March 15, 2009 - Polish Party

Earlier in the week, I went over to the airport after work and calibrated the left fuel tank.  It's nice that it doesn't get dark now until 7:30 or so. 

Today, I spent the entire day over at Montgomery County airport helping Mike Regen polish his RV-7A.  He decided to go with the Nuvite system like I did.  Each with our own circular buffer and orbital polisher, we hit it hard for eight hours on this cold, rainy and overcast day.  We knocked out the fuselage and wings (top). 

There wasn't any flying on this crummy day, but in early afternoon we heard someone take off.  A minute or two later we heard a very usual sound.  I thought it was thunder, but Mike wondered if it was a crash.  A few minutes later, he got a call.  A Cirrus had crashed.  We knew Cirrus's have build-in rocket-powered ballistic parachutes so I figured the noise we had heard was the ballistic parachute firing.

After we were done and about to leave the airport, two flatbed trailings came in with the broken-up Cirrus.

The Cirrus went into the overcast right after takeoff.  But the right door was not fully latched.  The pilot tried to latch it shut but in doing so lost control of the aircraft and deployed the ballistic parachute.  Plane and pilot floated down, landing on the edge of a parking lot.  Fortunately no one was injured, including the pilot.