EricJ

Looks like a school airplane. May have been a student or former student. It used to happen in the military once in a while. There are a number of stories of people, often disgruntled or bored or stressed or impaired crew chiefs or mechanics, taking aircraft and getting them in the air. Here are just two of many: This one was "successful": https://www.military.com/off-duty/2021/03/18/time-marine-mechanic-took-joyride-stolen-a4m-skyhawk.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1969_RAF_Mildenhall_C-130_theft Eight years ago a rampie took a Bombardier Q400 turboprop and did some aerobatics with it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Horizon_Air_Bombardier_Q400_incident

When Vince Neil's Learjet crashed at Scottsdale Airport last February there was only one fatality, and it was the pilot due to his side of the cockpit getting crushed by the aircraft that they hit on the ramp. It was a clearly survivable crash otherwise. All others on board survived. This is not an isolated example.

The weapon was actually Slim Whitman, though.

Oh, no! I always enjoyed his posts and especially the math geekery. The tail number on his airplane was icing on that cake. I will definitely miss his contributions here. :'(

Yay! Glad to hear it!

That's the common-sense assumption, that whoever is signing something off has at least looked it over before making the log entry. Many shops are busy and have a bunch of people working and maybe one or two people signing everything off. This works when things go well and the people doing the work are doing it properly, but that doesn't always happen. The stories of oddball things coming out of shops are legion just on this website. An A&P is allowed to "supervise" the work of another, which is extremely useful for getting things done. This allows an outside shop to repair an electric motor, or a competent welder to stitch something back together, or a good machine shop to mill a part. This also allows a non-A&P to work on an aircraft and an A&P to sign the "return to service" logbook entry for that work. Where it gets ambiguous is that "supervise" is not defined anywhere in the regs. Personally, I think this is a good thing, because it lets conscientious A&Ps get a lot more done, but it also means that maybe the less conscientious A&P was only minimally involved beyond signing the logbook. That's not unusual in a busy shop. It's just the reality of the situation. Anybody is allowed to work on the airplane, including you, and the regs do say that whoever does the work is supposed have their name in the logbook indicating that they did the work, and then the "return to service" is authorized by the A&P signature. This is all in FAR 43.9. For people who like to do a lot of their own work "supervised" by their A&P, I always suggest that they make a full logbook entry for whatever they do with their name, signature, and certificate number. For Preventive Maintenance this is all that is needed, and for anything beyond that the additional signature of the A&P is required for "return to service". This also makes a record of work you've done if you should ever decide to pursue an A&P. When owners do this under my "supervision", (and I add the quotes only to highlight that it is an undefined term in the regs), my logbook entry for return to service will indicate that I inspected the work, did an op check, etc., etc., and found it done properly, or something along those lines.

There is no way of knowing what sorts of non-certified things happen to it on an experimental airplane, so there's good reason to handle it that way. I don't know wether that status changes if you send it to a proper shop for overhaul, but that probably makes it uneconomical.

Yes, cynical me says they weren't "lost".

I think I've heard of more gear collapses due to lock block or other J-bar failures than I have electric actuator failures that led to damage. I think Skip is on the nose that the most likely failure mechanism is the pilot.

I do something similar. Sometimes it take a couple iterations, but it gets done. Aircraft Spruce sells one that is made from something that feels a bit like ballistic gel, so it's pretty soft, and seems unlikely to crack or break a tooth on the mag gear. I used it for a while, but now I don't even use that since it's not much harder to just be careful and stab the mag with the red tooth in the window. https://www.aircraftspruce.com/catalog/topages/FBsafetymag.php

Remember that Al Mooney worked for Culver designing the Cadet, which turned into the PQ-8 drone during WWII. Once in a while a PQ-8 comes up for sale. They're pretty cool little airplanes. So a pilotless Mooney is old history. Edit: The one I see popping up for sale once in a while is actually a PQ-14, which is similar but even better.

I have an AV-17 voice annunciator that says, "Check bus voltage" if the system voltage drops below 13V. Both times that the alternator quit I knew about it immediately, which does make a difference in being able to manage the remaining battery power. It also says, "Engine monitor" if the monitor alarms at all, and then I just look at the JPI which always has whatever the alarm variable is in big letters on the bottom of the display. It alerted me once when I forgot to open the cowl flaps on a missed approach, which probably saved my motor. Although it does do some annoyance alarms sometimes, it's way more than paid for itself for stuff like this. I always worry when I fly an airplane without similar voice annunciation that I'm going to miss something.

It seems to be a good idea to inspect the wires at the alternator whenever the cowl is off. You may be able to stay ahead of a broken wire that way.

One things that's not obvious on bowden cables is that you can lubricate it along it's length if you can flex it. When you flex it the outside circumference opens up a bit and will admit some lubricant if sufficiently flexed. Sometimes it's tough to do this while installed, but also sometimes there's a bend in the middle that's enough that it'll let a little oil in. It makes it a lot more effective to lube than just trying from each end, especially if it's a long cable.

I've had the alternator fail twice; once from a broken field wire and once from the ground wire to the brush assembly breaking. Both were easy fixes.

I wouldn't be too worried about frequency interference on most modern equipment. Channel isolation and filtering these days is pretty good, and the requirements and testing to assure out-of-band radiation is minimized are pretty good as well. There's so much stuff out there these days and you rarely hear of common user equipment interfering with each other on different frequencies. There won't be a traditional front-to-back ratio spec on Starlink antennas since they are adaptive and electronically steerable. The beam shape changes radically depending on the relative location of the satellite that it's trying to communicate with, which moves across the sky pretty quickly. A user in a front seat of a Mooney with a terminal on the glareshield will be mostly exposed to antenna pattern sidelobes, and they'll be constantly changing as the beam is electronically steered and adapts. The good news is that sidelobes are usually pretty low-power compared to the main lobe, but who knows how good Starlink's beem steering and adaptation and sidelobe control is. It might be pretty sloppy and have ugly sidelobes, which wouldn't be too surprising for something that has to do a lot of fast beamforming.

Cellular systems are all over the spectrum map these days. They've been sucking up available spectrum in many different bands for quite a while. I lost track of all of them a long time ago.

When my servo failed it was intermittent. During the last failure after we landed it would barely idle, and just made enough power for us to taxi to a parking spot. We ran it there for a while to try to see what we could get it to do, and it did come back and run, even full throttle, for a bit, then quit again. It did that a couple times. We definitely weren't going to fly it again, but there are apparently mechanisms by which the diaphragms and rods can get jammed and then unjam, or something. Contamination can get into the servo through the fuel path, which is heavily filtered, or through the impact pressure tubes, which is usually filtered but not on a Mooney with the ram air door open.

If it's just the motor, you can take it to any electric motor shop willing to work on it. An A&P just needs to "supervise", which isn't really defined anywhere.

The parking brake in my Mooney is useless, so I never bother with it. I've taken off with the parking brake on in the C182s, though. That's pretty easy to do, especially if you're used to it not being a factor at all.

If true, we could make book on how long until it closes again.

Just get a small torque wrench, sometimes called a micro-torque wrench, that has a lower range of settings. They may be 1/4" or 3/8" drive, so pick one you like. This is the cheapie one at Harbor Freight, but they're actually pretty decent and definitely suitable for things like rocker cover screws: https://www.harborfreight.com/14-in-drive-20-to-200-in-lb-click-torque-wrench-63881.html

I always tell people to put the rope between the cowl plugs around the front of one of the prop blades. This way if you do forget it, it'll fling the whole thing down the ramp, like yours, which is way better than taking off with them still in.

A buddy and I flew in to a wings meeting that was held at one of the big flight schools that has a long flight line and a ton of planes. We parked his Cherokee off the end of the schools long line of Archers and chocked one wheel. Before we made it into the building a few students walking by had tied it down and chocked the other wheel. I guess they do that by reflex there. We were both amused and impressed.

Two days is not a problem on a J with owner-assisted, i.e., two people working for two days. This assumes that there is no deferred maintenance and no big issues found. Did this many times with my old IA before I started doing them myself.