Hi everyone, I have to say our experience with the monto fly in was generally good and we had a fairly good time. My father and I left Innisfail in the 47 ercoupe (white, rag wing) Wednesday about lunch time and got about as far as charters towers where we refueled and overnighted at the caravan park, we had a good time in charters towers, the local van park came and picked us up from the airport, there are also some good pubs in town for a counter meal.
Thursday we travelled from Charters towers to springsure as a bit of a detour. Along the way we landed in clearmont, and refuelled in emerald. I have to say to any other aviators flying down this way, emerald has a fantastic new avgas refueling service there which accepts credit cards and is available 24-7. You may need an ASIC as it is a secure tarmac with Q400's rolling around. After refueling here is where our fuel pump started to play up.
I quickly brought her around and landed to recheck everything. Everything seemed ok so we got airborne again, it was about half way to springsure I noticed that the header tank was getting used and the wing tanks hadn't moved. This was a bit of an eye opener for us, but we had plenty of fuel in the header tank to get to springsure so it wasn't a problem. Once we were on the ground the header tank pumped itself up. We have a mechanical diaphram pump with no backup so this is our only way to shift fuel from the low wings to the higher header tank and gravity feed into the carby. It's only a short walk from the airport at the main street of town, where we stayed. Quite a nice little quiet town I should add.
Next morning we took off and everything checked out fine in the pre-flight. Shortly after take off we started to use the header tank again. Our flight plan was rollingston, thangool then monto. We landed in Rollingston and after an hour of diagnostics realised our pump had completely failed. From here on in we found small strips every 50 miles where we had to land, suck fuel out of the wings into a 5L container and manually fill the header tank.
Anyhooo, finally we arrived at monto, and were marshalled to our spot. The people were nice, the food was fairly good and the air was crisp. We stayed from Friday till Monday Morning, It was fairly cool camping in the tent but it was a good change from the heat. It was good to see so many aircraft around, and so many people on short notice. We had a great time. We found a small electric pump in town which we rigged up and it worked a charm all the way home.
Going home, we just flew direct in one day Monto - Innisfail. LONG day. lol
Well here are some photos I took of the coupe in springsure and one on friday, we didn't have power so our phones died real quick!
:)
Wow that was a bit long!
Monto: COLD
Spring sure: Nice town, unique country