peevee

seeing an airplane painted some shade of grey with the profile of a fighter against background clutter? Yeah, good luck.

even in an enroute environment 35 seconds to respond to a vector would be an eternity, in terminal I can imagine the controller was about to lose his/her cool.

I would have preferred a factory built plane too back when they didn't cost twice as much as my house.

I've had 4 place planes for several years, and I never once had more than 3 in any of them. The 182 I could do fairly comfortably, I think the 231 I could too but the weight.... But I also don't want to pay the extra fuel in something like a bo or saratoga to haul 2 people around 99.9% of the time.

that was the sonex, wasn't it?

wish these were for an avidyne!

Haven't played with it since it changed. Bummer. I like the aopa flyq Web planner though. What's everyone else using? I could never figure out fltplan.com

I like to think the owners just don't know about the issues coming out in the prebuy, but you never know.

It's some kind of plastic, but I don't think it's bondo, it's brown

well, now I'm even more confused. Maybe I'll meet another 231 somewhere and look at theirs and see I guess. Or just fly it and not worry. Probably the latter, it's cheapest.

no, there's something there. Guess that's why the MSC didn't care about it at annual.

Nope

it's a 1980 /K the cowl is definitely glass or resin, I suspect this is some kind of resin also. I'll dig through the logs. It wasn't painted all that long ago so it shouldn't be hard to find. Whatever it is does cover the rivets, it's completely smooth around the windshield.

it definitely isn't filler, that would flake and fall off.

No way it's metal, some sort of plastic or something, I really can't tell.

it'd do just fine, so fine in fact it'd be right back up in the air and flying immediately after the bounce.

either the company or owners initials would be my guess.

highly unlikely it would go anywhere. like I said, in the old days they may have you call and talk to the supe just so they sort of know what happened for educational purposes, now a lot is automated. Controllers aren't cops, they want to come to work, work their hours, move some planes around, and go home un-hassled like everyone else. If there's no readback on tape I'm actually really surprised it went anywhere outside of QA. Another hot button item is hearback/readback, so they'd LOVE to gig the controller on that, and he probably deserves a little....

sometimes the controller is doing something offline, might be on a landline, talking to a supe, briefing the next controller, drinking coffee from a spillproof cup so as to not fry a $1500 keyboard, who knows, things happen. In my facility it's usually 1 person on a sector and not often two people, so the guy on freq is doing the offline coordination also sector to sector. Sometimes it's on a ring line or shout line, sometimes it's yelling across the area. Staffing is pretty poor I think just about agency wide right now so I imagine that's the norm. You guys know you can make facility visits, right? Centers are easy, call the watch desk and ask, if you can't find the numbers I probably can. They'll show you around and plug you in with someone, it's worthwhile I like to think.

not just silence, if YOU haven't received a call in awhile. Often someone misses a call, they still hear radio chatter (I suspect?) and they outfly the transmitter range before anyone realizes and then they have to go after them. Monitor guard folks, the controllers will do everything they can to keep you out of trouble. They don't like paperwork either.

So, since those northwest pilots overshot their destination by however long a few years back nordo aircraft have been a hot button item. They get about 5 minutes to get you back, then it gets reported, then after some period of time I'm unaware of the above mentioned routine gets put into motion. There's been a lot of pressure on the controllers to know who is and isn't on freq and I can only assume word has gotten through the airlines because the pilots ask a lot more often if they haven't heard from me, which isn't a bad thing. It works a little differently in the terminal world I'm sure.

every few flights I pull the power, then drop the flaps before dropping the gear just to check the warning horn. Usually it still startles me.

I don't check it. I put the gear down abeam touchdown and never look away, I just continuously monitor the gear for the rest of the approach. It gets a little weird in the flare.

No, It likely has nothing to do with the controller. Once you go nordo beyond a certain threshold a report is basically automatically sent to qa, they write it up and forward it to the fsdo. Then they decide what to do with it. This has all changed quite recently. It times past they'd have you call in and that'd be about the end of it. Now it triggers a bunch of automatic responses. Monitor guard guys. If you get lost its the first place they'll go looking. Also the facilities are listening to guard, if you get lost you can call on 21.5 and if they can hear and find you they'll get you a frequency.

The nonradar handoff has nothing to do with you or the situation.