Today brought some nervous moment's provided by the Sanders' Sea Fury "Argonaut" and F8F Bearcat, "Rare Bear", now owned by Rod Lewis.
In the Silver, "Argonaut" pulled up while coming down the home stretch trailing heavy white smoke and quickly declared a mayday. Midway through that climb, the smoke turned black and the still running but disintegrating engine started puking four foot flames out the exhaust on both sides of the airplane. Things were not looking good as there was obviously a significant fire going. A few seconds later though the fire and then the smoke stopped, but he was left without power. Thankfully enough altitude had been gained and a textbook deadstick landing was made with the prop windmilling, but then coming to an abrubt stop as the Sea Fury rolled out. Both sides of the airplane were solid black from the rear of the cowl to the tail with HEAVY black oil. A reasonable guess would be a main rod failure.
In the Gold, "Rare Bear" pulled up into a high orbit immediately after completing the race. Very shortly after that it was announced that there was a landing gear problem and right at that time the "Bear" passed overhead with just one gear leg down. Steve Hinton in the pace T-33 joined up to check him over and the two flew around for a bit trying to come up with a plan. Not much time was available though because of the light fuel load for the race, and the oil temp beginning to rise. Just as one was thinking it was going to be time to pull up the one leg and belly her in, Penney executed a couple of high G turns and the gear popped down and he made a safe landing. I went down to the hanger a little later and talking with the crew chief found out that some teeth had broken off of the gear mechanism and the leg that had been down couldn't even be raised for a belly landing. Landing on one leg is apparently not an option with the "Bear" because the crew chief said that he was only a few seconds from instructing Penney to bail out of the aircraft. He also said it wasn't the turns that got it down, but that Penney had made a last ditch effort to get the gear down by taking his hands off the stick and pounding the gear levers back and forth aggressively and they thought that let the broken off teeth fall away and the gear to finally come down. When I left the hanger the crew was grinding away Bondo to "access" an access panel to make the repair. Hopefully tomorrow will see the "Bear" back in the air.
Topic: Friday Reno update... (Read 774 times)