Subject: Sad story
From: ACRE
Date: 4/23/2004, 3:36 PM

George Lendich wrote:

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

Ian,
That really is a sad story, considering the cause and the loss as a result.
I hope you had some insurance !
Would you go for an RV next time, or perhaps a composite - if a composite,
have a look at the Vision.
The Vision is very similar to an RV but in composite materials and you can
build everything yourself and is relatively inexpensive - considering you
will have most things still intact, i.e instruments etc.

That's about all the support and advice I can offer - I was looking forward
to see you rig next year when I go to WA.

Keep in touch, once you get over the loss, you will want to build again -
it's a sickness!! Just joking!
George (down under)

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