18 | February-March 2017 | Powered Sport Flying Southwestern Gyroplane Cross Country Gyroplane Adventure We were traveling from airport T74–Taylor in Texas–to my new home base of E16–San Martin airport in California. The trip took three days of flying, starting Friday, April 15, 2016 and finishing on Sunday, April 17. For background, I’m a pilot with about 700 flying hours, most of those in trikes–weight-shift control craft. I decided to learn to fly gyros when I got tired of being grounded by relatively low winds and any kind of turbulence. In a trike, turbulence isn’t just uncomfortable, it’s very scary. Although some (braver souls than me), do venture out in such conditions, I never did any long journeys in a trike, out of concern for being stranded somewhere, unable to fly due to being bumped around too much. When I learned about gyros and the way their wing-loading rendered them highly immune to turbulence, I decided to learn to fly one and get the endorsement. The fact that they were also opencockpit, the best aspect of trikes, and that they can land safely in very small areas was also very attractive. I trained in California with a cfi (Certified Flight Instructor) in Sacramento, then went to Austin in December last year to take a proficiency test, where I met Dayton, who is a designated pilot examiner (dpe), as well as a gyro instructor. In the course of our flying, he mentioned that he was thinking of selling his gyro in order to get another one and having been fully convinced that this was the kind of flying I wanted to do in the future, I got together with another pilot and agreed we’d buy it. Part of the deal was that Dayton and I would fly it from Texas to California. The Magni M16 is a two-seat gyro powered by a turbocharged 115hp Rotax 914. They are manufactured in Italy, but due to the peculiarities in the way the faa looks at gyros, you can’t buy them ready-made in the US since unfortunately they don’t fall under the lsa rules. So you have to buy them secondhand or build them yourself. Just how the faa imagines that this improves safety is beyond my simple comprehension, but let’s not go down that path here. One of the reasons that I was interested in this particular gyro was that Dayton had constructed it. This was a good thing for two reasons. First, it was the third one he’d built. Second, he had done it at the Magni factory in Italy, where they had checked every step he’d made and every nut and bolt on the gyro before shipping it to Texas back in 2015. Since then, he and his gyro students had put over 700 hours on it. The Rotax 914 has a tboh of 2,000 hours, so it clearly made sense for him to move on to another one before he burned through its time in only three years. Equally, I was very interested in acquiring it because it had been so well-made and looked after since, and although I was hoping to fly it a good bit, I’d be unlikely to equal that rate. Which is why on Thursday, April 14th, I booked a one-way ticket on Southwest to Austin and went to Taylor. Dayton kindly picked me up at the airport in Austin and we started things off right by going to his favorite local Texas barbecue place for some excellent brisket. After a couple of flights in the afternoon to check a new headset I’d bought and get some familiarization back after not having flown for three months, we met up with John Craparo, who together with Dayton broke the This is the record of the gyroplane trip Dayton Dabbs and I took to bring the Magni M16 gyroplane a friend and I were buying from him home.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTUwNDI3MA==