Last evenings flight was a small milestone for me. I broke 250 flight hours on N886MJ. To be exact, I now have 250.4 hours with 296 successful landings. I do remember one of those landings as not being a lot of fun and resulted in the fatality of one of natures antlered four legged friends. There have been a lot of other incidents such as a broken crankshaft (made a safe emergency landing on airport), a failed cam gear (made a five mile glide back to the airport for yet another safe emergency landing), a dropped intake valve seat (13 miles safely to Metropolis airport), there was the time I left the KR Gathering in 2006 and my engine quit at 1200 feet (switched to my secondary ignition and flew half way home to a fuel stop. It was a broken ground wire on the primary coil.), Oh yea, there was the time I was buzzing my brother in laws house and my fuel pump quit at 1000' and I made it back to the airport 11 miles away. What about when I first started flying my plane and I overheated the front two cylinders and broke the rings. Flew that way for 7 hours before Langford made me take the heads off because I had 7 lbs compression in one cylinder and 14 in the other. One time I took off with my belly board down and got about 500 feet and she basically would not climb. I could see the farmers daughters playing in the haystack as I barely cleared the silos. There was a high speed pass I made for my friends here in Wisconsin where I leveled out at 50 feet doing 190 mph and about a third of the way down the runway she started sputtering. I immediately pulled up to gain altitude as I thought my engine was going to quit. Forgot to richen the mixture on that one. Then there was the time I had a fog bank close in on me and I thought I was going to die. That was one for the stupidity log book. I know there are other incidents and Bob Glidden tells me I should write a book on how not to fly a Corvair powered KR. So why am I telling all this....because I did not let any of this discourage me and I now have a wonderful flying plane. Keep building and you too can have all the fun I am having.
Mark Jones (N886MJ) Stevens Point, WI E-mail: flyk...@charter.net Web: www.flykr2s.com
