Picking up another airplane

Another student disabled one of my airplanes, so we had to go do a recovery run to Pismo/Oceano California. The propeller on our Tomahawk took a bit of a beating, and when there is the possibility that a propeller impacts the ground or a heavy object the entire engine must be disassembled and inspected before it can fly again. Since we can’t fly it back, it had to come home on a trailer.

 

It was a nice day, sunny with a slight breeze and a temp of around 78 degrees. There was a slight overcast that showed up late in the afternoon. First things first, we took a look at the prop and assessed the damage. There were some chunks of aluminum missing from the ends and it was pretty beat up for about 4″ from the end on both blades.

We were told by the person that damaged the prop that something had blown into the prop while they were on the ground with the engine running. After looking at it in person, me and my recovery team were a bit skeptical about that. Still, we needed to get the plane home and daylight was burning and the process to tear it apart and load it on a trailer started. 

We got the trailer positioned and the tools unloaded from the truck. Off comes the engine cowling so we can get to the nose gear and compress the strut, meanwhile another person climb in and starts undoing the interior so we can get to the bolts that hold the wings on the airplane.

While one person is getting the interior bolts prepped for removal, the other two of us pull panels off the lower side of the wing and start disconnecting the brake lines, fuel lines, control cables, and electrical connections that go from the cabin area (fuselage) to the wings.

One of the other panels we take off is a cover that hides where the wing passes through the airplane, so that we can drop the wing straight out of the bottom when we separate the two pieces. You can see the actual wing spar in the upper right corner of the picture above, its aluminum with all the rivets in it.

All of the interior wing attach bolts are out, the landing gear is off of the wings, and the tow pieces are actually separate in this picture. The wing is resting on the two supports under it, while the fuselage is supported by the two red stands in the back under the tail and the lift on the engine. We then removed the stands under the wingtips and lowered the entire wing to the ground and put it on roller dollies. We slid the wing out of the way and began to remove the center supports so we could separate the wing halves.

Next was to get the fuselage stabilized and loaded on the trailer. It’s a bit of choreographed movement to do it since the tail is taller than anything else and makes the entire body want to roll over to one side or the other. Basically one person has to stand under each side of the horizontal part of the tail and lift while a third person works the engine lift and pushes it where needed.

I got a good picture of the wing channel that the wing spar sits in when the wing is in place, I’ll show it above a pic of the wing spar that sits in the channel.

That got all the pieces in broken down, we got them loaded on the trailer and strapped down for the journey home. It took us 12 hours to drive from Fresno to Oceano, break the airplane down, load it, and drive back to Fresno. Not a bad days work.

Oh, and a helpful person who saw what happened gave me the real story about how it got damaged. It wasn’t something blowing in the wind. Maybe I’ll share that story with you if we ever meet up over a glass of home made mead.