The Flight of the Microlights
(Page 3 of 5)
November/December 1979
By Jack McCornack
THE ETHANOL ADVENTURE
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All good things must end, though, and before long our barnstorming days came to a close . . . it was time to head to the EAA's Fly-In. As many of you know (especially if you've read the story on page 99 of this issue of MOTHER), "Oshkosh" is the biggest aviation event in the world, and we were the smallest aircraft ever to fly into it. Both Keith and I were pleased (and, I admit, a little surprised) to find that we were taken seriously. We even received awards for "outstanding contributions to sport aviation and cross-country flying" (which simply meant that we got where we planned to go without committing any blunders serious enough to get either the feds or the public mad at us).
The Fly-In covers quite a lot of ground -and it's nigh onto impossible to see everything there-so we were really pretty lucky to run into MOTHER's crew, who had come to promote alcohol as an alternative fuel. I found the fellows working with the wood-burning still, puttin' in corn mash and takin' out moonshine. They had already converted a pickup truck, a Volkswagen, and an experimental airplane to ethanol, and it didn't take long to figure that we could set up the Pterodactyls so they'd run on 'shine, too.
As it turned out, MOTHER's staffers were as curious about our lengthy flight as we were about the possibilities of alcohol fuel and before long-the magazine folks offered us enough "home brew" to carry our journey to its logical conclusion . . . a landing on the East Coast. It was a chance to complete a bona fide cross-country jaunt!
Needless to say, we didn't take much convincing. Keith and I simply called our coworkers in California. "Sorry," we said, "but it looks like we'll be gone another couple of weeks. We hate to do it the extra miles are sure to take a lot out of us-but the publicity ought to help us sell airplanes." The old "it's good for the business" line fooled 'em again, and we were off on two more weeks of vacation!
Since I'd assembled a third Fledgling at the Fly-In (just to show folks how easily the kits can be put together), we asked Paul Yarnall-a good friend and our New York dealer-if he wanted to fly along with us. Like any red-blooded American aviator, Paul jumped at the chance.
Our cobbled-up Pterodactyl-to-alcohol modification consisted of nothing more than opening up each engine's adjustable main jet another turn or two. Of course, we could have made the planes into much more efficient alcohol-burners by increasing the engine compression and so forth, but we were a couple of thousand miles from our shop and-with apologies to the Appalachians-had put all of the country's big mountains behind us.
Our objective wasn't to set any kind of speed record, anyway, so we didn't need maximum horsepower . . . we just wanted to demonstrate that ethanol could be used to fuel long flights. (We left Keith's "Fledge" stock and running on gasoline . . . just for the sake of comparison.)
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