to the opposite aileron in a similar fashion, the only difference is that it doesn’t directly couple to the control stick. The top cable simply runs through the inside of the wing, passes through the top of the fuselage cabin area and out the other side. It was neat to see the cable moving back and forth above your head, when we moved the stick from side to side. Apparently, this is how lots of planes have their ailerons connected, albeit in a slightly more concealed fashion.
When the pre-flight was finished, it was time to learn how to get into the airplane. Lloyd went through the contortions for me once, all the time admonishing me to step and grab there, “watch your head,” and "don’t step on that," but before long I was seated and ready for my next lesson. Next he showed me the heel brakes, and told me to apply them while he turned the prop through a couple of revolutions with the mag switch set to “OFF.” Next, he had me switch the mag to “BOTH” and I got to say. . . you guessed it. . . “CONTACT!” How cool is that?
Lloyd got in, and we both put our headsets on. (The plane lacks an electrical system, but they wisely decided to zip tie an intercom to the cabin ceiling.) We did a quick comm-check and I told him I was glad that we had an intercom since I hadn’t bothered to learn the hand signals! I got buckled into the seat, and we decided to leave the door open so we could feel the wind in our face like “real pilots.”
Lloyd next gave me a crash course in taxiing technique. I had heard horror stories about how easy it was to over correct when steering a taildragger on your first few attempts, and was expecting to have a hard time doing it. In fact Lloyd even had his own story about a 400 hour tricycle guy who swore he’d have no trouble at all. Lloyd said that they started on the grass to the right of the paved runway, but had run over the pavement and into the grass on the other side by the time they got airborne. He said that I would have to keep in mind that there was a slight lag between what your feet said and what the plane did, so when the plane starts to turn, you’ll need to try and stop it early.
I gave the engine a little more throttle and once we started rolling I found that steering the plane with my feet seemed perfectly natural to me. When we got out near the runway, he showed me how to S-turn to ensure there were no obstacles in front of the plane, and I continued on down to the end of the runway. We did our run-up, he took me through the simple checklist attached to the main wing spar above our heads, then we turned the plane into the wind and we were off.
You move the throttle smoothly forward “1-2-3,” walk the pedals back and forth holding the plane straight down the runway, and move the stick forward a bit to raise the tail. Once the tail comes up, you center the stick, and wait for the speed to come up to a blistering 40 mph, pull back and climb out at 55 mph. It was really that simple, and even more thrilling!
Once we got out to the practice area, Lloyd had me do some clearing turns, a 360° turn to the left, and then another to the right. In the Cub, making level turns is so easy since the horizon runs right along the top of the instrument panel in the front seat. It gives you a much better “feel” for what the plane is doing than any “fancy-schmancy” gyroscopically balanced artificial instrument ever could. This was flying in its purest form. The instruments are only there to confirm what the plane has already told you. I didn’t feel like I was flying the plane, I felt like I was wearing it!
After we completed our second turn, we looked again for traffic, and saw that another airplane had entered the practice area. Lloyd told me to lose some altitude, since we were “going over there to have some REAL fun!” Only, when I looked “over there,” I didn’t see ANYTHING. Lloyd assured me that there was a private airstrip, carved into the top of a nearby hill. When I looked closer, there were six road cones marking the boundaries of this so-called airstrip, and a Piper Tri-Pacer sitting in the weeds.
The “runway” ran up the side of the hill, so Lloyd lined up and landed once to show me how it was done. He told me that our flair on landing would need to be a little steeper to account for the uphill slant. We taxied up to the top of the hill turned around, headed right back down the hill and took off. Then it was my turn.
We flew the pattern, and on the downwind, I went through the pre-landing ritual for the first time. Pulled the carb heat, checked the fuel valve, throttled back, and set the trim. I lined up on the centerline and greased my first landing! I think Lloyd was as shocked as I was!
Just to prove it wasn’t a fluke, we repeated this four more times. I even got a chance to slip during a slight crosswind, and it felt great. Even though I hadn’t studied the hand signals in the POH, I knew what that “thumbs-up” meant on each landing. I loved this little airplane!
We flew back to 76N and did a few more landings on flat ground, with a similar result. On the final landing, Lloyd wanted to show me how quickly a cub can lose extra altitude, even though it had no flaps. We came in high on our approach, but he demonstrated one of the most beautifully steep side slips I’ve ever had the privilege of witnessing, finishing up with a perfectly gentle three-point landing.
I know things might be a lot different when you throw a stiff crosswind into the mix, or when we attempt to do main wheel landings during my next lesson, but needless to say, I’m totally hooked. I walked around the rest of the day with this huge grin on my face. Actually, come to think of it, it’s still there!