I had to pump up a tyre on KK recently. She was looking a bit flat. Somewhere around the twenty minute mark of faffing around I realised how much I really hate these spats.
Trousers, as it turns out, is about right
Over here they're spats. For my US viewers they're wheel fairings, or wheel pants if you're being casual. Wheel pants. I've been calling them trousers the whole way through and it turns out the Americans got there first.
About two inches of sidewall
A bare tyre tells you things. Crouch down and you can see the tread all the way round, both sidewalls, the valve, and whether anything's picked its way into the rubber since last week.
Now bolt a trouser leg over it. You then get to see about two inches of sidewall through a gap.
That's enough to see the valve, and enough to see the slippage mark, the line of paint running across the tyre and onto the rim, If they are lined up. They never are. On a bare wheel that check takes me half a second. With Spats, 20 minutes.
It's the same law that governs toast landing butter side down: wanting to see something in one position is precisely what guarantees it is going to be around the other side.
Want to check the rest of the wheel? Easy! Just rotate the wheel. Which means chocks out, tiedowns off, brake off, and shoving a ton of Cessna along by hand. At least KK is on a concrete pad. I would love to try it on wet grass in October. Once you have moved her into position, then you can check the tread for stones, nails, gravel, and the occasional flattened plane spotter. A pre-flight tyre inspection has turned into gentleman's undressing, without the Butler.
DON'T STAND NOT ON THAT!!
"Mind your head." "Don't tread there". Passengers nod. They say they understand and then you jog round to get the your door and by the time you're back there's a foot on the spat.
It's like having children in the house, except the thing you're protecting is an expensive bit of fibreglass whose only job is hiding your tyre from you.
Pump it up
And then when it comes to pumping things up, you can be sure the tyre valve which hides behind the spat, lines up with that gap in exactly one place. Which is never the pace it is parked. Never. It is toast with butter side down every time. So the aeroplane has to move, and you are out there on your own pushing her back and forth, with nobody to point out you've forgotten to release the rear tiedown. Yes that was me.
I think the engineers must love them. Nobody can get near the brakes or tyre until that fairing comes off, and everything with an aircraft engineer involves a bill with lots of zeros in it.
"But it gives you more knots!"
You sound like Howard Hughes. lets polish the aircraft and flatten all the rivets. I seem to spend most of my flying life with KK trying to slow her down. I don't want more speed. Every descent into a small field feels like a negotiation with an airframe that would quite like to keep going. I want airbrakes!!
And before anyone reaches for the comments to tell me it isn't a few knots, it's this many knots: you're rivet counting. This isn't a technical article. It's a moan.
The one exception to the rule
There are aeroplanes that wear them well. A Lysander looks magnificent on those great spatted legs. Purposeful. However KK, a 1977 Cessna 172 parked outside in Hertfordshire, is not a Lysander.
I'd would take a fairing gladly if there were something interesting in it. Machine guns. Rockets. A smoke generator. Laser firing sharks (I can dream!!)
Which, it turns out, is exactly what the Lysander had. No, Not the laser firing sharks. But it did have two .303 Brownings, one in each fairing, ammunition feeding down through the undercarriage leg, and stub wings off the spats for light bombs. That's not a fairing. That's a weapons station that happens to cover a wheel.
Or I could go with bigger wheels. A nice pair of tundra tyres. Proper fat bush ones, the sort that make a Cub look like it's about to do something interesting. Monster trucks get away with it so why can't i?
One thing about KK
The spats are on the mains. Nothing on the nose. Let's keep it that way, and if anyone has a nose fairing for a 1977 Cessna 172 sitting in the back of a hangar, I'd ask you very kindly to keep it to yourself.
So that's where we are
They can come off. She didn't have them when I bought in, and anything that goes on can come off again. It's just four to one. The others think they look better and they're right, and I'd lose that vote again tomorrow. Five people, one aeroplane. That's the deal, and it's a good one.
Have they ever saved us from anything? How do you prove a negative. Nothing's gone wrong, but nothing's gone wrong on a bare tyre either, because I've never had one on this aeroplane.
Although. The only honest reason they've never let us down is that I don't fly into rough strips in the back end of nowhere. Gravel, grass, a windsock and a gate.
Which is exactly what tundra tyres are for. Maybe I've been arguing about the wrong thing.
Westland_Lysander pic Alan Wilson from Peterborough, Cambs, UK used under CC BY-SA 2.0
