Air Plane or Parked Plane

24 hours in a day. 365 days in a year. That's 8,760 hours in a
year.

How many hours did you fly last year?

Unless you're in the business, patrolling a pipe-line or whatever,
you're lucky if you did a hundred hours.

Back when I had a girl friend going to Aridzona State and I was
playing Sailor for my uncle Sam, I flat bored a hole in the sky back &
forth between Meadow Lark & Brown Field. Still only added up to about
700 hours (which is a LOT of time in a C-120). Flying for lust or
your living, it can add up but most home-builders feel pretty lucky to
get in a hundred hours in a YEAR.

That means the bird is PARKED 8,660 hours in a year. Home for the mice
and the beez. Smells more like moth balls and rat poison than gas &
oil.

I know a guy, he HANGS his airplane up. Little bitty cable on a 12v
winch from Harbor Freight, hoists that thing up, keeps it clear of the
mice and the bean-counters. (You shoulda seen the pair of us,
laughing like fools when the winch gave out [ turned out to be the
switch, thank gawd! ] )

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Lucky if it's parked in a hangar. But most of us aren't lucky. Shed-
roof, along with a disk-harrow, four pallets of ammonium nitrate and a
pick-up truck with a bad rear-end you've been meaning to fix just as
soon as you find the time...

Parked Plane, not an Air Plane.

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The more you fly, the better you will.

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Doesn't have to be a REAL air plane. Anything that can get you off
the ground, into that third dimension that separates the eagles from
the turkeys.

Wing Ding, Teenie Two, VP... not REAL airplanes, according to the RV
drivers with their air-conditioned hangars living in their Air Parks
(cocktails on the apron, shaken, not stirred). While you're out there
using your J.C.Whitney radar detector to keep under the Big Eye, bugs
in your teeth cuz you're flying so low -- you don't worry about flying
into mountains, you worry about hitting the curb!

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Don't need to ask 'Why?' We all know the REAL answer. It's MONEY.
Not just for gas, money for the hangar; for the tie-down; for the
tires and the paint going all chalky and the varnish on the prop
starting the check. Hour in the air means ten on the ground, taking
care of the bird, reaching for your wallet. Insurance. Rich Man
taxes from the city and the county and the State. ( Own an airplane,
you gotta be rich, Right? ) So the bean counters figger you can fork-
over some for them too, and they kill the Golden Goose because you're
a soft target. Hard to hide an airplane. Unless...

What's that? You say you never registered it to begin with... which
means you ain't got no hull number.

Bean counters are all nine-to-fiver's. They never actually come out
and LOOK, they just run their finger down the list, charge you for all
those wunnerful benefits that excise tax isn't being used for. Bean
counters like to talk about AVERAGE incomes for whole HOUSEHOLDS.
They don't like to deal with MEDIAN income for individuals, which sez
there is more than a hundred MILLION of us earning less than $28k per
year. Long LONG way from the bean-counter's Rich Man. But the truth
is, us poor folk like to fly too.

Screw'em. Buy your aviation-grade pine shelving at the Borg. Along
with your aviation-grade Patio Door Replacement Hardware that you use
for pulleys on the rudder cables cuz everything else is a push-rod.
Shut off the fuel, attach your hose, drain the wing tanks. Pull the
pins, slide that wing out until the stub is clear then walk it back,
pin it to the horizontal stabilizer. Do the other then lash them
down: Two bungee cords and a ratchety load-strap. Angle-iron tongue
that clicks in place. Rudder comes off leaving the cables inside,
trapped in their Patio Door pulleys. Now you can lift the hitch, pin
it in place, drop it on the ball, tow that sucker... someplace.

120 hours FLYING in eleven months. (Leak-down barely 10%)

87 hours TOWING in the same period.

Airplanes don't weigh much; just about anything will tow one. But you
wanna put some thought into the hitch.

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Who & what? Twarn't me. An' I'll never tell.

Just another one of them Thotz, outside the box. (Like using Crisco
instead of chassis-lube to prevent cross-fires in your black powder
pistol.)

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It must be all them pills I'm taking. Or the fact the lab came back
with a big Waytago! report today whilst I'm laying there, IV drip-drip-
dripping in my arm. 184 pounds and holding. Cute little lab-tech
going down the list. "Hey! You're doing really well, aren't you."
Must be all that clean living.

The more you fly, the better you will.

-R.S.Hoover