All Is Well In The Flying World

The wind was cranking here in NE Ohio today. I spent most of the day cleaning leafs out of the yard. I got lucky this year and the tree gave up all her leafs in high winds and rains earlier this week. Usually the tree holds onto its leafs like they are gold. That or as I said before it loves seeing how many times I'll rake them.

Right before the sun went down I decided to head to EC and see if the Stryker would fly. The winds were at 6mph which is not a problem. The problem was they were gusting to 16 mph. The recommended wind speed for flying most park flyer airplanes is 7 mph max. Well rules are for everyone else, not me. LOL. So off to EC I went. When I got there the wind was seeming even stronger than I remember. Oh well no guts no glory. Put the battery in the plane and threw it into about 10 mph head wind. It took to the sky as if it was calm, well until it got to altitude. The wind was really screaming up there. So after a couple of barrel rolls and loops I brought it down to a low level and did high speed runs around the field. After about 8 minutes at full throttle the battery was waving the white flag and slowed down. So two more passes around the field and a long landing into the wind it was back on the ground safely. I'm either getting really good at flying or really lucky.

I used the photo of the F-14 because I found it online. The funny thing is the picture was labeled as taken in 1987. If that's true it means I painted it. The story behind it is this. All the F-14's were painted in battle ship grey at the time. The reason for this was it blended better with the water thus making them harder to see by enemy aircraft.

The Navy came out with a policy that every squadron was allowed to paint 1 aircraft in squadron show colors. I was in corrosion control at the time. (painting airplanes) They came to me and asked if I could recreate the paint scheme from just looking at older pictures. Of course I said I could. So they gave me several old pictures and I started the project. Three weeks later I had recreated it. Everyone and their brother was taking pictures of it. The commanding officer at the time (who hated me) looked at it and smiled. He then turned to me and said "I don't like it, repaint it the old colors." I told him not in this life time and he said I did not have a choice. The plane sat like that for about a month and he finally had someone else repaint it. It's nice seeing it again. Later after they were pulled off the Ranger and replaced with the F-18 they repainted them all that color before being decommissioned. I think if you click on the picture you can see the full sized photo. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did creating it.