flight report 337

[rick bell]

hharney is correct, all my activity is off a 1600" dirt,beach sand and gravel strip. the front prop always substained the most damage(rocks and sand blasting) finally need to replace one front blade due to wear. now use press on prop guards. raised the front strut 3-4"(more air) and now 90% of all damage is gone. also taxi on back eng and shut down front eng after landing asap.
raising the front strut made the bigest improvement

[JimC]

This article is still available at
https://web.archive.org/web/20050310...sna_337pg1.htm

[rrolland]

Great article. Thanks for providing the link.

[general]

I operate mostly off of gravel and dirt strips over the last 40+ years of flying various types of Sky Masters. So always idle with the front engine and taxi with the rear and you won't have problems, when you're at a safe area with very few rocks or on grass and warm weather you need to occasionally throttle up to front engine, it helps the cooling on the rear engine considerably and there will be no heating issues.
By the way the Skymaster is an ideal aircraft for flying off of rough unimproved strips. And not getting towards when Landing if you keep power on the front engine you can actually keep the front nose wheel completely off the ground, until you've dropped speed to about 25 or 30 mile an hour and then you almost immediately stop when you lower the nose as you pull off power. We used to do this in air shows all the time in the 02 s