Keep those flashlights handy...

denverpilot

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DenverPilot
Did you know that on the old flush Cessna breakers that can’t be pulled out, that even though they’re sealed in their little boxes, if you’re looking at them at night when they pop, you can see the arc flash through the white press button?

Neither did I until tonight. LOL.

So to set the stage I flew a couple of flights this afternoon and evening in the 182 after we did an oil change. One day XC to FNL to practice a few STOL takeoffs at an uncontrolled field and one night XC for currency and to spend some more time messing with the GTN 650.

So off I toodle to KFMM to go fly the RNAV 14 while also looking out the window, but at night. I want to run through all the procedures like I’m flying the approach but still have somewhat of an outside reference for the runway and do it all from the right seat. Let’s see how hard this is from over there.

So I’m bombing along and somewhere along the line I see a little haze and my brain says “turn on the pitot heat, it’s night and you don’t need any new problems while you’re doing this...” Little did I know I was setting myself up for one. Ha.

Now this flight is really to just get IFR procedures moving in my head again. Feel the flow. Get the zen thing going again. You know. Do all the stuff in the right order. I’m going to be doing an IPC and then prep for the CFII soon so this is “get the brain thinking this way again.”

So this is all going well. I even remember to click on the runway lights well before I need them but not too soon, etc. Procedures and checklist going well and flying the airplane fine. Yay. (It’s also not too awful doing it from the right seat...)

I fly the T transition and get some much needed GTN time getting that all set up. Cool. Works great. Turn final the ten miles or so out and hold the needles and capture the glide slope and then as I’m making a CTAF announcement...

A bright flash from the far right breaker and the cockpit is still lit and all the radios are on but it’s a little dimmer. “High Voltage” light it glowing dimly.

Okay I’ve seen that before when we needed a new Voltage regulator. I level off and keep heading for the runway (maybe I’m landing maybe I’m not. In hindsight I probably should have climbed to the MSA but I knew I had no obstacles and I was still at roughly pattern altitude still.

I know that breaker is the 60A buss breaker from the alternator. I’m on battery power only. Okay... let’s assess here. The battery is pushing 6 years old and has exhibited some signs of early weakness. We’ve been talking about replacing it but the weather got warmer and it’s starting and running fine but turns over the prop just a little slower than usual. (We’ve been thinking it would last the summer and replace in the fall.)

Okay. Do I smell smoke? No. Fire or burnt wires? No. That breaker just popped. Okay I know the rules... load shed and reset it once. If it won’t stay in don’t keep trying. So I start load shedding. I also have thoughts of ... “Hmm. I’ve never practiced getting the fire extinguisher out from this seat nor even thought of the fact that I might have to pull it out in the dark, pull the pin, and fight an under panel fire in the dark.” Just one of those thoughts that goes through your head. I think I’ll practice getting it out from over there sometime soon.

Anyway. I load shed. Radio two off, panel string lights off, switch to the one bulb overhead red for now and dim it, landing light and taxi light, work may hand across the switches. Don’t need strobes. Leave the nav lights and beacon on for now.

Ah! Pitot heat! OFF. Okay.

That tells me what’s likely up.

Either the breaker is old and weak and popped too soon or I’m drawing right at something close to 60 amps and I have the cockpit heat pretty warm like I usually do solo at night and that doesn’t help breakers much, or both.

I suspect the breaker pops a little sooner than 60A. I’ll double check and count up all the crap on that bus later in daylight and make sure the avionics folks haven’t overloaded it, but I doubt it.

By this point I’ve over flown the airport down the runway at pattern altitude and started a climb back toward Denver.

The thought here is the FMM is the armpit of nowhere late on a Sunday night and getting stuck there wouldn’t be all that fun. But if I have to land, I will.

If this panel isn’t on fire though, I’m going to fly this thing home, all I have to do is turn off everything, fly by flashlight and save this iffy battery for the transponder at the Mode C ring and the radio for calling the Tower and let them know I may lose electrical and get a landing clearance early. It’ll be dead quiet landing at midnight anyway so thatll work fine. Maybe a landing light back home if it’ll do it, but I really don’t care. I’ve landed without it.

Two things are not along on this night flight that usually are. My handheld radio and my headlamp. I usually fly at night with a headlamp on my head but not turned on. Works great for pre-flight and also great in the cockpit if needed. But, this whole idea to fly at night came up as I landed with the sun already set and in twilight on the day flight and I realized I want to get night current and also fly another approach or two.

I’ve got everything off and push the breaker back in. The overhead light gets a little brighter, ammeter shows a charge, life is good. It holds. I fly a little further toward Denver and decide, “Okay this is working. I’m going to go back and finish that approach.”

Turn around and go fly it again, all is well. Do a stop and go and another and head for home. A crosswind so good night landing practice. 080@9 for Runway 14. Nice.

Anyway head back home and no problems. Well other than the continuous light chop within 25 miles of Denver or so.

So, as NASA would say, we finally did the “full up” test like we were flying in the soup at night and the airplane showed a weakness. Pitot heat plus all lights plus all radios means, pop goes the weasel. The weak-ish battery probably isn’t helping things any. But it had plenty of time to charge up on the day XC and all that time on the way out to FMM and the ammeter was not showing a significant charge.

Nope. I think we have a weak bus breaker and it can’t handle rated load. Going to have to think about getting it tested or just replaced. Having that happen on an actual approach, I wouldn’t enjoy too much.

That little arc flash through the breaker button itself was a surprise. Sitting in the right seat you can easily see the breakers. Not as easy to see that in the left seat. It’ll sure get your attention when you see a bright flash and then stuff goes dimmer than usual. Hmmm.

About four and a half hours of “fun” punctuated by one moment of “stark terror” as the old saying goes.
 
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Nice after action report. I'm glad you and the airplane are back home.
 
Nice after action report. I'm glad you and the airplane are back home.

Yeah... could have been sleeping on an FBO couch, but I can’t even remember if FMM has one or not.

That was the other thing, I rarely fly without my jacket and I left it in the car at home base. It wasn’t freezing cold or anything but anytime I have to sleep somewhere stupid like an FBO couch or chair I usually do it with a jacket on unless it’s super warm in the building, if it is, the jacket makes for a decent pillow.

Some “pre-flight stupidity” with the missing handheld, headlamp, and jacket... those items could have come in handy if that breaker wouldn’t hold. Or I decided not to brave the headwinds going back home and testing the battery longevity the hard way.

Worked out ok but highlighted a little bit of “dumb” deciding to do that night mini XC on a whim. Little too confident in the ol’ equipment there.

Pretty sure the plan to dump everything and only fire up the transponder at the Mode C ring and then the radio to get back into the Delta would have worked, but it’s much smarter to have the backup plan in the flight bag and a jacket in the back seat. Learned all of that long ago doing long real XCs VFR.

If you can make yourself comfortable on a couch or in a chair, fixing the airplane or waiting out weather is much much simpler than pushing a bad scenario further into bad.
 
You survived Nate! Good write-up, educational too. For some reason I CAN visulize you flying with that headlamp on lol.
 
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You survived Nate! Good write-up, educational too. For some reason I CAN visulize you flying with that headlamp on lol.

My headlamp fettish started when my sister got me some fancy mountaineering headlamp from Petzl for Christmas years ago for walking the dog.

It’s got auto-brightness and three settings from normal lighting to “brighter than the sun” and is rechargeable via USB.

It definitely ain’t no Home Depot headlamp!

But honestly the cheapies from Home Depot work well because in the airplane you’re just going to use the red LEDs 99% of the time and the cheapies use a couple of AAA batteries you can swap if they die.

So the Petzl usually stays home but once in a while it goes for a night flight. The cheapies and some spare AAAs stay in the bigger flight bag.
 
That is a long post, even by Nate standards, but a good one!!

We all know that aircraft flashlights are excellent repositories for dead dry cells, so change those suckers on a regular basis.
 
I keep a fleece blanket in the baggage area. I've slept on the couch at Limon. It's a learning experience.

Many years ago, one of those days when the weather was crappy, I pulled out the original electrical docs on the cherokee and created an excel spreadsheet for power. Slog thru all the logs, adding and subtracting every electrical item. 30 amps limit in the cherokee, but swapping the 4509 landing light with LED saved 10 amps! At this point I think the total load is around 18 amps. Lost the mechanical beacon replacing it with LED but still have the belly strobe. That may get pulled this summer at the annual. On the other hand, the new transponder took more amps than the old Narco. Everything's a tradeoff. Another reason putting a GPS is questionable.
 
Well executed - maybe kill the transponder, too if it really comes to saving battery.
 
Sounds like an experience I had with the club's 182 a number of years ago. The High Voltage light flashed and a quick check showed that the alternator CB had popped. I was day VFR and heading home, so I just shed loads, waited a few minutes for the CB to cool and reset everything. It held and I continued on home. If it hadn't I would have dumped all the loads until about 15 miles out from KOLM, then brought up a radio to talk to the tower. We're outside the Mode C veil of KSEA, so the transponder wasn't needed. If I hadn't had enough battery to drop the flaps, no biggie. Landing a 182 no flaps on 5500 feet of runway isn't exactly rocket science. But, I had full electrical power, so...

Had that drill coming out of KPUW once, too. Reset and everything was fine. My wife asked what would have happened if it didn't reset. I told her that we simply would have returned to KPUW and had a mechanic fix it. Gotta love magnetos, they don't care if the electrical system is TU.
 
Gotta love magnetos, they don't care if the electrical system is TU.

Amen to that. There are a lot of Experimental builders who feel they can "design it better" and go with an ignition system...and sometimes a fuel system...that is completely battery-dependent. Even with a back-up battery, that is not my recipe for peace of mind.
 
That is a long post, even by Nate standards, but a good one!!

We all know that aircraft flashlights are excellent repositories for dead dry cells, so change those suckers on a regular basis.

It might be an idea, as backup, to download a flashlight app on your telephone. They work pretty well in a pinch, though you can't hold it in your mouth, setting it on the seat face up would give enough light in a pinch.
 
It might be an idea, as backup, to download a flashlight app on your telephone. They work pretty well in a pinch, though you can't hold it in your mouth, setting it on the seat face up would give enough light in a pinch.

Can also just open an all white browser window on any iPad you have aboard and turn up the brightness. A mini light panel you can aim at large swaths of the panel if needed.

Of course if you’re using it for navigation, don’t run the battery dead on it using it to light up the AI and DG.

But any tool works in a pinch.

Your phone even without a flashlight app (on iPhone that’s built in these days) can also be used the same way. White screen of any sort, and you’ve got a little light panel from the phone, too.

Really with as cheap as they are, I’m kinda kicking myself that there’s not a spare headlamp in the back seat pocket in my airplane. All sorts of other crap in the glove box including a pulse oximeter, but the headlamps have always just been in my flight bags.

Dumb. Should leave one in there along with some spare batteries.
 
We all know that aircraft flashlights are excellent repositories for dead dry cells, so change those suckers on a regular basis.

Nahhhhhh! ;)

Every year at annual I put new batteries in my flashlights (2) and the handheld radio that I keep in the glovebox. All AAAs, 12 total. Then I put the year old batteries in a ziplock and toss it in the glove box. I use these to power the ANRs.
 
Can also just open an all white browser window on any iPad you have aboard and turn up the brightness. A mini light panel you can aim at large swaths of the panel if needed.

Of course if you’re using it for navigation, don’t run the battery dead on it using it to light up the AI and DG.

But any tool works in a pinch.

Your phone even without a flashlight app (on iPhone that’s built in these days) can also be used the same way. White screen of any sort, and you’ve got a little light panel from the phone, too.

Really with as cheap as they are, I’m kinda kicking myself that there’s not a spare headlamp in the back seat pocket in my airplane. All sorts of other crap in the glove box including a pulse oximeter, but the headlamps have always just been in my flight bags.

Dumb. Should leave one in there along with some spare batteries.

That's a good point I think! The actual flashlight apps (at least the one I have) doesn't seem to be adjustable output...it's bright and I've never tested how quickly it discharges the battery when in use, only used it briefly. But just turning up the screen brightness (and disabling the screensave) probably would get the longest time with extra light.
Unless one has the cigarette adapter.

Maybe best would be a cigarette lighter adaptor and a flashlight that could make use of it?

It's going to be a long time before I fly at night, so I'll let you guys figure it out and just steal the good ideas!
 
I carry two LED keychain lights on a lanyard around my neck when flying at night. They're cheap (as in free. I don't know how many I have since they keep giving them away as marketing stuff.) and with two the odds of both crapping out at the same time are slim. Mini Mag lite in the end of my flight bag where I can each it with my right hand is mostly for preflight. But in a pinch...

(And before anybody warns me about the danger of a lanyard, it's made with a two pieces of cord and a short piece of heat shrink to hold them together. It'll pull apart easily enough to not get stuck.)
 
flashlight - storage container for dead batteries :)

wait, how did I get sucked into another battery discussion? The flashlights that have truly ticked me off are the ones that have this supposed low battery detection circuits built in, which basically ensure that the battery will be dead when you need it. The first 2 generations of the LED flashlights from Costco touted this feature.
 
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