Say Hello to Ariel

And here she is, parked in her hangar.

I've decided to name her "Ariel". No, she's not named after Disney's version of The Little Mermaid. Rather, she is named after the title character of the book "Ariel" by author Steven Boyett.

The book tells the story of a world where magic has returned, and advanced technology no longer works. As another consequence of The Change, as it's called, mythical and magical creatures have also returned, including unicorns. Ariel is a unicorn who befriends the main character, and they have various adventures together.

My airplane has a decal of a unicorn on either side of the tail, which was put there by the person who owned the plane before the person I bought it from. I'm certainly going to leave the decals there because this plane is, metaphorically, somewhat of a unicorn, considering its unique qualities. And that is what gave the inspiration for her name. It also hasn't escaped my notice that "Ariel" sounds like "aerial" and that just makes it even more fitting a name.

Comments

My engine is so pretty

I went out to the shop today to take a few pictures of my engine and plane before the engine is remounted. The baffling and some other stuff has already been attached to the engine. The engine mount is not back yet. Since the nose gear is attached to the engine mount, the plane is currently sitting on the main gear, and a couple of supports just behind the firewall, and under the tail. Here are a few of the photos I took. The engine looks lovely, to me at any rate, especially since I know those are new cylinders.

Thwarted

The plane is done being fixed again. Well, for the most part, but I'll get to that. The vacuum pump had indeed failed, so they replaced it. They also replaced the starboard fuel sump drain valve. Interestingly, I received an email yesterday from the shop with an invoice attached. It was for a credit to my account, which they gave me because they drained the fuel from the right tank. The invoice notes that 16 gallons were removed. The tank's capacity is almost 30 gallons, and I had filled it almost full on Sunday before my flight. So either they didn't credit me for all of the fuel in the tank, or it had continued to leak and had lost about 12 or so gallons over the course of a few days. I don't know which, but I'm not going to worry too much about it. I went out today to put some Camguard in the oil, run the engine, and possibly even go for a flight if the weather was nice enough. The grass runway and temporary taxiway are open so limited flight operations can proce

Flying when you must

The previous post was titled "Flying when you can." Today the weather was so nice that there was no question about whether or not I'd go up. Today is Saturday, and if you have weather this nice on the weekend, at this time of year, you can't not go flying if it's at all possible. I'll probably go tomorrow, too. I hope so. With the work that was done during and after the annual inspection, my plane is finally fully functional. As far as I know, everything on it works. The intercom is even behaving itself, with a distinct lack of loud static during the last couple of flights. The shop didn't say if they did anything specific to fix it but either they did when I last asked them to take a look at it, or it's somehow sorted itself out. Hopefully it will work just fine, at least until I decide to replace the audio panel with one that has the intercom built in. As noted above, the weather today was absolutely gorgeous. I flew north out of Harvey Field up past

A Man and His Airplane

Search This Blog