EricJ

I had a similar experience when I bought my airplane. It had sat outside in a big storm before it was delivered here, and we were still sumping water while doing an initial inspection. The airplane went from here to Maxwell's for a tank repair and more inspection. We did some check flights at Maxwell's, during which time I was still draining small amounts of fuel unti clear before flying. Just before returning to AZ the FBO had spilled some fuel and decided to hose the wings down to clean it up. That resulted in a bunch more water in the tanks. I just sampled fuel until no water was evident in the samples, but that kept happening for several flights after that, i.e., water would show up, drain until clear, etc. It took a fair amount of time until I stopped getting water during preflight, but once it was gone, it was gone. I changed out the cap o-rings and haven't had any issues since, but it hasn't really been outside in much rain, either. Shaking the wing likely helps, but if you do see water it's worth keeping an eye on it for a while after that.

Most likely just deposits. Like most things with cylinders, I'd just run it a while and check it again later.

There are a number of failure modes evident in the video. As originally reported, the control handle can be jammed by the o-ring fragments which could prevent selection of a tank or crossfeed, and also prevent being able to shut the fuel off to an engine fire. The o-ring fragments were shown to be able to flow out from the selector to the engine, which can certainly cause issues. Also, since the o-ring disintegration or displacement from their grooves essentially removes them from the system, there could be some uncontrolled flow between all of the ports on the selector, in other words, you lose complete control over the fuel flow. It should not cause an external leak unless the main o-ring to the control shaft failed, which didn't fail in the examples, presumably because it is always in a constrained configuration, unlike the smaller o-rings in the system. It's a dangerous situation, IMHO. It's also not an isolated case, as nitrile/buna-N/etc. rings are still widely used in general aviation.

Yes, after a one-day soak in G100UL in the fuel selector assembly the brand-new o-rings failed after only a few actuations. If there was testing done at GAMI, it either didn't cover a common application like this or the results were not shared or included in their analysis. Neither case is a good situation.

It's easy to not have issues when you're your own DER.

When my airplane has been down at various times I used the opportunity to do something I wouldn't do otherwise, like a tailwheel endorsement, multi-engine rating, etc. Those helped me stay current/proficient/whatever, so I at least didn't feel nearly as rusty when my airplane was available to fly again.

AvareX is a fairly full-featured EFB, and if the user interface and display methodology works for you then it's a good option. It's free, charts and plates are free and geo-referenced, etc., etc. I just got tired of the UI really quickly, but that's just me.

Don't forget to put the Origin and Assembler directives for the assembler at the top of the file. Good practice is to put them together at the top: .ORG .ASM I knew I was going to enjoy my career when I kept running into stuff like that.

AvareX is a complete start-over rewrite of Avare, with an entirely new user interface, display, etc. Not much from Avare carries over to AvareX. They've already stopped update support of Avare, so what you have now is all it's ever going to be, which is fine. I liked it. I suspect, however, that eventually they'll stop supporting chart updates for it.

The AvareX developer seems to be enamored with a particular modern, minimalist "intuitive" interface style, but he doesn't seem to get that it's not intuitive to many people. There is no manual, that's part of the whole deal. It's supposed to be so intuitive that it doesn't need a manual. Everything really is there if you can figure it out, but I didn't want to be flying along trying to figure out for the nth time how to do something, so I switched to iFly, which I do find 100x easier to use. FWIW, the old Avare was really nice. I don't know why they thought they had to change the entire UI or how they display everything in the new version. Some of the old display features were really useful and just don't exist in AvareX. It's still a fully functional, useful EFB if you grok the UI, I just found it too frustrating to use. That's a shame as I really liked the old version.

It would have failed a number of annual inspections or other inspections if the actual airworthiness certificate was missing, which is *not* that logbook entry. If there was ever a checkride done in that airplane the DPE would likely have checked that the AWC was there as well. So it is highly unlikely that it has been missing for a long time.

There used to be a lot of institutional biases against "free" or "open source" projects because of perceived quality issues. In many areas that's been swinging the other way, or at least there's no longer a quality assumption either way. The increasing trend to minimize testing or minimize development time or cost (via things like agile) has led to a signficant decline in commercial software quality in many markets for a long time. So now there are many customers that may prefer open source for quite a few reasons. Another aspect is that most open-source projects don't do a lot of marketing or have sales people, so they're expected to be underdogs in the market. The big corporations aren't always their target market, so, yeah, they often don't wind up there. Sometimes they do, though, and that seems to be happening more these days than it used to. I've been genuinely surprised to see some of the places where a complex, highly-integrated app with security needs, etc., etc., turns out to be open-source (e.g., TAK/ATAK).

The math isn't that hard. I've been working on a tracker to locate ELTs with a low-cost portable system. I've been using wx bots (ASOS, AWOS, etc.) as proxies for testing, and made a CDI display (on the tablet) to facilitate tracking to the estimated emitter location lat/lon, which gets continuously improved using various radio signal processing techniques. I had to make my own lat/lon math processing library because I couldn't find one suitable for what I was doing. It's not trivial, but the math isn't all that hard. I did the whole library by myself in not much time. Graphics processing is old hat these days since so many applications need it with a lot of libraries available for that as well. I think the main challenge with EFBs is integrating the various rendering, processing, database, UI functions into something that doesn't continually step on itself and make a non-functional mess. It appears that just having good, modern tools helps this a lot, which seems to be a critical element to the success of the new AvareX, which simultaneously integrates and develops everything from one source for multiple platforms.

Even critical missions with government customers tend to move toward open source these days. The transparency is a significant benefit for security analysis.

That's pretty much what AvareX is (and Avare before it). There are some other open-source EFBs, too, that are similar but seem to be not as popular.

It's possible that the orientation of that link makes no difference.

I used Avare, one of the free EFBs for many years and liked it a lot. The developer decided to stop support and start over using some of the newer development tools that make cross-development possible (to multiple platforms simultaneously). So now we have AvareX, which was developed by a few volunteers relatively quickly and is already reasonably full-featured as EFBs go, and is available on Android, Apple, Microsoft, etc.. I don't like the new user interfaces in AvareX, or the lack of documentation, so I switched to iFly, but I think AvareX is a bit of an example proof that it might not be as hard these days as it once was due to the modern software tool sets. It's definitely not trivial or inexpensive if you wanted to fund a similar effort, but it's apparently not the hurdle it may have been in the past. So there still are free EFBs out that that are very usable, and low-cost subscription alternatives like iFly. Avare, AvareX and iFly and other EFBs all have free charts and plates, so there are no fees related to the charts or plates. They're all still geo-referenced, too. I think one of the pressures on Jeppesen has been that they weren't offering much value-add compared to the free government charts used in many of these other EFBs, so I suspect that's part of why their prices came down. It'll be interesting to see what happens from here. This acquisition is just capitalists doing capitalism. I'm told it makes everything more efficient.

Field approvals happen all the time. Our local FSDO has been encouraging them, and I've heard that from reps from other FSDOs as well. The older G1000s are not well supported as evidenced by the difficulty of adding WAAS. I fly fairly regularly behind various G1000 systems including old stuff and newer NXi stuff, and compared to the newer stuff like the G3X I find the user interface of the G1000 extremely clunky. Some who use both find the GFC500 to be a much better autopilot than the GFC700. I totally understand somebody wanting to upgrade from an older G1000 to a newer system, whatever it might be.

Or a field approval. You can change anything with a field approval. People have changed engines with field approvals. Since L, M, R and S models are listed on the G3X AML the approved data already exists.

The AML includes M20L, M20M, M20R and M20S. The note says "Excluding aircraft equipped with G1000". If you uninstall the G1000, I think it would not be unreasonable to say the AML includes those aircraft. If somebody thinks additional approval is required, the STC data for those aircraft would likely get you close enough that a DER (or not) for a field approval would not be missing much, so I would not expect the expense of developing the data for the aircraft to be excessive. I've recently seen seeing FSDOs (including our local one) encouraging field approvals, so it might be worth trying. I don't see a regulatory barrier here.

There's a scat tube that is supposed to be connected between the muffler shroud and the mixing box on the passenger side firewall. If that hose is loose or disconnected, or the mixing box control not working, you could get what you're describing. Edit: You can see a lot of that just by looking into the oil hatch.

It doesn't look like corrosion, but it's often hard to tell for certain from a pic. A pre-buy inspection with a note pointing to check that specifically would be a good idea.

Sound like you did all the right things. Had you been cruising with the ram air open by any chance? Was there any moisture in the air where you were cruising? The fuel servo is sensitive to what happens with the ram tubes, and if the ram air is open and there's any moisture in the air I'm guessing it's possible either one or more ram tubes iced over or moisture was ingested into a ram tube and froze inside the servo. There's all kinds of crazy stuff can happen when then servo isn't happy, including failing (I've been there, too). It would also explain why everything was fine afterward. That's just speculation on my part, but it might have been something crazy like that. Edit: BTW, nicely done and I'm glad it came out well and you're getting it sorted out.

That'd be my thought. Likewise a DER, if needed, shouldn't have too much trouble working from the usual installation manual. There's always a way to do it, and I suspect the DER/approval wouldn't be a huge expense compared to the avionics and installation.

FWIW, Garmin still makes the G1000, and it is still being delivered in new airplanes. I don't know what the compatibility issues may or may not be with older G1000s and new replacement parts, because there is definitely an evolution there, but Garmin or a Garmin dealer should be useful there. In other words, if a component of an older G1000 needs to be replaced or updated, that may still be possible. If I were considering purchasing an aircraft with an older G1000, I'd look at that. We recently replaced a G1000 MFD in a 2015 C182 that I help with occasionally and the shop that did it just ordered the part and replaced it. Not cheap, but definitely doable. I don't know how much worse it might or might not be for a 2005.