On 3rd August 2002, N3R, a modified Long-EZ on extended loan to NOAA for air sampling, crashed into the sea off Martha's Vineyard. The plane was being flown by Tim Crawford, a highly experienced pilot who had flown N3R hundreds of times on all sorts of missions. The NTSB report of the accident is here.
Since local search and rescue craft were called out after N3R disappeared, and the wreckage was found floating offshore, the local news media snapped into action. The Boston Globe sent along reporters, and in due course an article appeared in the paper, and also in the Boston Herald. To say that the articles were scandalously short on facts and long on hyperbole would be an understatement. The Globe and the Herald seemed to be adhering to the old tabloid journalism rule that one should never let the facts get in the way of a good story. According to the article, the skies were full of "experimental" planes, built by enthusiastic amateurs in garages, held together with glue, sealing wax etc. and at any moment, one of these planes could be about to fall out of the sky on YOU OR YOUR FAMILY. One sentence in the article from the Boston Globe will give you an example. The sentence read "the type of aircraft flown by the scientist has a crash history". One is tempted to reply "No Shit Sherlock". Any plane with more than a few flying examples will have a crash history. The Boeing 757 has a crash history, with many times the number of deaths for every crash of that plane, yet I don't see the Boston Globe ranting and raving about that aircraft. My reaction and that of the canard aviation community was "what is this nonsense?"
Lost in this slew of journalistic innuendo was any coherent description of what might have actually happened. As far as the Globe and the Herald were concerned, the articles implied that the accident occurred because the plane was experimental and clearly failed in flight.
In contrast, the Cape Cod Times printed a short article, reporting the accident, the death of the pilot, and noting that accident investigations were in progress. Missing was any rant about "experimental aircraft" or any attempt to pre-judge the cause of the accident.
N3R was an interesting Long-EZ. It was built from the ground up as an atmospheric sampling aircraft. It carried (among other additional equipment) a nose probe to collect air from out in front of the aircraft, was wider and longer than a standard Long-EZ, and was heavily instrumented. It was also very well maintained. The owners actually maintained a web site for N3R for a number of years, and they published all of the maintenance checklists on the website. I was so impressed with the checklists that I used them as the basis for my own Long-EZ's Annual Condition Inspection and equipment maintenance checklists.
A couple of days after the accident, the local medical examiner's report was released. It revealed that Tim Crawford had suffered an incapacitating stroke in the air, and as a result had lost control of the plane. In the final NTSB accident report, released in 2003, it was stated that he was actually dead before the plane hit the water.
Conclusion: There was no failure of the plane. Tim had unfortunately died almost immediately in flight, intiating the crash into the ocean. He had died doing what he loved best, and there was no issue with the plane, it's maintenance or mode of operation.
The Cape Code Times duly reported the medical examiner's findings on its web site on 7th August.
I then waited for the follow-up article from the Boston Globe. Just as well I wasn't holding my breath. They printed no follow-up, or correction to their initial sensationalist nonsense. After expressing my frustration to my fellow canard aviators, and being reminded by my good friend David Orr that I should be addressing my complaints to the perpetrators, I wrote the Boston Globe an email on 8th August 2002 asking them if they intended to correct their reporting, and received....silence.
Hooray...for the Cape Cod Times. They showed how journalism should work.
Boo Hiss!..to the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald. They showed that given the choice between professional journalism and sensationalist nonsense, they would rather publish sensationalist nonsense.

In my last posting I noted how engine vibration was unacceptable above 2540 rpm. This was after I had the engine and prop dynamically balanced by a local balancing shop.
There had to be another cause for this vibration. The vibration first appeared in the Fall of 2004, when I was flying to the Rough River fly-in. The vibration had been getting steadily more noticeable, especially on longer flights at altitude.
As a result of my experience on returning from Hondo, I limited my flying to local flights with a rev limit of 2460 rpm until I resolved the issue.
I began by getting my A&P, John Hooker of J&A Aviation in Sherman, to inspect the engine as part of the Annual Condition Inspection process. We performed a compression test (all numbers in the 70-73 range), removed and inspected the spark plugs (all wearing normally with no signs of issues inside the cylinders), and John inspected the inside of the cylinders. We also checked the exhaust system and engine mounts for any evidence of deterioration or vibration.
John's conclusion was that there was nothing wrong mechanically with the engine. The cause of the vibration was therefore elsewhere, most likely in the ignition or fuel systems.
We then broadened the scope of the investigation. My engine has 1 electronic ignition system (the Electroair system originally sold by Jeff Rose) and a Slick 4370 magneto. When turning over the engine by hand, we heard 2 solid clicks and 1 weak click from the magneto per engine revolution. This was not correct. If the magneto is an impulse magneto, all of the clicks should be the same amplitude. If the magneto is not an impulse magneto, then there should be no sound when the engine is rotated by hand.
Whichever variety of magneto I have on the engine, there was something not right with its behaviour. The magneto had been on the engine since the plane was built (just over 430 Hobbs hours) and had not been rebuilt or overhauled for 10 years. John recommended a magneto overhaul.
I therefore pulled the Magneto and sent it to Select Aircraft Services in Lancaster, TX for overhaul. One thing I discovered from talking to Select is that Slick sets spare prices very high to discourage field overhauls. They really want you to simply purchase an exchange unit from them, for upwards of $375. Also, there is a brand of Slick magneto (the 4350) that was designed to be disposable. Literally, after 500 hours, you open the trash bin, drop the magneto into it, and fit a new one. Select's opinion of the quality of that magneto was barely repeatable in mixed company...
After 4 days my overhauled magneto with a yellow tag was ready for collection. The cost was a surprisingly reasonable $171. The work sheet revealed that internal gears in the magneto were loose. That probably explained the clicking sound when rotating the engine by hand.
I fitted the magneto back to the engine, replaced a defective spark plug lead to #3 cylinder (this was a saga in itself which I may discuss in future) and timed the magneto.
I then fired up the engine and took off for a test flight. For the first 10 minutes, I was convinced that I no longer had an engine in the back of the plane; it appeared to have been replaced by a watch. On the way back from a local airport, I was able to run the plane at full power at 7500 feet and 70 degrees OAT for 5+ minutes. The rpm settled at 2740. There was very little vibration, and only slightly more noise than at lower rpms.
The conclusion: the magneto had been deteriorating for some time - at least 1 year and probably longer. However, the deterioration of a magneto is a slow, subtle process, that you may not notice until the engine is really suffering. The issue will show up at elevated rpm and altitude, where the lack of an automated timing advance in the magneto, coupled with its poorer performance, will affect engine smoothness a lot more than at low altitudes or engine speeds. It is important to note that the engine was not actually misfiring; it simply ran roughly, and generated a significant level of vibration.

This past weekend, I took a work colleague flying in the Long-EZ. The local weather was very unsettled, with lots of thunderstorm shower systems springing up, moving irregularly across the countryside, and dying away again.
We took off from Dallas Executive and headed South-East. After about 20 minutes it became clear that a line of thunder showers was moving down into the area from the North-East.
Assuming (note fatal word there) that I was near Lancaster, I started looking for the airport, to land there and wait out the weather. I spotted what I thought was the airport, and headed towards it, intending to overfly and enter downwind for the active runway. I was broadcasting on the Lancaster CTAF. I was a little surprised that there was an aircraft in the pattern that did not seem to be broadcasting, but I have come across aircraft in local traffic patterns with no radio, so I put it to the back of my mind. I flew over the aircraft, which was flying the downwind portion of the pattern, turned back on a 45, entered downwind and followed the aircraft around the pattern to final. The aircraft touched down on the runway, and then came to a stop at midfield. By this time I was on short final, and I decided to execute a go-around, since I did not have any idea what the other plane was doing. I flew around the pattern again, gaily announcing my movements on the radio, landed, and rolled out.
While rolling out, the terrible truth began to dawn....the buildings did not really look like Lancaster airport. Then the "d'oh!" moment dawned, as I read the words "Midway" on the airport buildings. I had landed at Mid-Way Regional Airport, not Lancaster.
In fact, Mid-Way has the airport name in large letters on the ramp area, which I would have seen as I overflew the airport..except that at that point it was directly underneath the canard, and therefore invisible. After that point, I was more worried about navigating around the plane on downwind than I was about looking down, so I never saw the airport name. Because my GPS was turned off, I had no cockpit instrument "reality check" either.
No wonder I could not hear the aircraft in the pattern - they were using a different frequency, and no doubt cursing me for operating without a radio. The other plane in the pattern had landed behind me and parked. I parked the plane, apologized to my work colleague, and went off to eat crow and apologize to them. The plane was a Citabria with a woman instructor and her pupil. The pupil had actually owned a Vari-EZE for a while, but he sold it because he moved to a grass airstrip. I took the blame for the confusion, apologized and all was OK.
However, I learned a couple of valuable lessons:

1. Always keep the GPS on - it will provide a reality check on where you actually are, as opposed to where you think you are
2. When overflying, always look for airport identifiers on the ramp. It may save later embarrassment...

We did not stay very long at Midway, since the shower system (complete with lightning) was moving in rapidly. I fired up, and we left quickly, with a massive crosswind rapidly building. I flew out to the West and we landed at Cleburne, bought a soda, checked the weather at Dallas Executive, which was clear, and headed back to Dallas Executive over Joe Pool Lake, landing in dull conditions. As we arrived back at the hangar it began to rain.
An interesting afternoon, but not in the way that I would really have liked...

I finally decided to make my first visit to Oshkosh. This involved being the transport pilot for Gerhard Deffner, so that he could meet with Stemme as part of their US marketing effort. As a result, some of my expenses were covered for the trip, which is good since I am currently limiting expenditure to pay off short-term debt.
Originally we planned to fly up on Saturday and fly back on Tuesday. However, when I found out that Burt Rutan was giving a talk on Tuesday night, we changed the plan to fly up on Sunday and return on Wednesday.

Sunday
Gerhard and I flew direct from McKinney to Quincy, Illinois. Quincy was not the originally-planned fuel stop, but due to map translation issues (i.e. Gerhard in the back seat couldn't seem to find out where we were on the sectionals, while I knew exactly where we were from the GPS), we ended up picking Quincy because it was pretty much along the route of flight. When we landed at Quincy, it was 102 degrees on the ground, hotter than in Texas.
There are two reasons why one should not land at Quincy:
- Fuel is expensive ($3.70 a gallon for 100LL)
- The cafeteria food in the terminal building is mediocre
The airport is an example of the tendency of small regional cities to pretend that they are international gateways by getting feeder airlines to fly to their airport, setting up an airport screening zone run by the Department of Homeland Security (complete with an expensive-looking new DHS floormat next to the metal detector, and a couple of sour-looking DHS employees who grunt at you as you pass by). Often they name the airport something like "XXXXXX International Airport". In the case of Quincy, they are trying to attract new businesses to the airport. There is a jet warbird centre at one end of the airfield, next to the Illinois National Guard area (while we were taxiing for take-off a C-130 flew in and landed).
Takeoff at Quincy was made more difficult by the fact that the airport had closed the main taxiway to the departure end of the active runway, but hadn't roped it off. When I taxied down towards the end of the runway, we suddenly found ourselves looking at a missing section of taxiway. The alternative of taxiing across the grass did not look appealing, so we had to back-track and then back-taxi on the active runway. This did nothing for the CHTs or my temper, since we then had to climb at reduced power to avoid overheating. It wasn't until we got to around 5000 feet that the cockpit became comfortable again.
After flying most of the way from Quincy to Oshkosh at 7500 feet (where it was very pleasant after being fried on the ground at Quincy) we ducked down below the clouds about 30 miles South of Oshkosh and headed for the airport. We followed the standard Oshkosh arrival procedure from the South West, flying up the railroad tracks. For a newbie like me, this was an interesting experience, since you are not supposed to talk to the controllers - you waggle your wings to acknowledge receipt of instructions. My experience was about to get a lot more interesting. They told me to head for 36L. I should have rejected that instruction and asked for 27, since there was a wind from 270 at 12-16 knots. I therefore disobeyed Oshkosh Rule #1:

Never accept a dumb instruction, even if it does come from a resonant, well-modulated voice.

I duly flew an approach to 36L, only to find that there was a 12 knot crosswind directly across the runway, gusting to 18 knots. I flew down final, and was told to land on the blue dot (i.e. mid-field). Despite holding full opposite rudder, I was unable to keep the plane straight on final, and it became clear that the wind was still too strong close to the ground for me to successfully land straight. I was not prepared to prang the plane in front of a large audience (and I could already see a lot of people watching from the grass and parking areas), so I told the tower "unable to land". They then directed me towards 27. I was getting ready to fly a loop approach over the lake, but then was instructed to immediately turn and land on the numbers for 27. This caused an anxious 20 seconds or so, since I was climbing when I received the command, so I had to shut off all power, make a very sharp turn with full aileron (which resulted in an ugly sideslip) and then basically dive for the numbers, since the tower kept reminding me not to get tangled up with a rather slow high-wing plane which was going to land at mid-field. After much sweating and cursing, I managed to put the plane down almost on the numbers, and get it stopped by the first intersection. I refused to play the "turn onto the grass" game due to my less-than-robust nose gear, but that soon became irrelevant as I learnt Oshkosh Rule #2:

Never take a right exit on 27 if you are parking on the South West side of the field.

I proceeded to be directed on a very long detour around the North-East side of the field, then back across 36R and 36L to the Experimental plane parking area. A significant proportion of this route is across grass. The main issue with taxiing a Long-EZ on grass is that the nosewheel tends to "dig in" on the surface. This forces you to use a lot of throttle to keep the plane moving - between 1400 and 1700 rpm dependent on the state of the grass. As a result, your CHTs rise quickly. By the time I reached the assigned parking area, I had to shut the engine down since all 4 CHTs had reached 400 degrees. I finally hand-pushed the plane into a parking space, and we got it tied down.
I registered myself and my plane at one of the EAA registration booths (which took a while, since the computer card reader repeatedly refused to read my EAA membership card).
We then went off to rendezvous with Gerhard's Stemme buddies at the Stemme display zone. After that, it was off to our campsite. For 2005, we had a campsite in the Oshkosh YMCA. This sounded peculiar when originally described to me. However...
...The Oshosh YMCA is something else. I have never seen a YMCA like this before. The location has a lane swimming pool, a diving pool, a gym the size of a football field, 2 dance studios, an ice rink, a restaurant/breakfast area, and a basketball court that they convert into a camp site, complete with an astroturf floor and assigned camping spaces marked out with tape (small sizes for single tents, large sizes for family pitches). The basketball court is air-conditioned, which on Sunday felt like heaven, since the tamperature in the day had risen to 98 degrees.
So...it was restaurant time and then off to bed.

Monday
After an early rise and breakfast at the YMCA restaurant (all you can eat for $5.00) we set off for Oshkosh. After arriving, I soon made the first discovery - a cafe next to the canard pusher parking area that sells freshly baked warm donuts. Heaven! I relived my childhood, munching on a donut while wandering the flight line.
I spent the early part of the day wandering the canard flight line, meeting up with people that I already knew from various fly-ins and other events. Elwood Johnson (my bank manager from the Hondo fly-in) was present, as was Tim LoDolce from Truckee. James Redmon had arrived in his Berkut after taking part in the AirVenture air race, which he reported as somewhat exciting due to low-level turbulence. Sandy (his wife) was not impressed at having her head snapped against the top of the canopy on several occasions...
I then wandered around some of the parking zones. The sheer number of aircraft at Oshkosh is somewhat mind-boggling. I walked down one of the streets and passed a field that appeared to contain at least 200 RVs. Next door was an area next to the runway that appeared to be occupied by at least 100 Bonanzas. The canard area was still relatively empty, because a lot of planes had flown off to join Glass Overcast.
Glass Overcast was originally intended to be a formation fly-past and landing with White Knight and Spaceship One in the middle. However, due to a series of changes (including the decision to defer the arrival of White Knight/Spaceship One until the middle of the afternoon) the Glass Overcast formation flight was modified to the point where the planes would leave Fond Du Lac in nose-to-tail formation and land at Oshkosh without a fly-past. (Because Fond Du Lac is only about 15 miles from Oshkosh, assembling a formation in the air after take-off before arriving over Oshkosh would have been impossible). This led to a number of pilots not even bothering to take part.
The Monday afternoon was dominated by the arrival of White Knight and Spaceship One. The main disappointment was that they stopped White Knight so far out on the flight line that Burt, Mike Melvill etc. appeared as small dots, requiring opera glasses for proper visibility. After squinting in vain at Burt and the other dignitaries in the distance, I wandered off to some of the vendor tents.
One interesting feature of Oshkosh is that a number of businesses only tenuously related (or not related at all) to aviation take fairly impressive-looking exhibition spaces. Many of these are automobile and finance corporations, clearly working on the assumption that where there are planes you will find people with lots of disposable income (possibly true in the case of an owner of, say, a Cessna 410, but less true in the case of a guy building an RV in his garage). A number of those corporations also decorate their exhibition spaces with attractive girls whose legs start just below the ears. The best-looking girls were to be seen at the Virgin Galactic stand on Aeroshell Square (yes, you can buy the naming rights to just about anything at Oshkosh, it would appear).
After more wandering about, and watching the rest of the airshow, I happened to walk into Aeroshell Square at the precise moment that Burt, Mike Melvill and Pete Siebold were taking part in a second welcome ceremony. This time, they were standing next to White Knight/Spaceship One, which had been moved from the flight line to become the central exhibit on the square for the week. Burt, Mike and Pete gave short speeches, and then Burt answered some questions from the audience. This time, you actually felt connected to these guys, instead of seeing specks in the distance.
Paul Allen was also on the podium, and also made some remarks. After studying Paul Allen for a minute, I had no hestitation in naming him The World's Worst-Dressed Billionaire. For a guy reportedly worth around $15bn, his clothing was remarkably awful - a cheap-looking shirt, a pair of ill-fitting short pants, black socks (argh!) and black slip-ons. Allied to a less than impressive physique, you can be sure that he would never be mistaken for anybody with serious money.
Burt, Mike, Pete and Paul Allen quite cheerfully signed anything put in front of them for a while at the conclusion of the question-and-answer session, then disappeared in a car off to some other event.
We left Oshkosh at around 6.30pm, with storm clouds moving in from the West (the weather radar showed a large system over Minneapolis).

Tuesday
The YMCA camping option at Oshkosh is a good option if it rains, which it did on Monday night. We all felt ever-so-slightly smug as the rain tipped down on Monday evening. I saw a number of damp-looking individuals at OSH on the Tuesday.
Bill Allen (owner of Long-EZ G-WILY) finally appeared by his plane (which was parked 2 rows down from me, complete with a Union Jack on a flagpole in front of the nose), so I was able to introduce myself. He flew from Gloucester, UK to Wick in Scotland, Rejiavik in Iceland, Greenland, St. Johns Newfoundland, Bangor Maine and Oshkosh.
I met with Terry Schubert to get ideas on how to further improve cooling on my plane. I removed the lower cowling, and we discussed various ideas and options (see my Cooling Saga postings for more details).

The great thing about Oshkosh is that the afternoon airshows are always spectacular. There were warbird fly-pasts, including a novel formation of a Mustang, a P-38 (flown by Steve Hinton), an F-4 Phantom and an F-16. Terry Schubert remarked as the F-4 made a solo pass "that plane is living proof that a barn door will fly if you put enough horsepower behind it". At the time I was imagining the cost of a low pass with full afterburner in an F-4. Probably more than my entire year's fuel bill for 131JF...
I failed in my objective of getting to see Burt talk however. When we went over to the Theatre in the Woods to try and see Burt, it was only just past 5.00 pm but already there were dozens of people waiting in line. It was clear that (a) we would have to wait for a long time (b) we would not get a decent seat. So, we gave up on that idea. Since I had already seen Burt speak at his 60th Birthday Party in Mojave in the Summer of 2003, I only felt slightly cheated...

Wednesday
Gerhard and I broke camp at the YMCA and brought our flight gear into the airport.
I managed to get doughnuts again!
I then spent some time at the small vendors area, buying fasteners etc. that you can get from Spruce or Wicks, but which I could buy in quantity and slip into my bag. I ran into Gary Hertzler, and he agreed to come look inside my cowling, however, we ended up missing each other. Gerhard, Joe and I spent some time looking at the Paris Jet, which is a French jet trainer, converted into a 4-seat business jet. It looks like...well...a French jet trainer from the 1950's. Price is not bad for a jet, starting at around $420k depending on how many gizmos you want to load into the cockpit. However, with 2 Turbomeca pure jets in the fuselage, the fuel burn may make those of us with limited wallets wince somewhat...
We finally pulled the plane out to the flight line at 12.15. After engine start, it was a short taxi to 36L, followed by a parallel takeoff next to a Decathlon, who we left behind on climb-out. Flying back over Fond-Du-Lac, we monitored the AIIS for Oshkosh, to hear them informing arriving pilots that the field was full - unless you were a warbird or a display aircraft, you would have to land somewhere else.

Flight Back
We flew from Oshkosh direct to Trenton Missouri, and from there on to McKinney. After rolling out and waiting to back-taxi, 2 deer came out of the woods, and wandered across the runway into the woods on the other side.
Trenton Missouri is a nice little airport with cheap fuel ($2.50 when we landed) and a courtesy car that you can use to go into town. This is true rural America - the side roads on the way to town were full of vendors selling melons, corn etc. from the back of trucks. We went into town with 2 other pilots and had a Mexican lunch. Most agreeable.
Gerhard flew the plane from Trenton to McKinney. He hadn't flown the Long-EZ for a while, but that only showed once - when he let the nosewheel drop into the tarmac immediately after touchdown at McKinney. Otherwise, I sat in the back seat and we discussed the best way to sell a $250k motor glider in the USA (the Stemme).
After swapping seats with Gerhard at McKinney, I touched down at Dallas Executive just before 20.00 CST. A successful and relatively cheap introduction to Oshkosh. I now understand why you need to spend a week there - you will not have enough to see everything if you spend only 3 days there like we did.

After failing to get off the ground on Friday due to IFR conditions pretending to be marginal VFR, I was determined to make it down to Hondo on Saturday.
The weather on Saturday morning was a lot better - scattered low clouds, but otherwise good. The weather down in Hondo was not quite as good, with occasional overcast, but basically VFR flight was possible.
The main problem was that none of the Friday flying group was able to fly down on Saturday. They all had other important stuff to do. So, I would be a flight of one.
I lifted off from RBD, and set off for Hondo. I ran at 6500, climbing to 8500 and then (briefly) to 9500 as I went over the top of some overcast and round a line of developing showers with tops to 14+000 feet.
Flying into Hondo was my first experience of off-field aircraft marshalling, where they put a temporary tower 5 miles out, and have incoming aircraft report over that location. I was expecting things to be a lot more hectic, but everything worked out well, and I touched down at around 13.00 CST and taxiied to the experimental end of the flight line.
That was when the fun began...on closing up the plane, and looking in my flight bag, I found that I had left my wallet and checkbook back at the house in Dallas. This was unfortunate. I had enough fuel on board to fly back to RBD (I always leave a healthy reserve when operating to distant locations - fuel is a lot cheaper than a forced landing). However, without any money, I could not even pay the fly-in admission fee.
I decided to go walk the flightline in search of a good samaritan. I soon found one in the person of Elwood Johnson, who, from sitting under the wing of his plane catching some rays, was instantly transformed in front of me to become CFO of the First National Bank of Elwood. Acting as CFO, he approved and disbursed a loan of $20 in cash, payable in 1 instalment. I was saved!
I then spent the rest of the afternoon roving the flight line. There were not many canard pushers at Hondo - several guys had made it up from South Texas, and Elwood had flown all the way from CA (he was en route to visit relatives further East). None of the Dallas area folks made it down there except for me.
Elwood and I failed to locate Skip, who appeared to be taking a timeout. Elwood was complimentary about the overall arrangements and logistics for the fly-in. He was camping close to the field.
The fly-in is of intermediate size - it is at the large end of "organized" fly-ins, but is not large enough to be classed as an airshow. It is more formal than (say) the Rough River fly-in, and the experimental side of the event was dominated by the RV community, as you might expect.
Several smaller warbirds (notably a B-26) took part in the flying display, the highlight of which was Debbie Rhinn-Harvey providing real-time commentary from the cockpit as she went through her airshow acrobatic routine (I'm not sure how she managed to keep commentating while upside-down and pulling x g's, but that probably explains why she is a past US Aerobatic champion, and why I have yet to perform a proper aerobatic maneouver as a PIC).
The really interesting (and somewhat funny) events occurred immediately after the airshow ended at around 6.00pm. There was a large storm system moving slowly to the West just North of the airfield, and it was growing in size to the point where it looked like we could be trapped for a while. I therefore got in line early at the end of the airshow to take off when they re-opened the airport.
Because of the sheer number of planes trying to leave in a short period of time, the tower was positioning-and-holding aircraft to get them off quickly, and asking them for aircraft type direction of departure. The rat-a-tat nature of the tower's questions should have alerted pilots to the need to respond rapidly, but, no. Time after time the tower would bark "state aircraft type and direction of departure", to be greeted by silence, sometimes followed by a hestitant "er, Decathlon, er, East" or similar. One pilot announced a West departure, then was corrected by the co-pilot and changed to East. (One wonders how good their flight planning was). I could sense the tower operator's frustration with some of the pilots, who appeared to be totally la-di-da, with no sense of urgency whatsoever.
As I rolled down the runway, rain hit the canopy, so I left just in time. Looking back as I climbed out, I could see rain enveloping the North of the airfield.
The return flight was uneventful, except that when I tried to briefly run at 2540 rpm, I was forced to back down to 2450 due to significant vibration from the engine (when I put my head into the headrest, I found I had blurred vision). That is not acceptable for long flights, and the plane will not be flown for any distance until this issue is fully resolved.