Awesome story but I’m really disappointed in the lack of photos. Does anyone have any good links?
Some fun facts:
They refueled twice a day
They bathed by using a bottle of water
They didn’t sleep well and once overslept and ran on autopilot
They refueled from a truck that drove under them. They hoisted a hose up. Their generator died half way through and they had to use a hand pump the rest of the time.
I scoured the article to find out how they refuelled - the details were buried towards the end. Wow, what a way to transfer supplies and refuel 'on the wing' with a truck speeding along on the ground. A feat in itself. To to do this around 130 times without a major incident is remarkable.
EDIT: I'm also disappointed in lack of photos of the aviators and the aircraft. I am hoping the plane is still preserved somewhere and there are recent photos of it.
The cessna take off speed is 100Km/h, does that mean that refueling truck had to go around that same speed, or maybe a little slower since the airplane did not have to rise?
Am not a pilot, but why would they need takeoff speed, rather than to just stay above the minimum speed before stalling? That $V_s0$ speed is more like 65Km/h.
Also important to note that's airspeed, not ground speed. If they're driving/flying into a headwind, the ground speed (the speed the truck cares about) is even lower.
I build camera gear for 172s and fly (as passenger, not pilot) probably 20-30 days per year, sometimes much more, and I get nervous at <60kts at low altitude.
40kts IAS is I guess around the full flaps stall speed but you sure don't want to be doing that intentionally. At least not with me in the plane please.
Given the creative, but somewhat low-rent solutions they devised, I’m guessing that the bathroom solution wasn’t nearly as fancy as a space-consuming cassette toilet. I’m going with “bucket” and “go fly over some uninhabited desert for a minute”.
Precisely, those things are tiny! Its smaller and less comfortable than a car - so imagine the point which you get tiered driving a long distance, now cut by two - that's likely when you'll start to get fatigued in a small plane like a 172.
> This also inevitably leads one to the question: how did they use the bathroom? Well, because the Cessna 172 doesn’t come standard with a toilet, and there was no room to install a permanent one, Timm and Cook had to rig their own system. This took the form of a folding camp toilet and plastic bags. Once they had been used, the plastic bags were then disposed of over unpopulated areas in the desert around Blythe. According to Mark Hall-Patton, the administrator of the Clark County Museum system in Las Vegas, “I once asked John’s widow if they handed down the waste during refueling runs. She said, ‘No. That’s why it’s so green around Blythe.’ ”
Steep face rock climbing has the same problem. If you climb for days on a vertical cliff, there is really just one directs where all the waste has to go. Better watch out that it doesnt hit your rope or some climber below you.
Min KIAS, moderate flaps on a 172 I believe is 50kts (93km/h) and they could easily "recycle" their MRE bags during refueling runs paralleling deserted highways (with subsequent collection presumably by 'this road maintained by local Lions Club chapter' personnel -joke- )
Isn't it odd that the comment with the most additional comments in this post involves bathroom activities?
I think most military folks could tell you what happens when someone tries to pee off the back of a truck when it's moving at a pretty moderate speed. I'd hate to picture dumping a cassette toilet's tank at 2-3 times that speed :)
This line made me smile "There was no way they could cheat and land at another airport to refuel without getting caught. Shortly after takeoff, a guy sitting in an open Ford Thunderbird convertible had painted a white stripe on the landing wheel, and that could never be reached from the cockpit, even with the little platform attached."
I was wondering how they did the re-fueling. It's via pickup truck on a straight road near Blythe California twice a day. That would have been a sight to see.
As it mentions at the end of the article you can see the airplane hanging from the ceiling in the Las Vegas airport. There's a little mini air museum in there too with a few other aviation related artifacts. If you have a long layover it's worth seeing even though it's outside security.
FTA: Timm believed that his alcohol-injection system would prevent the buildup of carbon in the combustion chambers. Kuenzi disagreed but reluctantly installed the system.
(It was disconnected for the successful record setting flight.)
I wonder what would happen if they flew for more than 90 days putting them in violation FAR 61.57
> (1) Except as provided in paragraph (e) of this section, no person may act as a pilot in command of an aircraft carrying passengers or of an aircraft certificated for more than one pilot flight crewmember unless that person has made at least three takeoffs and three landings within the preceding 90 days
Apologies, I've a bad habit of skipping paragraphs in long articles. When I was at the bottom, I even searched for 'gas' (which showed me vegas) tried 'fuel' as well but I couldn't remember if it returned anything on Firefox, or did something wrong, was quite late into the night.
We shouldn't downvote for this reason. Some of us are on such a limited and remote internet connection that verbose HN comments are our only gateway to the article's knowledge.
Say what? If the page loaded enough for someone to know it was an awesome story, then they’d know how it was refueled if they read the article. That said, GP shouldn’t have said “if you read the article” that way (I’m guilty of it too though), it’s demeaning and is called out in the rules not to do it.
Agree with everything you said, but someone else described how they flew without landing. I appreciate this, because I specifically can't read the article :)
Some fun facts: They refueled twice a day
They bathed by using a bottle of water
They didn’t sleep well and once overslept and ran on autopilot
They refueled from a truck that drove under them. They hoisted a hose up. Their generator died half way through and they had to use a hand pump the rest of the time.
It was really boring up there.