Date: Wed, 3 Jan 96 23:17 EST From: 615pm@iag.net Subject: Newsletter, electric gear, wild Cozy, 4 sale. Hello Fellow builders and flyers... Seems as if I made Nats newsletter this quarter and thought I mention one thing Nat forget, ........ 1. Nat failed to mention that the heat shroud was what caused the fracture on the exhaust stack in the first place. After about 100 hours the weld area failed. After removing the shroud and having it rewelded it lasted another 450 hours. When reordering I requested that the shroud be left off, and that is what I have now. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mike Pinnock E-Mail 615pm@iag.net From: "Dewey Davis" Date: Sat, 17 Feb 1996 17:17:17 -0500 Subject: Gear-Up Landing Fred Wimberly and I had the dubious honor of landing gear-up in a COZY about a month ago. Fred has way over 1000 hours in his Varieze, and I have about 450 hours in my own COZY. Neither one of us has ever landed gear-up before, although the saying is "there are those who have, and those who will". But in this case, we each suffered our first gear-up landing in someone else's airplane. See the story and lessons-learned below. Tim Walsh just bought this airplane from someone in Texas, and Tim isn't ready to fly it himself yet. I had flown it a couple of times to check it out for Tim, and also to check out Tim's flight instructor so that Tim could finish his pilot training in his own new COZY. The plan on this day was to ferry the airplane to New York for some maintenance work. Fred and I got to Manassas airport very early in the morning and prepared Tim's COZY for a short test flight prior to us going to Long Island for the ferry flight. Fred wanted a short test flight in the plane so that he wouldn't have to launch cross-country in a plane he had never flown before. According to the plan, I would check him out in the plane for a brief flight, then I would fly alongside in my plane and escort him to Long Island and then give him a ride back home after we drop off Tim's COZY. It was brutally cold that morning. The plane needed a jump start to get the engine running. We eventually got going and took off. Since this was a checkout for Fred, he got left seat, I was in the right. He flew about 5 minutes and Fred was quickly comfortable with the airplane. Then we headed back for the airport and got a rude surprise. The electric nose gear wouldn't extend. We called tower and they confirmed that the nose gear wasn't down. We told them we would depart the pattern so we could work on the problem. We tried knocking it around, resetting breakers, looked for every possible manual way to get it down. No luck. We tried to reach under the panel for loose connections, under the instrument cover to jostle the switch. Still no luck. We reached under the panel and tried to manually rotate the shaft. No knob. Nothing to grip. No way to rotate it. After an hour of trying every wild idea we could think of, in between the cussing and brainstorming, we had to resign ourselves to a gear-up landing. We called the tower and told them we were coming in gear-up. They decided to position the equipment, but we asked them not to foam the runway (an EZ gear-up landing should be no big deal). They asked us to do another couple of low approaches so the firetrucks could get in position. Finally Fred brought it on in. He did a masterful job of bleeding every possible bit of airspeed out of it before the nose fell through with a huge bang on the runway. As the nose hit the runway, the landing gear indicator lights lit up and the nose gear automatically started to extend, as we had left the switch in that position. We didn't really come to a sudden stop as I have heard so many times about EZ gear up landings. Instead, we slid for awhile on the little foot that is attached to the strut for these electric nose lift systems. The foot broke off after about fifty feet and soon thereafter the nosewheel had protruded from its hole enough to get ripped off the strut. Fortunately the landing brake took the brunt of that and there was no prop damage. Then we slid along for another 200 feet grinding down the face of the strut as it slowly extended. Fred had good directional control throughout. After we stopped we got out of the airplane and assured the rescue guys there was nothing to worry about. After a minute of checking things out, we retrieved the nosewheel and reinserted it onto the pegleg strut and pushed the plane back to the ramp. After we got it back to the hangar we did a much closer inspection and discovered the source of the problem. One of the limit switches for the electric nose lift actuator had frozen in the position that indicates full extension. We could duplicate the problem easily and get exactly the symptoms we observed in flight. The gear would retract but never come back down. The final bang on the runway had jarred the microswitch free. Lessons learned: First, don't ever build an electric retract system without a manual override. The original builder of this plane, Al Yarmey did some beautiful work. Unfortunately, the plane has been through some non-builder owners since that time and they have had A&Ps doing work on the plane. The difference between the A&P work and the original work is like night and day. The builder work is excellent. The A&P had cobbled several mods into the airplane, including this electric noselift (not to mention a horrible cowling mod and a canopy mod) which is why the airplane was being ferried to Long Island in the first place, to get it into Ken Miller's shop so the mod problems can be corrected. Anyway, there was no manual override with this electric noselift. Second, don't fly an airplane without reviewing emergency procedures. I had flown this airplane in a couple of previous test flights for the new owner and I never thought about how to handle a failure in this particular system. I should have. Third, be extra careful in cold weather. Strange things happen to microswitches, O-rings, etc. Fourth, if you need to do a gear up landing with an electric noselift, consider leaving the switch in the UP position. We hardly had any nose damage but had considerable strut damage. If the gear had not started to extend, we might have had a more conventional EZ gear up landing where the nose is damaged but the nosewheel in untouched. I guess it all depends on what you like to repair. Anyway, we repaired the airplane in about two days and flew it to Long Island per the original plan entirely uneventfully. But Fred refused to retract the nose gear and flew with it extended for the entire flight up there. Ken Miller has now completely reworked all the shoddy mods and it is starting to look like the great airplane it used to be. I happened to be talking to Bill Oertel about a week ago (he sells these electric noselifts) and he told me he always advises people to put in the manual backup but that he knows many builders don't do it. So if you are thinking about using one of these electric noselift systems, DO IT RIGHT and put in the backup system. Keep building and keep 'em flying, Dewey Davis