A 60 percent increase in power made wondrous changes in the performance of the Air Bike. I could take off after the Aeronca Champ had departed, climb to pattern altitude inside the Champ’s pattern do a touch and go, go back to pattern altitude and have to extend my down wind to let them land. Anyhow it would out climb the Champ 2 to 1, What a difference from the spring times of just getting over the trees. I was totally happy with the engine swap and the results, but was it still an ultra-lite, yes it was. As built it weighed 213 lbs, I took off 55 pounds of 25 HP engine and added 85 lbs of 40 hp engine, it was 12 pounds under the limit, I had to add 10 lbs of lead, a coke can of ead and a half of another to the tail wheel post to compensate for the heavier engine and keep the CG in limits but it was still legal. One of the only legal ultra lights on the air field. I attribute that to our original attitude of keeping it light, we drilled holes in non structural members and only put enough paint on the wings to taint them yellow, yeah, the paint ran but it was easily sanded off, the wings only gained a few pounds after painting, of course that was significant in keeping the over all weight down. Don and I flew the Air Bike another 40 hours like that, we even put it on floats for a few weekends, of course with the higher horse power it burned more fuel so the two and one half gallon tank was only good for about 35 to 40 minutes of flying. Don installed the auxiliary wing tank extending the endurance to about an hour and a half and the range to about 100 miles. Don took a few more trips to see friends I did not know, one was to an antique aircraft fly in near Murphuriesboro, TN. There was an Aeronca C-2 and an E-2 Cub there, a Fleet and a Myers OTW that were the show planes among many other more modern possessions of the retired airline pilots that lived in the area. We flew the Air Bike several times and we had a constant stream of attendees stopping by to ask questions about our home made flying toy. The Bar-B-Que and cider were excellent, we got home about dark, a long but enjoyable day.
only salvageable wings fin and rudder. The fuselage had sat in a storage building with a dirt floor for years and the lower longerones were rusted out, but Don found a Wagabond project that had an almost complete fuselage but no wings or tail feathers, he finally found enough parts to complete the project, he even bought some of my collection of stuff.Mean while I was busy dating lady friends and repairing the Grumman canoe I told you about. Becky and I got married, that only lasted a little over five months, she was beautiful, bright, a gourmet cook, an impeccable house keeper and dressed her self perfectly, in other words a delight, but she had one fatal flaw — she was insanely jealous of my previous lady friends. I am not sure that she was not taunted by one or more of them, but after months of tantrums and make ups, I finally said I don’t want to live like this, either we are totally trusting of each other or we are not, if you cannot trust me to up hold to my marriage vows, I want out. We got a no challenge divorce. Daughter Natalie a sociologist and daughter in law Suzan also a sociologist agreed that Becky was certifiable. Its too bad because she could have been a perfect wife.
The Air Bike fell into disuse, Al Martz from Haines City, Florida wanted
the Air bike and the welding fixture that I had acquired when the Air
Bike factory got sued and settled by giving the manufacturing rights to
the man that sued them. Al came with motor home and a twenty foot utility trailer and a certified check, I emptied out the hanger and gave
it to Don as payment for his half of the Air Bike. Don eventually sold the hanger and it was replaced with a brand new building with a concrete
floor and a big ramp in front, the airport got a face lift.
Don and Pat Nash had been surfing the Internet and found a small company in Spain that had a flying boat to market. Don applied for a dealership and was granted North American distributorship for the Colyaer line of aircraft, Stan Smith went to Spain for several weeks and built his experimental light sport aircraft (ELSA) Gannat at the factory. It
qualified under the rules. We got it home in a seatainer and flew it
about 200 hours totally maintenance free, giving rides promoting our
product. We took it to Sun-N- Fun and Oshkosh and had a lot of interest
but we made a big mistake, Geneva, Natalie and I even invested $15,000 in what we thought was a sure thing. The mistake was that we told potential customers that an anphibian was in development, that was true, but the anphibian was a modification of the flying boat and it gained a lot of weight and performance suffered, the flying boat had won every take off – timed event we ever entered, the anphibian never got close.
John Roberts ordered an anphibian and paid for it up front, based on the flawless performance of the flying boat. But he refused to take delivery of his airplane because each time he came to get a check out in his airplane, there was another issue of maintenance or design to iron out, in his words “it is still a design in development and I don’t want to finance
what the factory should be underwriting” I did not blame him.
In spite of the trend Don accepted orders for two additional anphibian
Freedoms, he delivered the first to a retired airline pilot that lived on a lake in Florida, the customer started to have problems right from the
start, the factory was not responsive and our little company lost credibility in the process. The third customer was a millionaire that had a yacht that he moved each year between New England and Florida, his dream was to fly to his yacht in Florida and come aboard in grand style. Don had checked him out in the airplane and they where just shooting water landings to get the minimum time for the customers insurance to take effect, they had almost completed flying off the required time and they crashed killing them both.
I had lost a really good friend , a bunch of money and a soul mate that had got into aviation much like I had. Yeah, the Sunday afternoon beer drinking sessions when we would talk about future plans for the company and what new adventures might be in store, were suddenly gone. We had talked about giving up the distributorship for Colyaer aircraft, and importing a different Anphibian from Brazil, that idea died when the west coast company developed that sleek ICON A 5 that some of Burt Rutan’s employees designed and built, their was no way we could compete, the ICON was simply a better anphibian. We got pretty serious about importing the Pik-27 from Finland, a single place, single purpose glider tow plane. There is a potential market for about 250 glider tugs in north America, so it would be a real niche market, but there is a real need for such an airplane. Any how that idea died with Don…
So what happened? The NTSB did not spend much time on the accident and they did not come up with a cause but some of us close to the airplanes have some pretty plausible ideas. I was not comfortable with the amphibious gear retracting into the belly just ahead of the step a point of maximum water pressure during landing or take off. My search of the Internet showed only one other anphibian with wheels that retract into the belly and it is a Russian speciality airplane that I doubt has
had much appeal. Each gear door had a fore and aft loop to secure it to
the belly and a servo driven cam was supposed to engage those loops to hold then tight during water operations, the wheel wells where wet
meaning they had to drain during the take off so the airplane could be free of that weight and fly, it took way too long, so we installed bilge pumps in each wheel well to pump out as much water as we could before attempting a take off, it helped but it also added weight and complexity to an airplane that was fast going from over weight to obese.
Yeah, it would still fly but compared to the Gannet flying boat the Freedom had become a cow, the design flaws could not be over come with band aids, I told Don several times to stop trying to make something out of a flawed design, take the loss and heed the lesson of hanging on to a failed dream too long.
Back to the cause, the wreckage was inverted, Don and the owner died of blunt force trama to the head, the bottom of the cockpit had imploded and the instrument panel and nose section had folded under the wreckage and was now behind the rest of the cockpit, the engine was still running when the accident occurred because all three prop blades were damaged, the lollypop shaped landing gear doors were found floating fifty feet or more behind the wreckage, there was no evidence that the gear door locking cams had been torn loose during the accident. So it is my opinion that the gear doors tore off, exposing the wheel wells to the water and a really sudden stoppage occurred, the forces caused the cockpit/forward fuselage to collapse, and the inertia of the engine and remaining mass of the airplane caused it to tumble forward. One wing was essentially un damaged the other broken about mid wing but still attached, the tail cone had failed at its weakest point, rudder cables held it to the wreckage laying askew at the rear, yeah, it was a mess. So in my opinion the fatal flaw was the landing gear retracting into the belly, something that I had been leery of since the beginning. Need I say more?
I sure wish Don had listened to my advice when he first told me about the anphibian modifications that were underway at the factory. But that is
hind sight. Don had about $200,000 of his own money in the company and I suspect he felt that he had to press on in an attempt to recover some of it, there must be a lesson to be learned from all of this, in my mind it is, pay attention to your gut feelings, and listen to others that are
warning of problems ahead. I lost a really good friend and a wife in just a few years, I don’t know if I will ever totally recover from those two traumas but I am able to get up each morning glad that I have another
day, and all of you that have read my previous writings know that I have
many pleasant memories to counter poise with the bad things that have happened.
So with this edition I think I will stop writing stories and concentrate
on organizing what has already been written and edit out some of the
errors. Bob
