David Edmunds and his amazing micro-light adventure

After leaving school I went to university and after graduating spent three desultory years in the public serviced before deciding I wanted to go teaching. I spent my first couple of years teaching in Alice Springs, and then another 28 teaching in Canberra. I sometimes thought about doing something else, but couldn’t find anything that I would have preferred. There was rarely a day when I didn’t enjoy my day at work.

Along the way I gained a wonderful wife and two children, now grown up and out of home.

When Steve Padgham encouraged me to write this post he asked me to tell the following story.

About twelve years ago I decided to build an aeroplane. During the seven years when I was working full time I did a little bit on the plane, but work was very busy, so not much was done. I need to get a run at projects like this and find it difficult to start work at 9.00 at night.

In the first three years after I finished full time work, building the plane was my main occupation.

Eventually I got it finished and took it out to Goulburn airport where I completed the final fitting and engine runups and the like. I got to know a local pilot, an EX-CGS boy as it happens called Dick Nell, and a friend of Grant Nuthalls, who is very experienced and agreed to test fly the aircraft for me. He suggested that I complete the taxi tests, and then do a high-speed run where I just lifted the wheels off the ground, then let it sink back onto the runway.

I started the high-speed run, but when the aircraft lifted it gained height very rapidly and I realised that I would not have enough runway left to land it, so thought, in the short time available, “well fuck it, I might as well fly the thing”

So I flew one circuit around the airport and landed, a bit heavily but OK.

My wife was with me and photographed the event, and here it is.

As we were not expecting to fly, she was not exactly equipped with the appropriate camera, so the video is pretty rough.

Having flown the thing, it seemed a bit precious to now ask my test pilot to check it out, so I thought that I might get him to do one or two of the more complex sequences a bit later and in the mean time I would continue test flying the aircraft.

So I went out to do the second flight with the aim to sort out the landings. Now the very limited book of instructions said to fly the final approach at 50mph and then let the plane float under ground effect and settle on the runway. So I thought that if I flew the final approach at 70, I should have a big margin as this would give me much more lift. This is what I did. As I flew over the fence on approach to the runway I let the speed drift back to about 65 when I was perhaps 30 feet above the ground and the plane fell like a stone, I did not have time to catch it and it pancaked onto the runway, breaking off the nose gear, bending the wings where the main gear attached, breaking the propellor and numerous other fittings, and leaving me completely unscathed. Pity really because otherwise it flew OK.

I had a good look over the ruins and decided that I could build another one in the time it would take to repair this one and just at the moment I was not in the mood, so I sold the wreck to a guy who intends to get it back flying, but hasn’t yet.

I loved the building experience, so that compensates for my very short flying time.

I bought another plane about 18 months ago.

In July I am going to the large aircraft convention at Oshkosh with Rick Frith, and one of my main goals is to check out what I may be able to build. We are then going to hire Harleys and go for a bit of a ride.

Thank-you Peter and Steve for the blog, you have done a great job.