Flying a Cessna 172 for 65 days nonstop | Hacker News Reader

Flying a Cessna 172 for 65 days nonstop

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161 pointsjohncole46 comments

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.

It was really boring up there.

https://jalopnik.com/5971433/how-a-slot-machine-mechanic-fle...

That is a great article. It is too bad they dont have more photos.

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?

Or did they have a modified wing?

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 think stall spoed with full flaps is around 35 mph, so 50kph-ish

Yeah right around there for the 172. You usually do slow flight work right around 40kts

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.

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.

Here's another article with a picture of the refueling:

https://disciplesofflight.com/flight-endurance/

I can't help but wonder how they went to the bathroom? Did they have a little cassette toilet in the back that they had to dump out every couple days?

Having flown a 172 for a couple hours I can't imagine wanting to live in one for two months. I'd go insane.

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.

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”.

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 :)

Probably the same thing that long distance truck drivers do.

Pee in a bottle

Poop in a bucket

Glider pilots use a small plastic bag or a bottle for the former, so I think this is the pragmatic, non-technological solution that was actually used.

Considering they rigged up some Heath Robinson outside step for bathing, I figure they opened the door and went "over the edge".

I've also been in a 172, there's about as much room as an old Mini. Two months would be torture.

Pee tube through the airframe, I assume because I've flown in a Cessna 182 so equipped.

Pooping, pack it out in your MRE bags.

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?

From another article posted above:

> 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.

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."

Said procedure could be repeated at the other airport though. Blockchain refills opportunity?

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKZyy9FZRWY

Illustrated version: https://youtu.be/3TDk34hnSXc

Seems like blood clots could be an issue since there’s no way to effectively get your blood circulating effectively in such a small space.

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.

I've always really liked this story.

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.

The movie script writes itself.

Our heroes, trapped in a zombie filled Vegas airport, must somehow get the old 172 flying again to make their escape.

In that Zombie scenario I'd rather work for the ground crew doing the twice-daily refueling....

Can anyone explain the thinking around the alcohol injection system?

It was misguided.

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.)

Water-methanol injection was used in some early aeroplanes (and even cars) to improve performance, and reduced carbon buildup was a known side effect.

Fantastic story! Looking forward to following the new breed of aviation pioneers and adventures in space!

pics or it didn't happen

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

This was in 1958. FAR 61.57 was first created in 1999.

http://rgl.faa.gov/Regulatory_and_Guidance_Library/rgFAR.nsf...

Even then, it'd probably be fine if the passenger was (for example) a flight instructor.

Awesome story, how did they manage the fuel?

If you read the article, you’d learn that they refueled twice a day by lowering a hose down to a speeding truck.

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 :)

Also my score is -1 on that comment

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.

It's great to offer correct information, but please don't be rude on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com