Jay Honeck
Touchdown! Greaser!
So today we got Atlas out of annual. It's been 3 weeks -- about 50% longer than necessary, IMHO -- but there were no surprises, which is always good news. Two new tires, new brake pads, an o-ring in the brakes, an alternator belt, and we were good to go. Cylinder compression was good, and the oil filter was clean. Yippee.
Two things make this annual unique, for me. First it's my first non-owner-assisted annual -- EVER. Since 1998, I have always done all the grunt work, but this year I was just too busy remodeling the hotel to get away.
Second, this was the first annual ever done by a different mechanic than my old friend in Iowa. New eyes, new standards, all add up to a nervous annual -- but it all came together better than expected.
So, we go to pick it up today. Unfortunately, there's no shop on the field on the island we live on, so we had to fly it over to the mainland for service. It's only 12 minutes, by air, across the ship channel -- but it can be a two hour wait to get on the ferry when the tourists are in town. Thankfully, today was not bad, and we were there in less than 45 minutes.
Problem one: My new mechanic informs me that we are missing the most recent Aircraft Logbook. All the old ones are there, and the ones for the prop and engine are present -- but the newest airframe logbook is AWOL.
All of our logbooks and various paperwork have existed in a big leather zipper pouch since the day we bought Atlas in 2002. It was the first thing I bought for the plane, since the cheap old vinyl pouch was torn and cheesy. The logs themselves live under our bed, and NO ONE ever touches them -- why would they?
So, somewhere between last year's annual (with my old mechanic, assisted by my new one) and this year's annual, the airframe records for the last 8 years have disappeared. They have been in the possession of my new mechanic for the last three weeks, but he did not discover the missing book until today, when he went to fill out the paperwork.
Splendid.
No biggie, he says -- we can reconstruct everything from the 337s, yellow tags, and other assorted gummint paperwork that is still in the pouch. Cool beans. Better yet, my old mechanic's wife says she will be able to reprint all the old invoices, going back to 2002 -- so this isn't the end of the world I thought it was.
After a VERY thorough preflight, where we discovered a few missing zip ties (which the mechanic promptly replaced) but nothing else amiss, we fired up the Lycosaur O-540. It popped right over, and ran well. Taxiing gingerly to the runway, testing the new brakes, everything checked out. Two notches of flaps, and away we went, all gauges reading nominally.
I immediately had two first impressions. First, DANG, it's loud! We had forgotten to bring all the "stuff" from our airplane, including our Lightspeed Zulus -- so I borrowed an old pair of David Clarks from my A&P. Jeez, I had forgotten how awful it was to fly without ANR. Poor Mary had NO headsets at all, and soon understood why all old pilots are deaf.
Second, Atlas seemed to be climbing a bit more sedately than usual. Lightly loaded, with just 2 aboard and half tanks, we usually exceed 1000 FPM in climb, easily. Today, it was 800 FPM. Hmmmm.
Still, everything was smooth, and all gauges continued to be in the green. It was a warm day, near 90, and I hadn't flown in a while -- so I figured it was just the temperature negatively impacting our rate of climb. Out over the water we went.
Other than not being able to transmit on the radio with the ancient DCs, the flight and landing were uneventful. We were planning to fly to lunch, but -- since we had stupidly forgotten all of our on-board stuff, I thought we would make the quick flight to the island, grab our headsets, flotation gear, and all the other crap that lives in a plane you've owned for ten years, and head straight back to the mainland, where we could return our borrowed headset.
This turned out to be a very lucky decision.
After less than 5 minutes, we fired back up and I taxied to the runway. I always do a complete preflight engine check, even after only being shut down for a minute, and this was fortunate -- because the left mag failed, utterly.
When I say "failed", I mean completely, as if you had turned the engine off. Usually when a mag fails, there is sputtering, or backfiring, or missing -- but when I switched to "L", it got very quiet, the only sound being the prop windmilling down. WTF?
So, back to the hangar we went. I called my mechanic, who caught the ferry and headed out to the island. We worked five more hours on that stupid mag, trying various things. First, disconnect the p-leads, to make sure it's not the key switch. Nope, still dead.
Then, pull the mag out (a royal SOB of a job, if ever there was one) and inspect it. We found the contact that rides on the cam to be slightly askew, which made the contact surface about 50% smaller than normal. Could it be carboned up and not firing? Dunno -- so he disassembled it, cleaned the surface, and reassembled it so the full face was making contact.
Put the whole sumbitch back together, pull 'er out, fire it up -- nope, left mag still utterly dead. Augh!
Finally, he decided the only thing left is the coil inside the mag. By now it was dark, Mary had to go back to work, and the flying day was done -- so he took the thing with him back to his shop, where he will work on it tomorrow. We'll see what the problem is, then.
Needless to say, today did not go the way anyone planned, but still, I am thankful for small favors:
1. Redundant aircraft ignition systems are terrific. Were it not for having two independent magnetos, they would have been fishing our sorry butts out of the shipping channel this afternoon, since it apparently failed during the climb out after takeoff.
2. Thank goodness we forgot our headsets! If we had brought them, we would have headed to Houston, or Galveston, or New Braunfels for lunch -- and been stranded far from home. Instead, the mag failure was detected 400 yards from our hangar -- strictly by luck.
And this, my friends, is why more people don't own airplanes. I have NO idea what caused this mag to fail on the first post-annual flight -- it appears to be simply unrelated bad luck -- but I am skeptical of the timing. (Oooo, sorry -- bad magneto pun!) Something ALWAYS seems to get broken during annual "inspections", simply because the process is so invasive. Usually it's something in the panel, after the Avionics Gods have been displeased by having their wiring disturbed -- but often it's something worse and more labor intensive, like stripped screws, broken fiberglass, etc.
At times like this, I find myself wishing I wasn't so addicted to flying.
Two things make this annual unique, for me. First it's my first non-owner-assisted annual -- EVER. Since 1998, I have always done all the grunt work, but this year I was just too busy remodeling the hotel to get away.
Second, this was the first annual ever done by a different mechanic than my old friend in Iowa. New eyes, new standards, all add up to a nervous annual -- but it all came together better than expected.
So, we go to pick it up today. Unfortunately, there's no shop on the field on the island we live on, so we had to fly it over to the mainland for service. It's only 12 minutes, by air, across the ship channel -- but it can be a two hour wait to get on the ferry when the tourists are in town. Thankfully, today was not bad, and we were there in less than 45 minutes.
Problem one: My new mechanic informs me that we are missing the most recent Aircraft Logbook. All the old ones are there, and the ones for the prop and engine are present -- but the newest airframe logbook is AWOL.
All of our logbooks and various paperwork have existed in a big leather zipper pouch since the day we bought Atlas in 2002. It was the first thing I bought for the plane, since the cheap old vinyl pouch was torn and cheesy. The logs themselves live under our bed, and NO ONE ever touches them -- why would they?
So, somewhere between last year's annual (with my old mechanic, assisted by my new one) and this year's annual, the airframe records for the last 8 years have disappeared. They have been in the possession of my new mechanic for the last three weeks, but he did not discover the missing book until today, when he went to fill out the paperwork.
Splendid.
No biggie, he says -- we can reconstruct everything from the 337s, yellow tags, and other assorted gummint paperwork that is still in the pouch. Cool beans. Better yet, my old mechanic's wife says she will be able to reprint all the old invoices, going back to 2002 -- so this isn't the end of the world I thought it was.
After a VERY thorough preflight, where we discovered a few missing zip ties (which the mechanic promptly replaced) but nothing else amiss, we fired up the Lycosaur O-540. It popped right over, and ran well. Taxiing gingerly to the runway, testing the new brakes, everything checked out. Two notches of flaps, and away we went, all gauges reading nominally.
I immediately had two first impressions. First, DANG, it's loud! We had forgotten to bring all the "stuff" from our airplane, including our Lightspeed Zulus -- so I borrowed an old pair of David Clarks from my A&P. Jeez, I had forgotten how awful it was to fly without ANR. Poor Mary had NO headsets at all, and soon understood why all old pilots are deaf.
Second, Atlas seemed to be climbing a bit more sedately than usual. Lightly loaded, with just 2 aboard and half tanks, we usually exceed 1000 FPM in climb, easily. Today, it was 800 FPM. Hmmmm.
Still, everything was smooth, and all gauges continued to be in the green. It was a warm day, near 90, and I hadn't flown in a while -- so I figured it was just the temperature negatively impacting our rate of climb. Out over the water we went.
Other than not being able to transmit on the radio with the ancient DCs, the flight and landing were uneventful. We were planning to fly to lunch, but -- since we had stupidly forgotten all of our on-board stuff, I thought we would make the quick flight to the island, grab our headsets, flotation gear, and all the other crap that lives in a plane you've owned for ten years, and head straight back to the mainland, where we could return our borrowed headset.
This turned out to be a very lucky decision.
After less than 5 minutes, we fired back up and I taxied to the runway. I always do a complete preflight engine check, even after only being shut down for a minute, and this was fortunate -- because the left mag failed, utterly.
When I say "failed", I mean completely, as if you had turned the engine off. Usually when a mag fails, there is sputtering, or backfiring, or missing -- but when I switched to "L", it got very quiet, the only sound being the prop windmilling down. WTF?
So, back to the hangar we went. I called my mechanic, who caught the ferry and headed out to the island. We worked five more hours on that stupid mag, trying various things. First, disconnect the p-leads, to make sure it's not the key switch. Nope, still dead.
Then, pull the mag out (a royal SOB of a job, if ever there was one) and inspect it. We found the contact that rides on the cam to be slightly askew, which made the contact surface about 50% smaller than normal. Could it be carboned up and not firing? Dunno -- so he disassembled it, cleaned the surface, and reassembled it so the full face was making contact.
Put the whole sumbitch back together, pull 'er out, fire it up -- nope, left mag still utterly dead. Augh!
Finally, he decided the only thing left is the coil inside the mag. By now it was dark, Mary had to go back to work, and the flying day was done -- so he took the thing with him back to his shop, where he will work on it tomorrow. We'll see what the problem is, then.
Needless to say, today did not go the way anyone planned, but still, I am thankful for small favors:
1. Redundant aircraft ignition systems are terrific. Were it not for having two independent magnetos, they would have been fishing our sorry butts out of the shipping channel this afternoon, since it apparently failed during the climb out after takeoff.
2. Thank goodness we forgot our headsets! If we had brought them, we would have headed to Houston, or Galveston, or New Braunfels for lunch -- and been stranded far from home. Instead, the mag failure was detected 400 yards from our hangar -- strictly by luck.
And this, my friends, is why more people don't own airplanes. I have NO idea what caused this mag to fail on the first post-annual flight -- it appears to be simply unrelated bad luck -- but I am skeptical of the timing. (Oooo, sorry -- bad magneto pun!) Something ALWAYS seems to get broken during annual "inspections", simply because the process is so invasive. Usually it's something in the panel, after the Avionics Gods have been displeased by having their wiring disturbed -- but often it's something worse and more labor intensive, like stripped screws, broken fiberglass, etc.
At times like this, I find myself wishing I wasn't so addicted to flying.
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, the capacitors get replaced too. 
