Donna and I's 3rd Cross Country

Saturday May 8th 2004

This trip was a repeat of the one we made once before except this time we got to stay at our friends place a little longer.  87 degrees, sunshine and 4 knots winds was our weather.  As usual we flew right to our target with the exception of some zigs n zags in our course line to keep us over safe ground as much as possible.  This time we got to land closer to our friends barn thanks to a nice neighbor of theirs who gave us perrmission to do so.  The grass we hovered over and landed on was about 2 to 3 feet tall and I expected it to make it harder for us to hover over but it wasn't.  The down wash from the rotorblades helped mat the surface down a bit but not much lol.  We exited the helicopter and headed for the barn to see the mama horsie that was fixing to have her baby any time.  When we flew in and landed our ship she got pretty spooked and wasn't very happy to see us lol.

We took this picture after we took off.   If you look at the grass on the right side of the barn you can see our landing and take off path still embossed in the grass.

This is one of the Mama's to be.  She was still upset with Donna and I lol.  In the picture on the right the brown horse in the back ground is a real honest to goodness Mustang right off the range they aquired.  It has numbers branded into its neck about a foot long, that had to hurt. To date it's about 2 years old and never been ridden and they say it probably nevr will be.

This is where we spent alot of time after our tour of the farm, cooling off in the barn lol.

Our friends Judy and Larry are alot like Donna and I and have kinda sorta run amuck on their horse hobby lol.  They started out with 1 horse and before we knew it they had about 10 of them and two of them were pregnant with the fouls due some time in May 04.  Monday 2 days after we were there we got a call from Larry telling us one of the horses had it's baby sometime Monday, the odd part of this is it was the other horse that wasn't expected to deliver until way after the other one did lol.

Shots of their farm which is located a couple miles south of New Market Tennessee.

This is a shot of a lime mine I guess that's located about a mile east of their place.

It's one hell of a land mark and at the 3000 foot MSL level we flew at we could be see it at least 20 miles before we got to their place.

More air shots Donna took along the way.

On a 2nd flight that evening Donna took these pictures of a home a friend of ours owns.

While we were taking these pictures we had an anomaly in our ship.  The engine temp, oil temp and the seconary bearing temp rose up quickly kinda giving us a scare. The secondary bearing temp has been to 140 before and the oil temp had been that high before back when I was learning to hover and had the lower panels off but the engine temp has never ever hit the yellow until now so we don't know what happened.  We were only a couple miles from the airpark when it happened so we headed back in pronto as fast as we could go. It was getting late so we boxed up the ship for the night.

Sunday May 9th

The next morning we went over everything and found the secondary bearing had blown a 170 temp dot.  The cooling system and the oil were both full and the radiator was clear of debree.  The temp dot we're thinking is a result of the engine temps running up so high raising the temperature inside the engine compartment.

We've no idea what caused the engine to get so hot unless it was because we were running with a tail wind which was only 4mph or perhaps it had something to do with circling our friends place taking pictures prior to it happening.  Sunday around noon after checking everything over and replacing the heat dot we took the ship for another flight.  The outside temp was 81 degrees and 4 Mph winds and the engine temps stayed in the green and the secondary bearing temp rode at about 130 until we got into the down wind the 2nd time where it reached 140.  Looking at our old history temp charts we have at these outside tempretures that's pretty much a normal temp for the bearing temp so lord willing we should be ok and it was just a flook.