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PHIL HOWELL

ROANOKE TIMES Copyright (c) 2001, Roanoke Times

DATE: Tuesday, March 6, 2001      

COLUMN: NRV Profile 

DATELINE: CHRISTIANSBURG

SOURCE: TOM ANGLEBERGER THE ROANOKE TIMES

PHIL HOWELL

Email: poppapou@aol.com

THE FLEA, IN REPOSE, MAY FLY AGAIN

SUMMARY:   A Christiansburg man keeps his beloved handmade experimental airplane in his basement for now but hopes to soar with it again.

Phil Howell and the Flying Flea have been through a lot together.    Thirty years ago Howell built the tiny experimental plane in his Christiansburg basement garage and that's where it sits today.  In between have been emergency landings, separation, reunion, three reconstructions, a crash into the New River and 800 hours of flying time.  

"It's been part of the family for so long now," he said, "maybe they'll just bury me in it."

More likely it will go to a museum - a prime specimen of a very strange breed of airplane still considered experimental almost 70 years after its invention by an eccentric Frenchman.

"Let me unfold it," said Howell, after easily rolling the 430-pound plane out of the basement garage door. In just a few minutes, he unfolded the front and back wings, fitted the rudder into place and put on a beautiful, handmade canopy.  It looks like a plane from a children's storybook - so small and cute it might open its mouth and sing "I think I can. I think I can."  One pair of wings is above the cockpit, another is just behind it. The belly swoops up to an open engine set jauntily on the nose. The seat is covered in old carpet and just above it is a sign reading "experimental."  Howell, a former Army pilot, was a computer systems analyst based at the Radford Army  Ammunition Plant when his wife bought him the plans for the Flea in  he mid-'60s.

"I had always dreamed about that thing" since seeing ads for the plans in magazines, he said. "I really don't think she ever thought I'd really build it."

For $15, he had received four or five pages of instructions, he said.  not much information, but they guided him through five years of careful building.

Finally, when the Flea was complete, he towed it to the Virginia Tech Airport. 

"I told my wife I was going to do some high-speed taxi tests up and down the runway," he said. "Before she knew it I was in the air."   He had fulfilled both his dream and the dream of Henri Mignet, the  plane's inventor who wanted to create a do-it-yourself plane. 

"Buy an airplane? Flying lessons? A vacuum cleaner for 600 francs,  OK, but 60,000 for an airplane? Nothing doing!" he wrote. "You have an attic,  a basement, a little corner of a shop. In a box, drill, plane, file, hammer, the tools of an amateur. [A] few directions, some patience, a little money, and in two months your machine is flying."

When Mignet designed the Flea in the early 1930s, he considered it easy to build and easy to fly - so easy, in fact, that he encouraged pilots "without previous training" to teach themselves in their newly built planes.

"To fly! Live like a fairy! To be a bird ... in a paradise!"

Unfortunately, this paradise resulted in lost lives. As promised, the Flea did not stall or spin, but it was unsafe. The plane had a design flaw: dives turned into nosedives and helpless pilots were killed.

Aviation writer Jack Cox wrote that, though the Flea was redesigned,  Most of the world turned its back on the tiny plane.  But "the True Believers had never deserted him and have not to this day,"  Cox wrote.

Howell, of course, is one of them. He's entrusted his life many times to Mignet's design.

"If it's built with the corrections, it's a safe little airplane,"

he said.  "It flies real easy."  It's so small and so sensitive to air currents that the sensation is more like actually flying, he said.

He's looped it, he's rolled it, he's crashed it and he's lived to tell about it.

"I've used up just about ... eight of my nine lives," he said. "I got to be real careful from here on out."

The plane itself has never given him any trouble, he said. The engine is a different story.

Five times engine trouble forced him to make emergency landings - three times at the Virginia Tech Airport, once in a West Virginia winter wheat field and once on a road near Galax. Since then he's installed a new engine, which has been more reliable.  He's had to rebuild the plane three times: after hitting a fence post when landing, after a car ran into the plane while he was towing it through Christiansburg and after his infamous crash in the New River.  Flying low over the New River one Sunday morning in 1982, he had the Flea buzzing along at 85 miles per hour. He banked to round a bend near

the Peppers Ferry Bridge. The front wing blocked his view momentarily and he flew into a railroad communication wire, strung across the river like a power line.

"Spun it around about 180 degrees and put it in the river."

Wearing a helmet and seat belt, Howell was uninjured and able to swim to shore.

He gave the Flea to the men who pulled it from the river.

"I didn't want to fool with it anymore."

Ten years later, he tracked it down to a garage near Orlando. The crash damage had never been repaired. He paid $250 to get it back without an engine, towed it home and set about fixing it up again.

After years of separation, Howell and the Flea were airborne again.

Now the Flea lives a quiet life in the basement, which it shares with a partially completed seaplane. Howell flies frequently, but 

generally takes off in his 1946 Globe Swift, a more traditional plane he keeps at the Tech airport.

But, he said, he's not done with the Flea yet. 

"I do plan to fly it again," he said, but added "don't tell my wife that."

On the Net:   Pictures of old and new Fleas, along with translations of Mignet's writings.    http://www.flyingflea.com.ar/    A short movie of Howell and his Flea in flight.   

http://www.geocities.com/pou4_au/phil_howell_293.html

END

Flying the Flying Flea

The World's Weirdiest Homebuilt?

by:  ALLISON HUNT

Perhaps one of the most maligned hombuilts of all time was Henri Mignet's Flying Flea, if you are to believe Phillip W. Howell, of Christiansburg, Va., who flies one regularly.  Howell staunchly defends this sky louse, which first flew back in 1933, and acted so temperamentally that Flying Fleas were crashing all over Europe, where it started life.

     Howell built his Flea from plans his wife gave him as a birthday persent, and aside from installing a different engine and making two minor rigging changes, it is an authentic copy of the original biplane which mignet, a French furniture manufacturer, impishly named Le Pou de Ciel Louse of the sky.

     The way folks flew the flea in the thirties certainly did louse up the sky.  It started out to be Everyman's Airplane, something you could build for $500 complete in Deperession years, and get away from it all.

     With some 500 Pou De Ciels hopping all over the French landscape, and 18 Flying Flea clubs organized in England, it was an exciting rage, particularly when Mignet toured France in one and hopped the English Channel.

     Trouble was, the Flea design was ultra-sensitive, and as flown by hamfisted amateurs its flight characteristics were, to say the least, unpredictable.  Its worst habit was flipping over on its back when pilots put it into a dive.

     Mignet's Flea carried a 17-hp engine and had a speed range from 25 to 62 mph.  Its most noticeable feature was its unusual wing arrangement.  People did not know whether to call it a biplane or a monoplane, for the lower plane, staggered far aft, was actually part of the tail.

     The upper plane was supported well above the fuselage in parasol fashion, and in addition was controllable in pitch moment by a single stick in the cockpit.  You pulled the stick back to increase angle of attack, pushed forward to reduce it.  You moved the stick left or right to control the rudder there were no foot pedals to worry about.

     Without ailerons, you simply ruddered the Flea into a turn.  Trimming was accomplished by fixed tabs on the moveable wing, plus moveable tabs you could set from the cockpit.

      Few Fleas appeared in the United States before World War II, bur afterward Air Trails Magazine in the 1940's and 1950's advertised its virtues, and among the lads who were inspired by the Flying Flea was Howell.  He admits to day-dreaming as a boy, sitting in a tiny field wishing he had a flying machine that could get into and out of small places.

Phil Howell's Flying Flea folds its wing bug-tight for trailing home after hopping all over the sky.  Howell learned the secret of stability in proper use of trim to avoid dangerous tucking.

     By 1965 he was building one, and was since moved to ask rhetorically whether it was because there is little difference between men and boys,  except the price of their toys?  Something of a poetic person, as well as a paid-up member of the Experimental Aircraft Association, he was clearly motivated by the same interest in fleas that moved Jonathan Swift to write in the 17th Century:

   "So, naturalists observe, a flea Hath smaller fleas that on him prey; And these have smaller fleas to bite 'em,

And so proceed ad infinitum." 

     Howell might also have considered Eliot's dictum:  "The immature poet imitates, the mature poet plagarizes," because in the 19th Century Augustus De Morgan, obviously immature, penned these lines:

     "Great Fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em, And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infitum."

     If Henry Mignet, Swift, and Morgan shared a lively interest in the remarkable flea, the unusual aerodynamic features of both insect and airplane impelled L.F. Richardson in 1926 to add his whimsical touch, explaning peotically why the Flying Flea's 23012 airfoil worked so well at low velocities, when laminar flow is desirable.  He wrote:

     "Big Whirls have little Whirls that feed upon their velocity, and little whirls have lesser whirls and so to viscosity."

     Writing in EAA's Sport Aviation recently, Howell admitted that "The HM-293 Flying Flea won't win any beauty contests, but it has some very desirable flying characteristics particularly at the low speed end.  With a tricycle gear, one of the few remaining problems with the two control Mignet configuration, the crosswind landing, is pretty well licked.

     "The homebuilding world still needs a simple stall/pin proof machine that can be safely operated out of very small areas...by low-time pilots who can't for various reasons, fly enough to maintain their profeciency in conventional aircraft.  The Mignet tandem wing could be one of the ways to go.  It would be good to see more modern work on the Flea formula."

     Howell chose the HM293 Mignet design over the HM290 design because it called for an optional long wing of 20-foot span, which would accomodate the higher wing loading required should he want to install a VW engine.

     At present, Howell is flying behind an O-100-1 McCulloch engine that develops 72 hosrsepower at 4200 rpm.  After flying the Flea with the McCullough engine for close to 300 hours, he has come to understand its peculiarities, and feels that it has been unjustly avoided by homebuilders.

     Howell made a few changes to the engine to convert it to aircraft use, installing long-life AX con-rod bearings and an extra set of gaskets between cylinders and crankcase to reduce the compression ratio to 7.1:1.

     He flies the McCullough at 3100-3200 rpm on takeoff, and cruises it at 3000-3200 rpm with a Hegy 55x 32 prop.  This he says, equates to 55 hp takeoff power and 35 hp for cruise.  In level flight the engine turned up to 3600 rpm max.

     Howell burns American high-test automotive fuel in the McCullough, or 100 octane aviation fuel, mixed beforehand with one quart of 50W non-detergent oil per five gallons of gasoline, a mix ratio of 20:1.  It starts easily cold, but when hot, he's cranked the thing for as long as two hours before she starts.  He finally worked out a procedure of starting full lean when hot, letting it run dry, then restarting with a shot or two of prime.

     At first Howell found the rear two cylinders developed hot spots, evident in backfiring through the carburetor, "and pilot heart stoppage."  Then he installed J-3 type cowlings over the rear jugs.  A 180-hour teardown showed almost no signs of wear.

     After the first two flights in the Flea, Howell reduced rudder control movement to decrease control sensitivity, and experimented with an adjustable spring trim attached to the stick.  (It didn't work.)

     The Flying Flea is quite sensitive and light on all control inputs, says Howell, with the rudder actually more responsive at lower airspeeds.  Takeoff is effortless, with proper trim, and the Vx climb is 60 mph IAS.  Vy works at 40.  Takeoff run on a hardtop runaway is under 200 feet.

     In cruise flight the Flea is pitch sensitive to trim changes but can be flown hands off in smooth air.  The pilot sits at aircraft CG and center of movement, and so rides easily in rough air.

Phil Howell poses with homebuilt Flying Flea he put together and flies all over.  Lower wing is a part of empennage, and top wing is controllabl in flight.  The engine is a 55 hp McCulluogh.

     Howell finds she'll indicate 80 mph cruising at 3,000 feet on 3100 rpm, 90 at 3200-3300 rpm, with a Vmax of 100-105 mph.

     "Slow flight stability and control are outstanding," he reports.  "For instance, if you are in a slow steep turn, and forget about the necessity of airspeed for lift, the Flea will automatically level its wings and lower its nose to regain proper speed.

     "Any time an excessively slow speed is approached, a large, positive kicking motion is felt in the stick.  This is an immediate indication that the front wing, which carries three-fourths of the load, is about to stall.  If you continue to hold the stick aft, the nose will drop 10-20 degrees and immediately come up again, with no tendency for a wing to drop."

     Howell has done loops and wing-overs with his flea, which is not stressed ror other aerobatic maneuvers, and on landing approach he can slow her down to 40 mph with no fear to stall/spin.  A steep approach can be made by flying the backside of the lift curve-nose high,  with high drag and an airspeed of less than 40 IAS.

     Near the ground, he lowers the nose and/or adds power.  In crosswinds he crabs down final, and on touchdown the Flea aligns herself with the runway due to the CG being forward of the mains with his trike gear.

     A nice thing that got Howell into the Flying Flea action is its roadability in a matter of minutes he can fold the wings to a span of 8 feet, and tow the insect home at 50 mph, parking it in his garage.  No tiedown fees, and she's right there at home when he wants to work on her during the week.

     When he flies cross-country, Howell slips into his pocket a $10 AM pocket radio with a standard ferrite core antenna, which he says is very directional.  Aim it at a station and fly that way, listening to rock music or the news as you hop along in you Pou de Ceil.

      Howell's first flight in his Flying Flea was on a great day back in 1970.  He waited until his wife went into the hangar to make a phone call, then tried to take off.  He overcontrolled badly on the rudder, but finally got airborne and calmed down.

      After several more flights he was convinced that that Flying Flea has been the victim of a bad press- "it simply will not stall or spin," he says.  Recently a British aeroplane journalists, James Gilbert, nominated the Flying Flea one of the "world's worst airplanes," but then, he never flew one.

     In crosswinds it's a baby - Howell simply crabs down final, lands on the mains, and presto, she cocks around straight as an arrow on her full-castering nosewheel.

     On takeoffs, however, he has to get her rolling well above stall speed before he can raise the nosewheel.  This is because the CG is a little too far aft, and the short fuselage doesn't allow for a long tail moment.

     Howell has flown her for some 275 hours, including voyages down over the Great Smokies National Park, where the Flea rocks along through turbulence with the greatest ease.  The story that the Flea will tuck under in a dive and kill you fast is a legend, Howell says, unless you trim it nose down, and then dive steepens only slowly.

     Trimmed for level flight or a climb, and pushed over into a dive it recovers by itself after a couple of oscillations.  So sensitive is the Flea that you can trim it up and steer it left or right and up or down simply by shifting your body weight, he says.

     Sensational on short field landings, the Flea comes down at a steep angle of maybe 30 degrees, on the backside of the lift curve, when you pull the nose high and slow to under 40 mph.  Near the ground, Howell drops the nose a shade to pick up speed for a roundout, then stalls her in.  In ground effect, everything stabilizes and smooths out, gentle as a flea-bitten kitten.

     Even wihtout ailerons the Flea  rolls nicely, and it does a real fancy wing over: pull the nose up at 60 mph, push the stick left or right, and she'll roll over on her back, real playful like.  Then you pull her through back to level fight.

    She'll even do a falling leaf in a climb like hopping upstairs, if you pull the stick way back.  The nose simply oscillates up and down, up and down, and she keeps right on climbing.

Source:

HOMEBUILT AIRCRAFT  

SUMMER 1976 

FLYING THE FLYING FLEA

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