Mica Doane

Without Mica's help a few years back, we wouldn't have our Chapter. It was on the verge of collapsing when he took it upon himself to recruit people to accept Officer positions and get regular meetings scheduled. Mica is currently our Young Eagles Coordinator.

This is Mica's current project-RV6

I got my private license in 1980, but I started flying right seat (actually front seat in a J-3) with my dad in 1965. He was working for Davy Martens at Fairview as an instructor and eventually taught a lot of local people to fly. So far I've logged about 900 hours but I'm pretty lax on logging all my hours.

I'm in (hopefully) the final stages of an RV-6 project. I picked the RV because of it's all-round performance and aerobatic capabilities. I have an O-320 to go on it and plan to keep it a simple, lightweight VFR airplane. Before the RV-6 I owned a Monnett Sonerai II. The Sonerai was a neat little airplane but it wasn't really a genuine 2 seater and the VW engine was pretty maintenance intensive. It did cruise around 140 on 65 hp though and was the first airplane I was able to do an 8-point roll in. Before the Sonerai I owned a 7ECA Citabria with my dad. He taught me aerobatics in it, even before I took my checkride. I still think the Champ/Citabria line is one of the all-time great utility airplanes and always jump at the chance to fly one, even if it's just a beat-up 65 hp Champ.

The longest trip I've flown, both distance and time-wise was to Oshkosh in the Sonerai. It was the longest time-wise because I flew formation with Steve Regier from Fairview in his J-3. This was in the days before GPS and we mostly followed roads and rivers, so our ground track was probably 800 miles or more. Steve ran the Cub wide open all the way and I don't think we averaged 80 mph. The Sonerai only burned about 2 1/2 gallons an hour pulled back to stay with the Cub.

The only person to spend more than about 15 minutes in the front seat of my Sonerai was Nick Coleman. At that time Nick was a Tweet IP and member of Chapter 455. He came up with the idea of flying down to Grand Prairie TX to visit an old college buddy and offered to buy the gas if we took the Sonerai. I thought if he was dumb enough to spend two hours folded up like an accordian, who was I to deny him that privilege. He had the route all planned out so we could thread our way through the DFW TCA and had even talked to a controller from Dallas by phone to make sure we didn't get in trouble. We flew down on Saturday and things went pretty well; a little trouble hot-starting the VW but that was normal. Down south of OKC we came up behind a Piper Tomahawk coming up off of a little airport west of Paul's Valley. He was climbing out at about 80 and after losing some altitude we were doing about 160. As we pulled alongside I notice an emblem on the vertical that said "OU #4 and what was obviously a student pilot wrestling with a sectional chart in the cockpit. Nick held up his hand and made a circle in the air with his index finger (not that I needed much prodding) and as we pulled slightly ahead I pulled up and over into a big barrel roll right in front of him. That'll teach him to look around from now on.

The trip back the next day wasn't near as much fun though. I made the mistake of topping off with auto fuel at Grand Prairie and about five minutes into the flight the VW began popping and missing as we flew up the interstate between Dallas and Ft Worth. The auto gas was boiling in the fuel lines. Just as we were beginning to lose altitude, the then-new Alliance Airport appeared on our left and after a short conversation with the controller in the portable control tower we were given permission to land. I'm sure we were the first homebuilt and probably the first light aircraft to land there. The airport was so new the only things there were the portable tower, a fire truck and a fuel truck sitting on the ramp. We had to drain all the gas out of the fuel tank and fill up again with straight 100LL to get the engine to run right.. We made it to C.E. Page just before dark and Nick's wife drove down and picked us up so we could go to work the next day. We drove back down after work and I flew the airplane home, and was I never so glad to be done with a cross country in my life.