Wednesday, August 4, 2010

The best moments are never on video...

Last night my neighbor Kai Kroll was over, and we were flying the Supercub off the lake. After 3 batteries between the two of us, Anna came down and decided to try a flight. Well, she put the airplane into a dive that I couldn't quite pull out of- and it smacked into the water really hard, with the floats belly-flopping into the water. The float mounts broke, and while the floats stayed on the water the airplane bounced upward. By this time I had control back, and I firewalled the motor to keep the now floatless airplane out of the water. All I could think of was crap, how am I going to land this? I was thinking that I could slow it down and ditch it into the weeds and big rocks on the shore. After regaining a little altitude, I throttled back and banked it back towards the dock. As it neared, I lined it up with the long part of the dock and continued to throttle back. I realized that I had it lined up perfectly to fly parallel with the shore to fly it right down the dock in front of the bench between the dock posts. Kai and Anna dove out of the way, and I chopped the throttle and reached up and grabbed the cub as it flew overhead. Amazingly I actually caught it without chopping my hand to bits or damaging the plane. Kai and Anna (any myself) were shocked- neither one of them even realized that the floats were still in the middle of the lake.

One more reason why there should always be a camera going when flying...

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