Homebuilder's Workshop - July 2011
Oliver Springs, Tennessee
By Ed Wischmeyer
My old Garmin 396 couldn’t find Oliver Springs airport, which is near Oak Ridge, Tenn., which is near Knoxville, Tenn., which is – aw, go look it up – but airnav.com and the trusty map application on my ancient, first generation iPhone could. AT&T cell phone service actually works way out here in the sticks in Tennessee.
What a cool place! Grass runway, a few hangars – one with a door, one with a few tarps across it, and a great selection of airplanes. There are three or four Cessna 182s, some 172s, and an immaculate Cessna 150 that’s been in the family for over 30 years. The owner was waiting for her instructor to show up to give her a BFR, and she explained, in her soft, Tennessee accent, that her husband had died a year ago. But the last thing he did was to rebuild the airplane, making everything new, and giving it an immaculate paint job. She also says that there are two flying clubs on the field.
Meanwhile, tied down in the grass, and still visible above that grass, another Cessna 150 with crazed glass and faded paint, sits forlornly outside, waiting for somebody, anybody, to call its name. N5551G. On this Memorial Day Monday, a family sits outside, alternately flying two electrically powered radio controlled model airplanes. A Pterodactyl Ascender, an ancient ultralight, flies up and down the length of the runway. The owner, I’m told, is deathly afraid of thermals so contents himself with crow hops. His other Ascender sits in the hangar, and his partially assembled HiMax is outside for the moment, a plane that desperately calls for a tax on ugliness – a stiff tax. Meanwhile, little white bugs crawl across my computer screen as I sit in my car, typing this.
Behind the tarp in that hangar is an ancient Bonanza that has been converted to a twin. Supposedly it hasn’t flown for 30 years, and I rather doubt that it will fly in the next 30 either. There is a clean Citabria, two Aeronca Champs (one immaculate), and an Aeronca Chief, plus a TriTraveler, a Champ with a nosewheel instead of a tailwheel. Or, in the case of the one I saw in Arizona, in addition to a tailwheel.
Some of the hangars have strands of fishing wire hanging down at a six-inch spacing to keep the chimney swifts out. Other hangars have planes coated with bird poo. Some hangars have ramps to keep the planes up out of the occasional flood, and those planes are usually nosed in, presumably under their own power.
This is the kind of field where a Cessna 182 makes a lot of sense. It can handle grass, it’s not too slow, and it carries a bunch. Then again, my old Cessna, waiting for me back in Iowa, does much the same.
What wind there is here is a crosswind, with puffy clouds indicating rough air all around, and the temperature is steady at 90 degrees. The hottest ship on the field is an RV-7A that hasn’t flown in a while. I haven’t flown in a while, either – three takeoffs and landings in the RV-8A, right after its annual condition inspection, nothing in the two months before that.
As I sit here in the Audi, the air conditioning barely keeping up with the demand, there’s a part of me that would so very much like to be hot, sweaty, and wiping the bugs off both me and the biplane as I discuss aerobatics with my passenger, having just landed. Maybe some day.
• • • • •
So I’m selling the RV-8A, the one that I traded the AirCam in for. The one that just got a new boarding step, a painful process, and also got a new nosewheel fairing that was extensively modified. Why? Well, lots of reasons but mostly because I could. I really don’t need two airplanes, and the original plan was to buy the AirCam at a government auction for cheap, using retirement money, fly it for a few years and sell it for enough to cover all of the expenses. So I advertised the AirCam for sale and said that I might trade for the right RV-8. Wound up trading it for a very nice RV-8A with a broken boarding step and mangled fiberglass on the nosewheel and nose gear fairings.
Also, the -8A might not be the best Georgia airplane. It’s really hot under a bubble canopy, and although the back seat is roomy, there’s not much wiggle room. And the -8A fishtails in turbulence, jiggling the backseater side to side. Not a good way to impress new friends with your airplane, especially if they’re new to airplanes as well.
With the help of new friends at Gulfstream, I was able to find hangar space at a grass field sort of like Oliver Springs, except with brand new hangars. Trouble is, although the hangars are new and the grass runway is in great shape, the taxiways and the dirt around the hangars are not in good shape. Taxiing across them would be treacherous, and pushing an RV-8A backwards, with that swiveling nosewheel, would be onerous. Yes, there are fixes, like a winch (I typed “wench” the first time, and that sounds good, too) for pulling the plane into the hangar (if the wench can do that, she’s too much for me) and a new tow bar that actually fits, but instead I’ll have money in the bank and be down to one airplane for the first time in years.
Now if I can sell the Cessna, maybe I can get a Skybolt for aerobatics and an F-1 Rocket for cross country, and increase my investment in airplanes. I know where there are gorgeous examples of each…
• • • • •
So why am I driving through remote Tennessee? I’m taking the scenic route on my way to stay with my sister en route to a new job with Gulfstream in Savannah. The beautiful Yellowjacket Cessna (that’s a much better name for it in Georgia than Bumblebee) is still waiting for all – I mean 100 percent all – of its paperwork to be in order to complete an exhaustive annual. I’ll fly it home July 4 weekend, hopefully with a former student. He now has about 5,000 hours, the majority of it in the right seat of a CRJ.
• • • • •
PS. The RV-8A is sold. Paperwork has been filed with the FAA by the escrow company. Money is in my bank account. Former student doesn’t have enough seniority to get a weekend off from his airline job. Yellowjacket is all ready to fly,
