Greeting, It's Mark here in the land of Oz.(Mid-West USA)

I spent the last 10 days flying a small bush plane to an Inuit village 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle! While not a motorcycling adventure, I thought some of you might be interested.

By the way, offer is still open for anyone wanting to visit France next summer; come over to visit me in Vaour .
Cheers,

Mark
Here's part 1 of 4 parts:

A funny thing happened on our way to the North Pole or “how to change the right landing gear leg on a Maule MX7!”……Episode 1 (August 8, 2012) 

(written in Cottage Grove, Oregon, USA)

Well, as you all know Richard (an old high school friend) and I have started a trek to the North Pole, or almost (our destination is supposedly 2 degrees north of the Arctic Circle), and we are doing this in Richards Maule MX-7 tail dragger airplane. We are planning to visit Santa…….

So……August 4 (Saturday) we spent in Richard’s hangar deciding what we are going to take and then weighing everything so that we stay within the max allowable gross weight for the airplane. We started with a big, big pile of stuff intended to cover all eventualities on the trip; as we weighed stuff we found ourselves deciding that we really did not need to take that! Eventually, we ended up with a load that had a minimum of tools and stuff to camp out and hike out of anywhere we ended up which was not on the schedule…or so we thought. We even packed a spare tail wheel, wheel assembly, inner tube and tire!

Sunday morning, August 5, we arrive at the airport and pack the airplane with the stuff we decided could not be eliminated; we tried to do it in some kind of logical sequence. By the time everything was packed into the airplane, the morning low clouds were gone and we launched from South County airport just south of San Francisco. We headed northeast, initially, so as to avoid the SFO airspace and all that mess, with Richard doing the flying. We headed to our first fuel stop in Red Bluff, northern California (KRBL) for gas. We landed without incident and fueled the airplane.

Then…… we started to push the airplane back from the pumps and pull it over towards the transient parking…a strange clicking noise was heard to emanate from the back end of the airplane as we pushed it. I must admit that my first reaction was to want to pretend that I did not hear the Click….click…click. However, Richard, being a more rigorous soul than I am, said we should check the tail wheel. Sure enough, the wheel was wobbling and upon taking the wheel cover off we found that 1 of the 3 bolts holding the wheel rim halves together had fallen out and the other two bolts were only finger tight. I suggested that we should tighten them up; however, Richard in a previous life with Maule tail wheels had already tried such a simple solution and found that doing so could pinch a hole in the inner tube. So……having been so prudent (thanks for insisting Richard!) as to pack a spare tire and wheel assembly we pulled it out and went looking for a friendly mechanic to beg a jack off of so that we could raise the tail of the airplane. Luck was with us, and a long walk down to the other end of the airport produced a friendly mechanic becoming frustrated while trying to seal a leaky gas tank in a Mooney 201. He seemed pleased by the interruption and graciously lent us his big floor jack. So…off we trudged back to the airplane with the jack in tow.

We arrived at the airplane, with now a very heavy floor jack (even though we were pulling it on its wheels), caught our breath in the 100 degree weather, and proceeded to change the tail wheel wheel assembly without problems. Then another trudge back to the mechanic to thank him and return his jack. Then back to the airplane………this walk was getting to be long as we were on trip no.4.

Tail wheel repaired, it was now my leg to do the flying; so with the airplane’s trusting owner sitting in the right seat, I tried to do everything correctly and taxied out, did the engine run up and we headed off happily down the runway and into the air, just as we were supposed to…Cool! Our next planned stop was to be in Florence, Oregon to visit an old friend of Richards; the plan then was from Florence to fly on to Seattle for the evening and see other friends of Richards. Well, as we fly on, we get a close up look at Mount Shasta; we fly by the side of it. Mt. Shasta is, I think 14000 ft. high, and we passed by the side of it at 6500ft. So the view was impressive…..then on into Oregon and Florence. When we were about 75 miles out of Florence, Oregon, Richard had the good idea just to see if we could pick up the Florence ATIS (Automatic weather recording). Since Florence is at about 54 ft MSL and we were at 6500 ft we managed to hear it, though it was scratchy. Looking over in the direction of Florence, which is on the Pacific coast, we saw clouds but I thought nothing of it……Richard, however, knew something must be up. Sure enough the ATIS was announcing a 300 ft overcast ceiling! Richard reacted correctly (!!) by immediately saying we were not going to be able to get into Florence. He further explained to me that there were no instrument approaches and that the airport is apparently in the middle of the town! That made it doubly sure we were not going in there in those conditions!!! So, Richard hauled out the maps and we found what looked like a great place to stop and still have over an hour of fuel on board when landing.

The new destination was Cottage Grove, Oregon (61S) and Richard set this as our new destination into the GPS and off we went. So what has all of this to do with learning how to change out a right landing gear leg on a Maule, you may be wondering…….hang on!

Ok, we head over pointy, tree covered, hills with absolutely nowhere to land (like flying over eastern Kentucky) should the engine fail. Happily, the engine stayed smooth and emitted a nice, reassuring purring noise, and we arrived in the proximity of Cottage Grove and started hunting for the airport. We crossed one final ridge of hills and the airport came into sight with a higher ridge of hills to our right (east of our track) meaning that any pattern at our altitude would be close in. Wind more or less favored runway 15 (a southerly pointing runway) but was being reported as light and pretty much out of the west, if memory serves me. OK, now I start letting down trying to show Richard that I had been listening to his advice when we did my six refresher landings on Saturday. I nailed the speeds, with 80 MPH on down wind, slowing to 70 MPH on base and I was at the perfect altitude when we turned onto final. Now going to full flaps and slowing to about 65 everything is looking good and I land on the centerline, going straight Cool! I immediately get rid of the flaps as Richard had suggested I do to get weight on the mains and stick it to the ground. Works well as a technique in this airplane. So we are down and rolling; then….suddenly the airplane begins to turn to the right. I cannot stop it pulling right and call for Richard to help as well. We both have the left rudder in and left brake applied and yet the airplane keeps heading off the runway to the right! We eventually end up with the right main running off the tarmac runway and onto the gravel and grass shoulder; this right track was a continuous curve to the right with the left main leaving a braking mark (not skidding, as we did not lock up that wheel). The airplane should have been turning left due to the heavy left brake application, but it did not. All of this is captured on video as Richard, the electronic geek that he is (!), has set up a video in the cockpit with a perfect view out of the window. The camcorder is just between the left and right seats at pilot’s eye level.!

Anyway, when the right wheel goes off onto the gravel and grass, the airplane finally starts to swing to the left, as the friction is now lower between the ground and the wheel on the right side due to the gravel. The airplane swings and slides at about 90 degrees to the center line and travels back up onto the runway and we come to a stop. I thought that I must have ground looped somehow, but the swerve to the right was too gentle and the recovery to the left only occurred when the right wheel got onto the gravel and we have clear marks showing left brake application for over 100 feet! In spite of the violent swing to the left as we regain the runway, we do not touch a wing tip on the ground nor the tail, and we do not nose over and hit the prop. Engine is running, still, happily at idle. Richard and I look at each other, sigh a big sigh of relief and I apply power to taxi to the parking…….but the airplane does not move, or even try to move. Wait a minute?? We did not touch a wing tip or a prop and we are right side up…..What’s wrong? I shut the engine down and Richard opens his door to get out and notices…….the right main wheel is horizontal to the ground instead of being perpendicular, and the bottom of the massive aluminum spring landing gear is bent like a plastic spoon. Oh shit!!! The airplane is sitting at 90 degrees to the runway centerline ON the centerline!

To be continued in “episode 2 of lessons in how to change a Maule landing gear leg”