ORIGINAL: wayne d
Now back to Zombie
OK, here is the report from the fly-in today. Wonderful weather, virtually no wind. 1st flight, engine quits, crash landing in the corn field.[
]
She started up nice, the electric gear worked perfect (although it is again mistakenly programed as a P-51), took off and got cleaned up, made a high speed pass, set up for another that was going to become an emmelman, but just as I started my clime at the far end of the field, she abruptly quit with no warning. I still had plenty of speed and made a 180 back to the runway but she was still way too fast with no gear or flaps, so I held the wings level and proceeded over the end of the runway, over the tall grass run off, and into the corn. The wings were dead level as she settled into the corn. The cloud of dust kicked up was incredible and a collective gasp was heard from the crowd. My boy and some friends walked to the crash site and there she was, sitting on her belly facing straight, at the end of a 40-50 foot swatch of flattened down corn. I could kick myself for not getting a picture of that. They said it look like a full scale belly landing. Because the corn was only about 2 - 3 feet high, it looked even more fullscaleish (not sure if that is a word, but it should be
). The stocks were soft with no corn ears on them yet.
Plane was carried back and set back on the gear. Broken prop, a few more creases in the belly pan, covered in dirt and green stains, minor damage to the sheeting in front of the belly pan, a few very small dings in the leading edge (we like them and will leave that as is), and both wing tip light lenses were gone. My Son figured they would be on either side of the 'trench at the beginning, and he was right. He walked back and found them both!!.
We cleaned her up and took these pictures.
A gentleman was in attendance who took a shine to Zombie. Seems he was a P-47 pilot in WWII!!!!!. We took some pictures of him with the plane, and then we had him autograph it.
You could tell he was reliving his experiences as he looked her over and talked with us. Very cool.
PS all these pictures were taken AFTER her trip to the "pea patch".
WHAT A TOUGH PLANE!!!!!!! THANK YOU AGAIN MIESTER.