Ian Beadle wrote:
Hi Paul
I'm afraid I won?t be contributing much to ACRE in future as I crashed the RV
last weekend. Fortunately no injuries but the plane is a right off.
We had flown in to a vintage car show at a country town and used a marked off area of a paddock as an airstrip. On climb after takeoff at about 2000 ft
coolant sprayed over the windscreen and temperatures started to climb. I elected to return to the strip lose height where we were, and do a straight in
approach. I was so worried about being too low and too slow that I started the approach too high and too fast.
I sideslipped to lose height but when I should have been concentrating on the roundout I was distracted by the proximity of the fence and trees. The result
was a hard landing the nose wheel dug in, and the plane flipped over. On a hard strip I would have got away with it.
Now the reason why.
The lower hose from the water pump blew off. The reason was that I had fitted a thick walled pipe from the engine to the pressurised overflow bottle. The bore
of the pipe was too small to take a large flow of water as the engine heated up.
It has been my practice to allow the engine to reach operating temperature after taxiing. On this occasion we had to taxi over the rough surface to get to the
strip which was a bit soft. I had to use more power than normal to taxi and take off . The rapid expansion of coolant was too much for the overflow pipe and
coolant pressure blew the pump hose off. The EIS was set to alarm low pressure not high.
Ian Beadle
I am really sorry to hear that Ian. I am also very very glad that you and your wife are
OK. Is there nothing that can be salvaged?
Maybe in awhile you will feel like building another one.
Paul Lamar
Jerry Bass wrote:
Sorry to hear, Ian. Hope you are ok.
Jerry Bass
540-932 3125
Cell 241-2675
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