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On the second run I raised the tail
and waited.
This was slightly more promising. At
the 1,800-foot point, it was getting light.
At 2,000 feet the wheels stopped rumbling. With an inch or two of space
between the wheels and the ground, I
stayed level and pointed the nose at the
trees at the end of the runway, letting
the airspeed build. The Kitten flew out
of ground effect (sigh of relief ) and settled into a very slight climb.
It took six or seven minutes to reach
1,000 feet AGL. Judging from the feel of
the controls, there was a little reserve in
energy that could be used to climb
slightly faster, but only at the risk of a
stall. The stall is variously listed as 26
and 28 mph. With the airspeed indicator
showing 32 mph, I preferred the
extra margin of airspeed to a slightly
better climb rate.
I did not touch the mixture, leaving it
in full rich; around these parts, 1,000 feet
AGL is about 2,000 feet MSL. I saw no
need to lean it out. Generally, most
authorities think it’s good to start leaning
the mixture no lower than 3,000 MSL, so
Kitten, I was
apprehensive about pulling the little tab
that supposedly controlled the mixture.
Maybe the engine would go from
“Running” to “Not Running,” and I was in
no position to get out and hand-prop it. I
just left the mixture alone.
The airplane flew well enough on the
trip home. A few gentle turns showed
that it needed a lot of rudder to overcome
adverse aileron yaw, but it was pleasant
to be putt-putting along behind a four-stroke engine, however anemic. The
landing, my first ever in a taildragger, was
uneventful. (Yes, it was stupid to fly a tailwheel aircraft without training. We’ll
come back to that.)
Over the next few days, I tried to fly
it, but the longest runway at my home
field is 1,800 feet, and the second half
(no matter which way you go) is slightly
uphill. Over the years I’ve seen a
number of pilots who, if they were not
airborne by halfway, either wisely
rejected the takeoff or unwisely
continued the attempt, usually resulting
in crunching some metal in the weeds at
the end of the runway. After many
attempts to take off, I turned too wide to
back-taxi, went into the weeds, and—
sure enough—crunched some metal.
Friends helped me roll the Kitten back
into the hangar. We propped it up on
blocks, and I went off muttering. It was
clear that if it did not have the power to
get airborne, it was an unsafe airplane
to fly if it did get airborne. A climb rate
of 120 feet per minute is not enough. I
was now the unhappy owner of a cute
but unflyable airplane.
WRONG, WRONG, WRONG
There is not enough space in this whole
magazine to describe in detail every blunder I made, so I’ll have to condense things
a lot. Although I covered some of these
before-you-buy points in the previous article, they are worth repeating.
First, the J- 3 Kitten, although not
completely unheard of, was still pretty
much an unknown. It never caught on big
when it came out in the 1980s. That
meant that finding parts could be a problem. Much worse was the absence of a
knowledge base, in the form of a well-established community of
