A tale of two tires

Eric Gleason

Eric Gleason

Pre-takeoff checklist
Joined
Sep 6, 2016
Messages
489
Location
Albany, NY
Display Name
Display name:
Eric Gleason
My poor fiancee... besides being stuck with me, her first experiences with GA have been less than smooth.

Her first flight was to be a day trip to Block Island (KALB -> KBID). After departing, I misinterpreted the ammeter, thought the alternator was failing, and decided to return to Albany. The digital readout on the Archer III is unlike any I'd ever seen before, and with only 1 flight in this plane I was still way behind the panel. After we landed and I talked to the club maintenance officer, I realized my mistake and we decided to try the flight again. When we got back to the plane, we found the right main tire was flat, and that grounded us for the day.

Her 2nd flight was a dinner trip to Oxford, CT, which went smoothly. I highly recommend the 121 restaurant there.

For her 3rd flight, I decided a spontaneous trip to Keene, NH with my 4 year old son for dinner and ice cream would be the right way to start Memorial day weekend, particularly with a lousy forecast for the weekend. Upon landing at KEEN, the left main went flat on rollout and I had to leave the plane stuck in the grass next to the runway. We were extremely fortunate to be able to spend the evening in the restaurant while the FBO brought in a couple of guys after hours to get us going again. We were able to fly back home late instead of trying to find a hotel room in town for the night.

I'm extremely fortunate that I have a fiancee who is willing to keep coming on these misadventures with me. And maybe in enough time, she'll be convinced that the club planes break down too much and that we need our own :D
 
One of several reasons I own an airplane.
 
Sounds like you had some unusual bad luck, but look on the the bright side. Nobody was hurt and she keeps comimg back for more fun. Normally an Archer is a very reliable airplane. It is hard to inspect the tires with fairings mounted.
 
On the other hand,

Those things CAN happen to your own plane, and then YOU are responsible for the hassle and expense of the repair. However. all in all, it is worth it. If you take good care of your plane, you can minimize (not eliminate) those types of situations.

I suggest that if you remain in this club, you improve your pre-flight inspections.
 
Glad everything worked out for you. Stuff happens.
 
frfly172 said:
Glad everything worked out for you. Stuff happens.
Click to expand...

Yeah, definitely. Fingers crossed that less stuff happens while I have my fiancee with me so her confidence in these adventures isn't shaken.

JOhnH said:
I suggest that if you remain in this club, you improve your pre-flight inspections.
Click to expand...

My preflights are pretty thorough, and wouldn't have caught either of these tires before they went flat. #1 was an older tire, but still passed all criteria (no visible cracks, had tread left, no cords showing). #2 looks like a manufacturing defect in the tube (tire and tube were both relatively new).
 
Eric Gleason said:
Yeah, definitely. Fingers crossed that less stuff happens while I have my fiancee with me so her confidence in these adventures isn't shaken.



My preflights are pretty thorough, and wouldn't have caught either of these tires before they went flat. #1 was an older tire, but still passed all criteria (no visible cracks, had tread left, no cords showing). #2 looks like a manufacturing defect in the tube (tire and tube were both relatively new).
Click to expand...
I wasn't just talking about the tires. And I wasn't criticizing your current pre-flight procedures.

But if you think that owning your own plane would reduce problems, why would that be other than you would ensure higher maintenance standards. And if the problem is maintenance issues, then more thorough pre-flight inspections are necessary to catch the little things that turn into big things. If you are flying a plane that you don't control the maintenance, then you need to be more thorough on your preflight than you might be on your own plane. That's all I'm saying.
 
Sounds like you made the best of it, which is certainly what it takes at times when dealing with airplanes. Also having your significant other on board is certainly helpful when a passion for aviation is involved, sounds like you guys are well on your way. Enjoy!
 
GA can be rough on the family/SO.

One trip I had planned with my daughter involved flying from Salt Lake to southern Utah for a triathlon she was participating in. So, load up the Pathfinder with all her gear, plus camping gear, and drive to the airport. Unload it all and load it into the club plane. On takeoff the ASI goes dead. Aborted takeoff and parked the plane. Unloaded the stuff back into the truck and switched vehicles with my wife ... thinking the Civic gets better gas mileage. Unloaded from the Pathfinder into the Civic. Halfway there the coolant system went pooch along with the engine, luckily at an exit. Walked to a gas station and they towed the car to their lot. Again luckily my daughter's coach was just behind us. Unload the stuff into her car and proceeded with the trip. Ironically enough flew the same plane down to a nearby airport some weeks later to retrieve additional belongings and transfer the title over.

My wife doesn't fly often but she occasionally subjects herself to my fancies. The worst one was from Salt Lake to Vegas. Hit weather halfway there and had to land to wait it out. Five hours at the FBO. It was also a P&P mission so had a 3-legged pug with us. The foster mom decided to drive to where we were to get the little guy while we were still grounded.

The hobby isn't for the impatient, that's for sure :rolleyes:

/sorry for the long stories
 
I've been flying for about 12 years, never had a flat.

Only tire that went down on me was one I had just assembled, pinching the tube in the process. It held air long enough to get the wheel on and airplane off the jack before I saw it was losing pressure.
 
The first phone call I made to a buddy after this started with "I've been flying for 29 years and never had a flat tire before I joined this club!"

Two different planes, two different causes. Hopefully I've used up my bad tire coincidences for a while.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
We had a mystery flat in our (then) new C-172M. Some times went flat, other times held air normally. Turned out there was a thumb tack inside the tire carcass that poked a hole in the tube, but only when the tire was at a certain rotation position in our hangar.

Someone was having labor problems I suspect.
 
Eric Gleason said:
Woodchucker, never apologize for the length of a 2 paragraph story :)
Click to expand...

It's definitely an adventure. My wife is super patient, and she sleeps through turbulence that ought to wake the dead.
 
denverpilot said:
Poppycock. If they didn't you wouldn't bother doing a pre-flight.
Click to expand...
Utter nonsense. You do a preflight because it gives you chance to uncover an anomaly while you can safely correct it. I've never found anything amiss in any preflight of any airplane except a couple flat tires (and it didn't take much of an inspection to reveal those). How about you?
 
steingar said:
Utter nonsense. You do a preflight because it gives you chance to uncover an anomaly while you can safely correct it. I've never found anything amiss in any preflight of any airplane except a couple flat tires (and it didn't take much of an inspection to reveal those). How about you?
Click to expand...

So what "anomalies" are you looking for, if not something broken?

You find a cracked flap track or hinge without a safety wire during your pre-flight, Mr. "Owner", would you sternly lecture the airplane that it's not allowed to break because it's routinely flown by you? LOL...

Give me a break. Crap breaks on ALL airplanes.
 
It's funny, I have had two flat tires in the last couple years, both times it was nose gear on my Conquest, first one was on landing roll out and the last one taxiing for takeoff very near where the first flat happened. Other than a few low tires from sitting on the ramp, I don't remember a flat tire during operations in my 34+ years of flying. My son had a left brake failure on the 182 when he was taking his college room mate up for his first flight, got it fixed and the right main went flat when he landed! Stuff happens, sounds like she's a good sport!
 
In the past 5 years I've had the voltage regulator fail, a battery die, right main flat after landing, a rebuilt compass leak, the tach rebuilt, a mag distributor block fail, and an exhaust riser crack. This winter my nose strut lost pressure and requires a new seal. I consider my plane well maintained but all of these things are wear items on a 52 YO airframe.

This annual its some new SCAT hose, three new spark plugs, rebuilt nose gear, new Bogert cables, and a vertical card compass. Always something to upgrade or replace.
 
iflyvfr said:
In the past 5 years I've had the voltage regulator fail, a battery die, right main flat after landing, a rebuilt compass leak, the tach rebuilt, a mag distributor block fail, and an exhaust riser crack. This winter my nose strut lost pressure and requires a new seal. I consider my plane well maintained but all of these things are wear items on a 52 YO airframe.

This annual its some new SCAT hose, three new spark plugs, rebuilt nose gear, new Bogert cables, and a vertical card compass. Always something to upgrade or replace.
Click to expand...

Hush. @steingar says these things are not possible. Hahahaha.

I think he’s just hoping for a cheap annual this year, like we all always are. :)
 
Of course things break on aircraft, especially if they're as old as ours. I guess part of this equation is that the average aircraft owned by an individual doesn't fly as often as one being rented. Hence things don't tend to break quite as often. Also, our aircraft aren't used for training, so hopefully they don't suffer quite as many hard landings and other harsh forms of treatment.

It is a rare thing when my aircraft isn't ready to fly when I want it. When I rented aircraft it was a rare thing when something wasn't broken.
 
2 flat tires sound to me like a hange/ramp with screws or safety wire on the floor.
 
We suspected as much as well, but it appears to be a coincidence. The first one appeared to be due to age. The 2nd one appeared to be a manufacturing defect in side of the tube. No evidence of FOD in either case. The 2nd one was relatively new, as a matter of fact.
 
Well, I've never owned so I can't speak to that. I've belonged to three "clubs" over the years.

The first was fairly large (10 airplanes when I joined) and slowly declining. They periodically sold off aircraft to keep operating. Lasted about 6-7 years after I joined. I had failures for sure. Second instructional flight the alternator light came on and wouldn't reset. So the instructor turned off the extra stuff (left 1 radio and the transponder on) and said "We'll have plenty of battery to get back" and we continued the flight. We did have plenty of battery to get back. The head of maintenance (and also co-owner of the club & aircraft) was know for saying "It's on order. Go fly." I had one flight canceling issue early in training when one brake was just about non-existent.

Second club was one plane, and one on leaseback. The only two flights I canceled due to mechanical issues were 1) I leaned back to get the seatbelt buckle out from under my butt and broke the weld on the seat back. And we flew in the other plane anyway. 2) Thought to myself on the way to the airport "I've never found anything in pre-flight that kept me from flying." During preflight, I pulled the gascolator drain handle and nothing came out. Oops. No fly... Turned out to be a known problem with the fuel system and the plane was down for maintenance but nobody called those scheduled to let them know...

3rd club I've cancelled one flight because neither I nor the flight instructor could get the plane started on a cold (Relatively. It's Florida.) morning. Oh, yes. And once (again with an instructor) we were setting out on a BFR in a plane which was to get an engine overhaul right after this flight...Started but wouldn't stay running. Neither of us could keep it going. So we changed planes.

So 3 (5 if you count switching airplanes) out of some 350-400 flights. Not too bad...

John
 
denverpilot said:
So what "anomalies" are you looking for, if not something broken?

You find a cracked flap track or hinge without a safety wire during your pre-flight, Mr. "Owner", would you sternly lecture the airplane that it's not allowed to break because it's routinely flown by you? LOL...

Give me a break. Crap breaks on ALL airplanes.
Click to expand...
Sorry, but I'm with @steingar on this one. Crap breaks on all airplanes, but as an owner you're far more likely to find (and immediately fix) very minor wear & tear before it progresses. Since I fly the same airplane every time, and only one other person (also an owner) flies it, we know the plane very, very well. We'll catch minor things and fix them long before they become failures. As owners, we decided to replace both main tires well before they got old and worn enough to go flat. It's a two minute conversation. Any little anomaly gets addressed immediately. The owners also tend to operate with a little more attention to treating the airplane and engine right. Sure, YOU might treat the airplane well, but the next guy may not. We have some skin in the game.

When I was renting and flying club planes, I got stranded away from home twice and found planes down for unexpected MX issues several other times. Since I've owned my plane, I'm trying to think if there has been a single time when I wasn't able to leave on schedule and make it home when planned. There may have been one time I had to postpone because of something I found during preflight, but I can't recall what it was. OK, sure, we're also not flying something that's been used by a couple of hundred people over the past 40 years... another perk of ownership.
 
I think the hairs are starting to get split awfully fine here. Owners sometimes catch things before they break, maybe while washing it or doing other non-flying related activities. And sometimes they put more money into upgrades and replacing parts before failure than a club or business might. But things still break. I know few owners who would say they don't.

This club is the closest I've come to ownership. I've rented from outfits that took poor care of their planes, and I've rented from outfits that took good care of their planes. I've flown a lot with CAP, which tends to maintain their fleets pretty well, but also tends to ride them hard. I'm coming up on 600 hours, and have only had about a half dozen mechanical events that impacted a flight.

1. DG Tumbled on a VFR training flight. Kinda neat to watch it spinning wildly.
2. Popped a circuit breaker on a VFR training flight at night in class C airspace. A wire had shorted and the xponder stopped working
3. Bug in pitot tube, noticed after take off. (The one and only time I got to fly with my dad, and it was a quick trip around the pattern.)
4. Dipstick tube on a 182 pulled out of the engine. The bracket holding it in place had cracked due to vibrations.
5. Tire #1 last month
6. Tire #2 this month​

How many of these would an owner have prevented? 2? Maybe 3? The DG was in a 152 that was worked pretty hard with primary students, and the owner liked to do spins in it. My club tends to be pretty conservative about its approach to maintenance, so it's out of character that tire #1 was allowed to age enough to get a flat.
 
I’ve also rented from places that did crap maintenance and a club that kept airplanes better than I’ve ever seen airplanes kept, including, and I’ll admit it, my own.

Much of that was due to one of the airplane owners who helped run the club and had two airplanes on lease to the club out of the three it had, he was a force of nature.

But have seen it go both ways for sure.

I’ve had the following downtime in my airplane...

Fuel bladder failure while it was sitting in the hangar. Found when I went to fly it. (What a mess. Blue goo everywhere.)

Failed nose strut seal during instrument training with @jesse while not at home base. Fixed on the road. Luckily didn’t get completely screwed on maintenance price and job done was excellent. It has held up with a small leak for many years and they gave info on a place to re-chrome the strut if that was ever needed.

Spark plug screw on connector broke and fell off in flight on the way to North Platte Nebraska. Found during mag check on run-up. Airplane was left in Nebraska for a week while we rented a car, drive back to Denver, got in my Yukon, and drove straight through to OSH.

Wheel pant crack that tried to fold a wheel pant under the tire that made the aircraft unflyable at a Cessnas 2 Oshkosh formation flight training session at an airport away from home. A screwdriver and some cursing “fixed” the problem by removing what was left of it so the next flight could be done. A Cessna with one wheel pant on, looks silly by the way. ;)

And, not a big deal but could have been... a battery low enough after the airplane was parked away from home on a cold ramp that it couldn’t quite turn the engine over. Ground power cart and direct home.

None of those other than the battery were predictable or fixable by any special maintenance the owners could have done. Crap just breaks. You’re not going to pre-replace fuel bladders that show no signs of problems in inspections usually, nor spark plug connectors, nor wheel pants, nor nose strut seals. (The nose strut seal failed at -10F so maybe that one was a tiny bit predictable. Ha. Not really though.)

Obviously there’s also a long list of things we DID notice and fixed prior to them causing dispatch problems too, but most of those any rental place would have fixed at the next 100 hour.

The good club would have fixed them as fast as we usually do, or faster... sometimes the next day.

We have a small list of items we need worked on right now. I called and got us on the schedule for them, none of them being AOG or critical and the airplane is still flyable.

The first opening our shop had on the field for non-critical airworthiness items, was June 18th. They’ll get the airplane from the hangar and do the assessment for a quote on one item and are pre-authorized to do the other. I called them last Monday and that was the next schedule opening.

So even if we wanted to fix stuff as fast as that old club I was in, we couldn’t get on the schedule anyway. The only way to “jump the line” is the airplane to be unflyable, and that would probably be a wait of at least a week.
 
denverpilot said:
So even if we wanted to fix stuff as fast as that old club I was in, we couldn’t get on the schedule anyway. The only way to “jump the line” is the airplane to be unflyable, and that would probably be a wait of at least a week.
Click to expand...
LOL. That's how it was with the vacuum pump yesterday. A&P handed me the pump, pointed towards my hangar, and said fix it. I taxied over to his hanger after replacing the pump so he could make the sign of the cross over it....work is way backed up right now.
 
Eric Gleason said:
The first phone call I made to a buddy after this started with "I've been flying for 29 years and never had a flat tire before I joined this club!"

Two different planes, two different causes. Hopefully I've used up my bad tire coincidences for a while.
Click to expand...

Hey, I'm a flat-tire guy too. I've had four flats in 2000-some hours.

I figure, if I'm gonna have a failure "thing" in aviation, I'm OK with it being flat tires. LOL I knew one pilot who had had three gear collapses (414, King Air, Citation). Worse, but at least non-fatal!

Never a flat on the Mooney, but one rental 172 and three club planes (182, DA40, Citabria). The 172 and Citabria were both with instructors, and both times I had said to them beforehand, "Hey, doesn't that tire look a little flat to you?" and both times they said "Naah, let's go fly." I trust CFIs way too much.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top