Montycosmos racer
ass-kissing
yesterday, during my am flight i noticed several cop cars active in the desert here in az. i landed and taxied into my parking spot here on the gila river indian reservation. a cop car had followed me , a deep 'official' voice behind me said 'good morning sir', i thought uh-oh, i'm in trouble. then he asked had i seen 6 illegals they were chasing. i hadn't but offered to go up again and look.he said he would welcome that so i did, but the miscreants were long gone and after twenty minutes of searching i landed behind one of the cop cars and reported no sightings. the cop asked me how much weight i could carry, so i diplomatically told him 300# including ammo! ps, i have found several stolen pick-ups on the res and reported them to the cops, a little ass-kissing works wonders!
Comments
That's great Monty! At first I thought the cops were after you. I was soaring a nearby ridge in my hang glider one day and was getting a little tired, about to land, when a cop car cruised slowly along the road at the top of the ridge. Something told me he was looking for me. So, I pulled back into the lift band to watch him from my eagle eye vantage point. Sure enough, he drove down to the road at the bottom of the ridge below me, parked and waited. I guess he figured this crazy kite was at the mercy of gravity and I would just have to land right at his feet. Instead, I just made longer and longer passes up and down the ridge waiting him out, teasing with some nearby passes-- eventually, I flew several miles across no-road terrain and landed (actually short in a horse corral (but that's a different story & no horse there- flared hard right before the barbed wire and fit it in! Whew!)). Anyway, I thought it was pretty funny winning a low speed chase between a cop hang glider. People have an odd idea of what is illegal (basically if it's different, it must be illegal), and cops have unusual ideas as to what their jurisdiction is (not airspace (see Ed's story on the Secret No-Fly Zone)). But all was well that ended well for me- I hadn't done anything wrong-- but why land and talk about it when you can tease them from overhead instead ?! ;)
Hi Monty,
I like your article about AZ police encounters. It's pretty cool.
Thnk you for an article about how handle the front wheel steering. I will continue flying as soon as my arm/wrist is out of cast.
I might want to add heavy duty springs on the front wheel to prevent accidently steering in wrong direction as cburg suggested. I need to press harder if I need to turn while doing the taxi on the ground.
hi sally, i built a sabre trike from plans many years ago, and fitted strong bungee cords to the fork to center it. i found them unnessesary and not helpful. springs, and bungees , will tend to fight each other for control, possibly initiating a shimmy, which could be a precurser to rollover city. your legs are probably sufficient to prevent a shimmy if applied equally, and firmly, the wheel held in line with the direction of travel, not necessarily the direction the 'sharp end' is pointing ' especially if a cross-wind component is causing a 'crabbed' landing . northwing fit a pretty neat steering damper to their trikes which is adjustable and having no springiness won't bounce from side to side which springs can (they don't have damping and will tend to oscilate ) ever ride in a jallopie with bad shocks? boing,boing, boing! please get a refresher before soloing again. you will never land as smoothly ever again as you did on that first time, and we all tend to have safe periods and blase times when we don't concentrate quite so closely as we did that first time. hugs monty
Sally... do not bother with springs or bungee cords. Simply have a properly designed nose wheel assembly. Not all trikes are built equal out there in the flying world and some are really poorly designed. A proper system will have a slight forward rake of the forks but the actual wheel will sit behind the ends of the nose wheel fork in what is called a trailing link or trailing arm that will automatically make the nose wheel follow.
You should be able to push your trike from the prop and have the trike roll straight. Some are built less well and will kick left or right when you push from the prop, that is because the nose wheel is less than properly designed to be a safe rolling mechanism that will track straight, it really should track straight on its own. These are the trikes that have more difficulty in keeping straight when your landing is a little off. However all systems will bounce and skip left and right on landing if you land too fast and do not pull the bar all the way in and keep it there, the moment your nose wheel touches the ground.