Searey

Boat + Airplane = More Fun!

 Something was missing in my life.

 I would go to work, come home, kiss my wife, pet the dog, work out, eat dinner, settle onto a nice couch with a good book, but I just couldn’t get comfortable. Something was missing. After a few weeks, I was caught up on reading, bored with tv and by fall of 2008, had to admit – I am addicted.

 Night after night, I would feel myself pulled into the hangar, where I would stare at the completed Rocket and the lonely tools in the corner. I would make up excuses to take things apart and put them together again (“upgrades, honey”). Finally, the excuses ran out and it was time to face the facts: After three years and 3,000 hours of building, the F1 was complete and my evenings had an empty hole craving something other than sit-coms and re-runs: It was time to build another airplane.

Having faced up to my disease and identified the treatment, I felt much better. The search commenced and as we focused on the process of finding the next candidate, the symptoms waned. I became more relaxed and Avril, appreciating her less-testy husband, gave in with a sigh and blessed the endeavour, with two caveats: It had to have more than one seat, and she gets a test ride with veto power before anything is ordered.

Ever since I was a kid, I have enjoyed the water – the sound of waves lapping against the shore. Eyes half closed in the sunshine and water gently gurgling against the hull. . . A sparkling reflection from the lake. . . The only problem was that a lakehouse was not practical for us, a boat would take all day to get to water, and once there, the enchantment would wear off by the 20th lap around the same lake. Aviation, on the other hand, offered unlimited destinations and ongoing excitement in three dimensions. With a great, intuitive leap, my hopelessly addicted brain made the obvious connection: Build a flying boat.

When I was 10 years old, I held a bucking bar for Dad as he drove rivets into a 1946 Luscombe. He was active with the local Experimental Aircraft chapter (later the Recreational Aircraft Association chapter) and allowed me to tag along to meetings and read his aviation magazines. This ensured lots of exposure over the years to stories of flying boats that promised a lot but in reality were reluctant to come off the water. As a result, when the search commenced, the lemons were already eliminated, leaving a short list of potential candidates.

Speed was not one of the criteria –anything that could float would be slower than the Rocket, so there was no point in trying to compete there. The candidate must have lots of copies flying and lots of history, so the design would be well out of the teething stage. It should be strictly a fun-in-the-sun, bugs-in-your-teeth flying machine. It should be simple to build and maintain, as it would be operating in a salt water environment, where corrosion would be a chore. After a short period of deliberation, the likely candidates were whittled down to the Aventura or the SeaRey. The design of the SeaRey and its closer-to-regular-airplane construction appealed to me, so we made arrangements to visit the factory in Florida for a demonstration ride.

Setting the Hook

Kerry met us at the airport and walked us around some of the highlights of the SeaRey design.  As usual, I was elected to go first. I think Avril prefers it that way – kind of like sending the fat kid out onto the ice.

I was expecting a brisk takeoff and wasn’t disappointed. Within moments,

we were curving towards a large lake and descending for what would be my first landing on the water. But wait – something was wrong. The airplane wasn’t pointed at the big lake anymore. Glancing at Kerry, he seemed perfectly at ease. Surely, he wasn’t planning to land on that small pond beside the lake? Why pick a small pond when so much lake was available? Turning to final, it was clear that the pond was our destination. Gripping the side rail with images of airboating up the far bank, I trusted our demo pilot to know what he was doing and was stunned when we came to rest less than halfway across our tiny puddle. 

Wow!

Adding power, we motored around like a speedboat, turning sharply and skidding across the surface. I hardly had time to wonder if our takeoff would be similarly short. It was.

From there, we landed on drainage ditches, pushed through reeds like a swamp-boat, beached on wheels, beached on the hull and generally put the airplane through its paces, when Kerry asked “Want to do a water landing”?

“I’ve never flown a float plane before”

“That’s OK – just line it up into the wind, keep the rpm around 3,000 and fly it on”.

So I did.

Yes, it really was that simple. Kerry didn’t say anything else, and he didn’t have to. This was one sweet flying machine!

We headed back to the airport and as the engine shut down, the mood became a little more somber. I think Kerry knows  what it means when the wife wants to go for a ride; she has veto power.

As they flew off into the distance, I had plenty of time to commune with the crickets and think about our flight. The demo ride was a blast. This was something I wanted to do. The only unknown was – would Avril like it?

I didn't have to worry. As the propeller ticked to a stop, her ear-to-ear grin gave it away: “Did you get to see the alligators”  she asked?  “That was fun!”

Only one problem: Our hangar back home was full. Time to sell the Maranda.

 Building the SeaRey

July of 2008 brought a familiar sight: Avril with camera in hand  and me on the hangar floor in a pile of parts. Like many times before, the thought crossed my mind: “What have I gotten myself into”, but this time, it was only fleeting – after all, I was becoming an experienced homebuilder!  J

The SeaRey kit is very complete. Everything except for engine, instruments and final paint is included. That being said, there were still regular orders going out to Aircraft Spruce for different lengths or kinds of bolts and other small items. One of the things I didn’t like is the kit supplies regular bolts and elastic locknuts for hinged connections. This is contrary to acceptable aircraft standards, which call for drilled bolts and castle nuts on all moving parts where the bolt and nut might be subject to being turned. Most of the rest of the kit was first class. Metals parts were already drilled to final size, pre-cut, pre-bent.and already anodized. In most cases, even the edges were finished smooth. Fiberglass and carbon fiber parts came pretty much complete, requiring only fit and finish – and even the finish was excellent, requiring only light sanding in most cases. The one exception to this was the fiberglass wingtips, which were completely out of alignment on the trailing edges, requiring that the existing trailing edges be cut off and re-fabricated. 

It was fun to see how quickly the different parts came together. For example, the structure of the wings only took about 30 hours each (not counting the tips). I worked around 15 hours a week. Within a couple of months, both wings were ready for covering. The primary fuselage structure was done in a week. Getting the control surfaces ready for covering took a few nights each.

  The most time consuming part of the project was fabric and paint, which took about 6 months. Many people who build planes like to get them done and then take them to a paint shop later, but this is not an option with a fabric-covered airplane. You have to apply the fabric and get it at least to the point where it is painted with the silver UV protection before it can go  outside in the sun. By the time it is this far, it is best to just keep going through the final paint color as well.

One of the colors I chose was a semi-metallic silver. That was a mistake. It took three attempts on some of the parts to get an acceptable finish and it doesn't buff very well. The problem is that semi-metallics really show when they are applied a little heavier in some areas and you can’t sand out any runs. This was problematic as the paint needed to be applied quite thin to avoid orange peel, but spraying thin paint makes it easy to get runs. With the semi-metallic, you can see a pattern in the paint which reflects whether your spraying pattern was up and down or side to side. The eventual technique was to spray several light coats, each in a 90 degree pattern to the last coat, and only a minute or so apart, so they would flow together and eliminate the spray pattern.

 This was my first paint job with an HVLP gun. It was the kind with its own dedicated turbine (fan) system and worked quite well, resulting in a lot less overspray than with regular guns. An outside air respirator was also used, and is highly recommended. Some of the chemicals in spray paint can kill you with only a regular filter-based mask. Also, it was really nice to have cool outside air flowing across my face while painting. This helped to keep the sweat-drops out of the final finish.

Around 100 hours were spent building a custom instrument panel/dash assembly and installing the instruments. The SeaRey is supplied with a large panel sufficient to include most of the IFR goodies you might want to have, but as a  basic VFR machine, it didn’t need all those things. Also, the stock instrument panel interfered with the view over the nose. One of the great things about building an experimental aircraft is you can customize things like this and not affect the integrity or performance of the airframe. The original dash was cut out and in its place, a new instrument panel was installed with a lower top lip, maintaining the same position along the bottom edge. This meant a more shallow instrument panel than stock. The panel only runs halfway across the width of the  cockpit, leaving the area in front of the passenger seat available for a map/sandwich/purse shelf. 

A tongue-in-groove arrangement was built for the nosedeck to slide over top of a new bulkhead immediately in front of the rudder pedals. This isolates the front baggage compartment from the cockpit (so stuff doesn’t fall back and get in the way of the pedals) and also provides more strength in compression for the top of the nosedeck immediately in front of the windshield.  The panels and bulkhead were formed using foam and fiberglass. To build the panels, a roll of waxed paper was laid on the floor, then a sheet of fiberglass, then a sheet of foam, then another sheet of fiberglass, then a sheet of stiff plexiglass (window material), then bricks to weight the whole thing down and press out any extra resin or air. This was kind of like a poor-mans vacuum bagging system, but without the vacuum . .  . or bag.. The end result was very light, stiff and strong panels. The surface wound up with some wrinkles where the fiberglass didn’t lay perfectly flat, but this was easy to dress out for the few areas which would be visible. As for the areas that aren’t so visible, it will be our little secret.

 I really like keeping switches and circuit breakers off the instrument panel. It helps provide a cleaner appearance. To accommodate this, the fuses were placed on the back side of a trap door behind the sandwich shelf and the switches were placed on an overhead panel between the two sliding doors. The switch panel was made courtesy of my friends at www.frontpanelexpress.com. It is so cool to dream something up, push a button and have it show up your mailbox three weeks later. The instrument panel itself was made from sheet aluminum which is covered by a kind of crinkly, black wallpaper material which is the same as used in Rotorway helicopters (in fact, it was purchased  from Rotorway). 

The bottom of the hull has stringers for reinforcement. These are a couple of inches high and run down each side, one under the pilot and one under the passenger. The seats are sling-style, suspended with straps above the stringers. I was concerned about what might happen to my tender backside if the straps ever broke, so installed blue foam insulation on each side of the stringers, making a smooth, flat surface (unlike my butt).   

One characteristic of most amphibious airplanes is that they don’t do well when landed on the water with gear down. To help avoid that, a gear warning system was installed to verbally challenge the pilot to select “Land” or “Water” buttons whenever coming in for landing. It senses the gear position and warns the pilot if the gear is in the wrong position for the selected landing. There is a debate in some quarters about how effective this system is, but I can say from personal experience that it has prompted me to do the right thing at least once where I might have otherwise messed up big time. Once is enough, in my books.

I am a firm believe in getting lots of good training before trying to fly anything new. Why spend all that time and money building an airplane and then scrimp on the pilot? To this end, we took a vacation in Florida and arranged for some training with John, an expert SeaRey pilot. He spent a couple of days with me, working on consistent landings for both land and water operations, including simulated engine failures to landings on the water. However, even with this training, I was not the best person to fly our airplane once it was ready. Despite over 1,000 hours flying taildraggers, I had only about 15 hours in SeaReys. Compared to John’s experience, I was a babe in the woods, feeling my way along. While it probably would have been OK as long as everything worked right, I wouldn’t have the skill or experience to deal with the situation if something went wrong. And I wouldn’t have the experience to know the difference between something that wasn’t rigged quite right vs. “it’s supposed to do that”. As a result, it was an easy decision to say “yes” when John offered to come out to Houston to do the test flight. Once again; all that time and money was spent on the airplane – why cheap out on the pilot?

 On July 25, 2010, SeaRey N801DF took to the air for the first time. Over the next couple of days, John and I fine-tuned the rigging so that it would fly hands-off, leading John to describe it as one of the “sweetest" airplanes he had flown. 

Flying the SeaRey

It’s a blast!

As of Fall, 2010, we have a little over 40 hours flying together and it has turned out to be everything hoped for. It has been mechanically trouble-free (touch wood) and performs very well, jumping off land or water with equal aplomb. Whether curving across the water like a high-speed motorboat, or just sitting and bobbing around, adding water has introduced a whole new experience.

Anyone who flies has heard about the “hundred dollar hamburger”. This is a joking reference to the pilot’s pastime of flying somewhere for lunch. By the time you add up all the expenses, lunch costs about $100. One of the objectives with the SeaRey is to eat a lot of hamburger, but not spend $100 each time. This is easily accomplished, as the SeaRey only burns about 3.5 gallons per hour of car fuel and we have found a number of restaurants which are only half an hour away from home.

During the search for new SeaRey-accessible restaurants, I came across a marina with an on-site deli and an undeveloped channel next door – perfect for beaching. When the airplane came to rest on shore,  the depth of the water was no more than knee high. What wasn’t so obvious was the soft Gulf Coast mud underneath. As I put the cell phone and digital camera into my shorts pockets, I had no idea what was in store as I swung my legs over the side and promptly sank into the mud up to my knees. Math has never been my strong suit, but this was an easy one:  knee high mud + knee high water = drowned camera + drowned cellphone. 

On another outing, we landed in the Intracoastal Waterway to visit a restaurant on the Bolivar peninsula. There was an exposed mud flat that we could beach on, pressing the anchor into the mud to hold the airplane in case the wind came up. From there, it was a short walk to the restaurant and a pleasant lunch watching barges and boaters go by. As any school kid knows, seaside beaches all have one thing in common – the tide. Unfortunately, it was not the first thing that came to this kid's mind, until we returned to the mud flat after lunch to find that it had gotten bigger. . .The tide had dropped and the water beside the SeaRey was now only ankle deep. Collecting the anchor, I was a bit worried about what would happen next. The worries increased when I discovered that pushing on the airplane succeeded only in sinking my feet further into the mud. However, I was reminded of a little trick Kerry had shown me two years ago in Florida. . . .  Get into the plane, start up, kick the rudder all the way over and apply full power . . .  and the airplane pivoted on the spot. Straightening the rudder out, it scooted across the shallow mud and into deeper water – home free! 

 That night was a reminder that no man is an island, when the picture at the very top of this page showed up in my email inbox: turns out a passing boater thought the airplane was “cool”, Googled the registration, Googled my name and sent a picture of the takeoff. 

On the performance front, the SeaRey provides a “high speed“ cruise of somewhere around 95 mph, burning about 5 gallons per hour, or a low speed cruise of 70 mph, burning a little over 3 gallons per hour. It gets off the ground in about 400 feet and not much more than that off the water. While I am still a newbie, I am limiting myself to ponds which are at least 1,500 feet in length, but this provides plenty of room for error on both takeoff and landing as long as the approach and departure are reasonably clear. The climb rate is around 500 feet per minute at gross weight of 1,430 lbs. It weighs 911 lbs empty.

One of my favorite places to fly to is an old gravel pit which has filled in with water. It was apparently abandoned a long time ago, as the trees have grown up all around it and there are no access roads. It is big enough for green seaplane pilots like myself, but small enough that the waves don’t get very big, even in a respectable wind. No-one lives around it and there is never any other traffic. It is about 15 minutes from our home field and a great destination to practice water landings. I especially like taxing out into the center of the lake and then shutting off the engine, drifting in the breeze, listening to the water lapping against the hull and feeling the warmth of the sunshine on my face as it reflects off the water. It feels like I have come full circle to my childhood memories, only now, when it is time to wake up and go home, I only have to turn the key and take off into the air. Pretty cool stuff.  J

Between the SeaRey and the Rocket, it really feels like we have the best of both worlds: Something fast and IFR and something slow and waterful.

However, this leaves a really big problem: With so much covered by these two . . . what am I going to build next?

Back to Dave and Avril's Homepage