That's too funny. Hey, maybe I really should get to the beach. I just can't till I do a major project for the SWMBO and I'm swamped with work. Obviously I can't remember how it's spelled , but I remember hating inspections and having to take the screwed up floor boards off. That and replacing the huge plates under the wings by hand. I thought my arms would fall off , 2,387th screw 2,388th screw...
Ughh! I hear that!
I worked on Lockheed T-33's and Grumman S-2 Trackers for several years. The TBird's bugaboo was the leading edge of the wing. A 10-32, phillips head screw about every inch or so, top and bottom. The Tracker was held together with 8-32 screws. Whotta pain in the arse! Somewhere, I think I still have my pink coveralls, a souvenir of drawing the short straw, and having to be inside looking for the leak in a hydraulic fitting while the system was operated. Yech! I still hate hydraulic fluid.
Cheers Trevor Jones
If the coveralls were pink, that was 5606 fluid. Try getting soaked in Skydrol. Burns like fire. Only thing that will slow down the pain is soaking the area in Castor oil. In the eyes, you use milk. Bad stuff. I'll be so glad when I retire. I don't even want the damn things flying over my house.
Garrett Fulton
I witnessed a beech 18 climbing out from allegheny county airport near pittsburgh, pa, yesterday
those big ol radials diggin in, what a sweet sound
On Mon, 23 Aug 2004 19:26:22 -0700, Jon Grimm wrote (in message ):
Military designation= C-45 Most commonly called a "Twin Beech" , or D18. An engine-driven oil pump controls propeller pitch through a governor, which is controlled by the pilot. An oil pressure accumulator provides oil to feather the prop in case of engine failure. The engines were Pratt & Whitney R-985s. Most of the old C-45s and civilian D18s are in the scrapyard now. There was a problem with the main wing spar breaking, which lead to a FAA mandated spar X-ray (Very expensive) every few hundred hours. Although I heard someone came up with a permanent fix.
Navy designations: SNB (Secret Navy Bomber) and JRB (Jury Rigged Bomber) really meaning "Scout-Trainer, Beech" and "Utility Transport (multi-engine), Beech"
Thaere are quite a few of them still flying as cargo haulers, and they are fairly easy to work on as long as you can do maintenance without a computer. Major gripes - bad pilots break cylinders, always replacing brakes, and that @#$%^&* Southwind combustion heater. Major points - they're cheap, they don't cost much to run if you have a mail contract, and overhauled engines are about $20K, about 1/10th the cost of an overhauled small turboprop engine!
Bob, Former 18 mech
Nothing like the sound of a round engine or even better a pair of em. A DC=3 with wright 1820's is the best with 200 cu in per cylinder and 9 cylinders per engine it beats the sound of a harley by a mile.
The 18 G is the best of the beach 18's . It had the higher useful load and higher cabin in addition to fewer AD's. The engines are bullet proof.. I have seen em come in with the pilot complaining of a slight miss in the engine... Slight miss... the top of the cylinder was being held on by the two spark plug wires. The 18 is a simple aircraft with reliable systems and built to last.
John
Does not even start to compare to four RR Merlins. Gerry :-)} London, Canada
(snippage)
Couldn't disagree more. Try 4 P&W 18 cyl. 2800's at max. BMEP dry right after you hit the water/meth. switches. What a lovely tune and how she starts rocking in the chocks. Long live round engines. Ain't ever been anything water cooled to compare with that.
Garrett Fulton
Yep I agree, 56 inches of boost will kick your backside. I loved running them up after doing maintenance. I never did get my FE rating, never had the time. There was nothing like having a scope on each mag of each engine to monitor everything. I never worked much with 3350 wrights but with the prt's (power recovery turbines) they put out 3350 hp on takeoff. No merlin will even come close to that. IF they had the exotic metals they have today it would have eliminated all the problems they had with the prts coming apart.
John
The dreaded ignition analyzer. Man, have I ever got bad memories about setting up the scope distributor on a P&W 2800. 30 yrs. ago and still scares me.
Garrett
14,000ft in seven minutes and be on the ground picking up the next load before the jumpers are back on the ground. Still nothing beats the sound of radials.
Richard
My ears hurt just thinking about that up and down.
You got to be nuts to jump out of a good flying airplane.
John
It's really a lot of fun! I also did a little jumping (about 400) back in the 70's... mostly out of DC-3's at Lake Elsinore CA... but did a fair number out of Beech 18's, Howard DGA-15's, a C182, and even an old Norseman. Elsinore had 3 DC-3's for a good while, and I can even remember when they all all running AND in the air at once! That was rare though... seems something was always busted on one or the other. They flew the 3's with 33 jumpers/load IIRC. In early 79 when I stopped jumping, it was $9.50 one way to 12,500'. Don't have a clue what it is now, but bet it's a little more.
Kids now days are spoiled with all their skyrocket Twin Otter's, Skyvans and King Air turbines... and can rip off more jumps in a few hours than we could in a weekend.
Miss those days, wish there was a place closer to jump. I wouldn't mind doing a couple a day even now...
There are a lot of people out there who've literally made tens of thousands of dives...
Erik
"On October 17, 1982, a military version of a Beech D-18 crashed during takeoff near Taft, California. The aircraft had 12 sport parachutists onboard; none survived. The Safety Board determined that the airplane had been overloaded with a center of gravity well aft of the prescribed limit."
I was supposed to jump that day, but had to work. Ive not jumped since.
Gunner
"In my humble opinion, the petty carping levied against Bush by the Democrats proves again, it is better to have your eye plucked out by an eagle than to be nibbled to death by ducks." - Norman Liebmann
Got to witness the running of a 1909 Gnome radial rotary engine a month or so ago. Really fantastic. However, I was surprised by the sound. I don't know why, but I expected it to sound different than an ordinary radial. It didn't, though. If I closed my eyes I could easily envision a Stearman running up.
That was a terrible day... a friend, Rich Hayden was on that load...
Erik
I bet the pilot wasn't that sharp. Most of the jump plane pilots are building time so they can get a better job. a C45/ beach 18D should be able to carry 12 jumpers if it wasn't full of fuel and had the big tanks. The aft CG can cause a problem though, especially for a low time pilot.
John
Gee. IANA Pilot - but if the pilot felt the balance of the plane was really off and the handling was funky, how hard would it be to holler back for a few people to move forward to shift the CG point?
That's why the pilots have multiple checklists to go down - every single takeoff without fail, he should have been checking the load and loading was proper, among all the other thousand little things that have to be right before takeoff.
An "oh. s*it." while going down the checklist *sure* beats the last legible words on the Cockpit Voice Recorder being "OH S*IT!!!"
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