It’s springtime, which provides an opportunity to get out and land on grass again. It is much more forgiving to land on grass and a lot of fun. Just remember that some fields are private and the owner’s permission can be required to land. Grass fields can be short, so brush up on your short-field takeoff and landings!

You may have noticed that N878AC has not been flying for a while. A leak in the fuel tank in the right wing is the reason. Leaks like this are not unheard of in Super Decathlons and might be caused by snap rolls, which is the reason we don’t do those in N878AC. We decided to replace the tank rather than having it repaired.

During the tank replacement process, we decided to completely recover the wing with new fabric, rather than just patching the hole which was cut out to replace the tank. As always, things turned out to be more complicated than anticipated and this work took longer than expected. The new full tank is in and other work on the wing has been completed. The wing still needs to be covered with new fabric and painted, but we should have the airplane back flying again in a couple of weeks.

The student pilot in this video was 13 years old at the time the video was recorded. If a 13-year-old can do loops and rolls, so can you! To make loops look great, the stick needs to be relaxed at the top to make a perfect circle. There are different kinds of rolls, and this is the most basic one: The aileron roll. Enjoy…