What on Earth ??

What on Earth did they want that for ??

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The trip

On Tuesday 23rd November three volunteers travelled to Skycraft near Spalding with a large trailer attached to their car. Once there they collected a badly damaged fuselage of Zenair CH601 Zodiac G-CDFL and took it back to the museum.

Luckily the fuselage was very light, in fact, it probably only weighed less than a fifth of what the trailer did.

You might be wondering what on earth the museum wants such an object for.

First a bit of history:

The aircraft was built in 2004 and in July 2019 was being flown by its owner who found himself in conflict with another aircraft in the circuit. Unfortunately, he allowed his aircraft to get too slow and when a wing dropped attempted to recover it using aileron (a big no-no at slow speed). This stalled the wing further causing the aircraft to enter a spin. It impacted a hedge then the ground almost completely flat.

Luckily the pilot, who was the sole occupant, was uninjured and able to exit the aircraft unaided.

The aircraft was declared an insurance write off as beyond economic repair and was bought by Skycraft who specialise in recovering parts for resale from such airframes, mostly instruments. The remainder of the airframe being sold as scrap. The museum was thus able to purchase the remains at scrap value.

Zenair CH601 Zodiac G-CDFL as Found

As can be seen from the photographs the damage was quite bad, and the airframe isn’t suitable for display as an exhibit in its own right.

A bit more history:

The museum operates a number of flight simulators, two Link Trainers which are full motion, but have no scenery, and four computer-based examples which use various flight simulator software. Of these one is in an ANT-18 Link Trainer shell. This can be quite difficult for the “instructor” to help the student with as it is very narrow, and with covid restrictions not particularly suitable.

ANT-18 Link Trainer @ NASAM

We, therefore, started looking for a suitable replacement. A contact pointed us at Skycraft.

The fuselage will be trimmed down, and the wing stubs reduced in size to fit the space available. This work will be carried out over the winter recess and we will keep you updated on this blog. Watch this space as they say.

Quite fitting that a Zodiac was recovered by a Kodiaq…

Steve Bell

(Photos) Zenair CH601 G-CDFL comes to Flixton

Caption Competition

It has been suggested the photo below would be good for a caption competition …. Suggestions please in the “Leave us a comment if you wish” at the foot of the page below:

PS

As an interesting postscript to this article, when paying for the fuel at the petrol station kiosk, the attendant asked “is it a runner ??”

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