EricJ

Described at the time as a banana towing an orange crate.

WIth the prop control full forward I fly mostly by rpm, partly so that I'm always cognizant of keeping it out of the yellow band, and don't pay as much attention to MP. As others have said, in the pattern if you're flying the conditions rather than a formula it's all by ear, anyway, so you just do what you need to do. My home field is extremely busy with a LOT of student traffic, so many or most of the patterns wind up being non-standard, anyway, e.g., if you have to follow traffic ahead of you that spontaneously decides to fly halfway to Scottsdale before turning base. So you have to fly what's there rather than always doing something at a particular place in the pattern, or following a fixed procedure. That said, after crossing abeam the numbers to touchdown I usually have the rpm at either the top edge of the yellow arc, the bottom edge, or at idle.

I'm glad they didn't all die in the touch n' go.

Mine does the occasional miss (lope, whatever) during idle sometimes as well. As far as I've been able to determine (which seems to be being echoed here) is that this is pretty common and isn't really an issue. I've heard and do hear lots of other airplanes do this as well. FWIW, I have fine wire plugs in the bottom and it still does this sometimes. Probably the drain/sniffle valve thing.

Aha! I didn't know the impulse coupler fed both sides, which is an interesting advantage of the dual magneto. Now the Service Instruction makes sense. Thanks!

Dropped my airplane off for some avionics work today and I asked about the KX99. They confirmed that it is a switch and not a transformer/splitter, and therefore fairly desirable compared to a splitter (lossy) or diplexer (expensive). When yours failed it may have been the switch not completely making contact, which would have resulted in an open circuit and therefore high resistance. I'm going to keep mine for the time being. If it ever fails then repair can be attempted or just replace it with a bulkhead fitting and connect the handheld to the antenna cable directly.

That was late yesterday a few miles from my house. Myself and a buddy had been in and out of SDL yesterday and flew quite a bit the rest of the day. It was warmish, 80s F, and the accident aircraft apparently had a small tailwind when taking off from the calm wind runway. Six people in a single-engine Comanche on a warm day, and I wouldn't conclude that it had anything to do with the drain valves just yet.

They all happened within a few months of owning my airplane, which had some history of neglect, or "deferred maintenance" as some might say, and bad decisions by maintainers/inspectors that I think were contributing factors. Once the issues were fixed it has turned into a very nice little bird. I knew going in there'd be issues as I bought it as a fixer-upper. It was a little more adventurous than I'd anticipated, but the experience has actually been very good. Traffic Pattern Altitude. I hadn't heard it before and when I was getting current again a couple of years ago my CFI used it and I had to ask.

I thought the point of disabling the non-Impulse-Coupled magneto was to allow the IC to retard the timing for slow rpm start, as the relatively advanced timing on the magneto might result in enough preignition at slow rpm to interfere with starting. The Cub I got my tailwheel endorsement in just had two switches and I used to start it with both on, but it'd occasionally stop the prop dead during start. Starting with only the IC mag enabled was a lot smoother. Am I missing something on the above case where that wouldn't be an issue? Is the dual mag built differently?

It certainly doesn't help, but whether ice was responsible for the failure would be difficult to determine. If there's ice build-up there may be moisture intrusion in the attachment or electrical connection, and that doesn't help, either. Ice both reflects and attenuates rf energy, but specific effects on a particular antenna with a particular level of build-up at a particular frequency in a particular direction would be tough to guess. But, yeah, it doesn't help.

My guess would be a men's room.

The minimum surface area shape is a sphere, so if that were the driving consideration we'd be flying around in beach balls with wings. Fluid dynamics is pretty complicated and somewhat non-linear, so many simplifying assumptions are risky. I think the 201 windscreen likely reduces drag overall, despite having a bit more area.

I've had three engine failures and none were related to a power setting change. Two were at takeoff; one was water ingestion, which may have gotten picked up due to rotation pitch up and quit just as the gear stowed and the light went out, one was a partial failure with an injector that clogged just as the end of the runway was disappearing under the nose. The other one was during a gradual descent when my fuel servo decided it had had enough after living an apparently rough life. I don't know if there are detailed statistics on this stuff anywhere, and they might only be significant for like engines, anyway, so who knows.

Went to Lake Havasu (KHII) for lunch with a friend today. Seems like every time I go there something interesting happens. The last time just as I arrived a V-22 made a low pass. This time just as we were leaving this guy was making low passes.

Mine went from cruise power to a backfiring, sputtery idle. I was (extremely fortunately) within gliding distance of my destination airport, and on the ground it barely made enough power to taxi, still sputtering and backfiring. I walked into the field A&Ps shop and he said, "Was that you? Sounded like your fuel servo." They verified the servo was bad and sent it off for rebuild. When I picked it up I got a baggie full of the old o-rings and gaskets, and it was pretty clear that it had sat with water in it for some time during it's history. No idea how long since it had been rebuilt or serviced, but, yeah, it was like a new airplane after that. Starts really easy now, too.

I very nearly got flattened by a city bus in Shanghai. We were in a median on a busy street, the crosswalk symbol changed to the walking figure and as I was about to step into the crosswalk I noticed a bus in my peripheral vision hauling the mail toward me. Was probably doing 50mph. I stopped, and a colleague next to me said he stopped only because I stopped, as he hadn't seen the bus. It passed about a foot or two in front of me. I never could figure out the logic of the crosswalk signs there, but the locals apparently had some secret as they seemed to know when you could actually cross the street or not, which didn't seem to correlate with any of the signage. Those public cams will be good for replaying the demise of foreigners who succumb to the unfamiliar street etiquette. Those sorts of public cams have been all over Europe for a long time. As for ADS-B, I think it's already making a big difference in safety and I'm glad for that.

The first episodes of Airplane Repo with Nick Popovich were very good with little to no manufactured drama. I found them very interesting and compelling. Who knew that people repo'd airliners and how hard that could be? I think there wasn't enough drama in that to make good TV, though, but they went overboard in subsequent seasons when it just got sillier and sillier. Pimp my Plane might be a cool thing for airplane geeks, but probably wouldn't have enough appeal for the general public.

Your airplane may have a cocaine problem. Otherwise, fix the crack.

No inner gear doors?

For a lot of V-tail history with Bonanzas and other aircraft, the idea was to minimize drag by eliminating a tail surface. It seems to have been figured out since that it either doesn't make much difference or isn't worth the effort. Kinda like puck landing gear. ...runs away...

If you have GPS, either in the panel or in a tablet, the 2nd NAV is not very useful. I rarely use a VOR at all any more (especially since my autopilot died). Just having one VOR is pretty much only a backup to gps nav (for me, anyway).

Yes, they're not in the sat pic, they're only a year or two old and Google hasn't updated the sat pics in eons. Upper right corner of that ramp, though.

Not by the buildings, it's on the east end of the little parking pad just across from the Casino. It's not super reliable, this is the 2nd time I've gone there and it's been down.

I go there once in a while for cheap fuel, but sometimes this happens: After I got home I checked NOTAMs and they'd posted one that the pump was out about the time I was leaving there. I imagined this happening: Dude: There's somebody at the pump. Dude2: It doesn't work. Dude: We should post a NOTAM. Dude2: Done. Dude: He's leaving. Dude2: Musta seen the NOTAM. Dude and Dude2 high five each other.

I saw it, good movie. I was mostly adding to your comment addressing thekubiaks statement about slide rules. Digital computers were used quite a bit in the Apollo program, both on the ground and in the spacecraft, and on the ground in the previous programs. Since software tools weren't so great back then, a lot of hand analysis and modelling was done to figure out what software to write. I'm sure slide rules were still used a lot throughout, since the computing resources were scarce, but they did exist.