PT20J

A lot of what you can do in a helicopter depends on the rotor system. Chuck Aaron uses a BO-105 for his Red Bull routine which has a rigid (hingeless) rotor system. One way to conceptualize a helicopter in forward flight is to think of the rotor disk as a big wing. The rotor does the flying and fuselage follows along. How the rotor attaches to the fuselage makes a difference. The rigid system is more like an airplane. At the other extreme is the teetering system originally used by Bell. On those, the fuselage only follows the rotor at positive g and if you unload it the rotor head can "bump" the mast and break it and then ... hey, maybe there's an untapped market for ballistic parachutes here. Skip

Usually lot's of used ones on eBay.

Yep, I did my multi-commercial in a Seminole. I did my multi-CFI in a Duchess with accumulators. In between I flew a C-310B and once shut down an engine in flight for practice. Couldn't get it to crank past a compression stroke either (that's when I learned about slipping Continental starter adapters). Landed uneventfully at SJC but could not taxi the darn thing straight on one engine. Used every trick I knew but ended up making a couple of 360s on the taxiway. When I finally threw in the towel and requested to park it in the grass and get a tow, the ground controller approved it and I could hear laughter in the background when he keyed his mic. Skip

Just to add a couple of points: the reason why low rotor rpm stalls are unrecoverable is that once the helicopter starts to descend, the angle of attack far exceeds the stalling angle of attack and there's no way to change that. Also, in the stalled condition, drag on the blades is very high. There's video on the Robinson safety course that shows an accident where the rotor came to a complete stop before the helicopter hit the ground. The rpm will decay if the engine fails and the drill is to bottom the collective immediately to reduce pitch and begin an autorotation. How quickly the rpm decays after a power loss depends on the rotor inertia. I've never flown a Huey, but I've heard that they had enough inertia to roll off the throttle on the ground, pick it up to a hover, do a 360 pedal turn and set it back down. On the R-22, they figure you have 1.1 seconds after the engine quits. There is also a less serious phenomena called a retreating blade stall. As the helicopter moves through air, one blade is advancing and another is retreating. Since lift is proportional to the square of the airspeed, the advancing blade would have more lift and cause a rolling moment. The swash plate adjusts the angle of attack of the blades as they rotate around to compensate for this. But at some limiting forward speed, you reach a stalling angle and the helicopter will want to roll. Skip

Pressure suits would only be used when flying very high as in a U-2 or a SR-71. You are probably thinking of a g suit. But, most likely they just meant a nomex (fire resistant) flight suit. The pilots wear these when flying the museum planes. My wife says that the pilots may think we look cool but all the women wonder why we're wearing pajamas.

Yes, I did that with mine. The whole glare shield is thermoformed from ABS sheet material in the first place. Just go slowly because it goes from stiff to very pliable quickly. You just want to get it hot enough to shape it without stretching it. Continued heat cycles weaken the material as Anthony pointed out, so try to do as little as possible. Skip

Simpler solution: M20J IPC shows AN3-11A bolts from SN 24-0378 on replacing the cotter pins used previously used.

I wonder what it means to interface with the GFC 500. Isn't the autopilot logic in the G5?

...add a parachute.

What plugs are you running? Does yours have the firmware mod that’s supposed to help with the backfire? Skip

Check to see if SI M20-88 has been done.

Warning: loops and rolls can be habit forming. Pretty soon you’ll be looking at used Decathlon’s if you aren’t careful

When mine did that, it turned out to be a cold solder joint on the interconnect between boards in the computer. Lot’s of things can cause this apparently. Skip

Never tried that. Does it work on both the stick on sheet material and the painted on coatings? It’s not bad for wiping down the prop blades to remove bugs.

And that’s why I’m skeptical that the gear up rate for Mooneys would be different than other retractables. Years ago, I was a member of a flying club that had an Arrow and a Ranger (Johnson bar). I know that the Mooney geared up twice and the Arrow at least once. No mechanical issues. Skip

@Lino I’d give @Bob Weber a shot. There are precious few folks in the US that really know how to troubleshoot these things anymore - probably a lot fewer in Europe. You can waste a lot of money overhauling and replacing parts trying to find the root cause of a problem. KFC 200 was a great autopilot - it’s just old. Skip

So, what kind of plastic are they using for auto interiors these days? The vinyl seats used to crack and some if the older plastics turned to powder, but the latest stuff seems to hold up really well. The carpet is shot. The runway at my home drome is going to be closed for a couple of months this spring for repaving so I’m likely going go use the time to redo the interior —including the document holder Skip

I had to run out to the plane anyway, so I took a couple of pictures. Let us know what you did to refurbish your plastic and how it worked out.

Actually mine isn't all that bad for a 25 year old piece of thin black plastic -- probably because it has spent most of it's life in a hangar. When I bought it, there was one crack. When I had it off, I noticed that someone had done some work on it and the light strip was assembled backwards, so I took the two mating pieces apart and fixed the lights and also took the time to fix the big crack and reinforce some areas. I reinforced the areas that need to flex with fiberglass cloth and abs cement. The big crack was around the area in the center where the post comes through and I doubled that with some ABS sheet since it doesn't need to flex. I cut out the center to make it easier to remove from around the post and installed one of Bruce Jaegar's easy out plates. All was well until I parked it in the heat of Texas at MooneyMax where the black metal easy out plate got so hot it softened the plastic. I have since glued a thin insulating layer of dense black foam rubber to the bottom of the plate to insulate it. I need to do a little filling and sanding and fix a couple of small cracks and it should be fine. I was going to spray texture it and paint it with black SEM. But, I'm thinking a better solution might be to send it to Hector and have him cover it. So, what do you think, would covering it protect the plastic and hide any small cracks that develop, or would it accelerate the deterioration? Skip

Put Teflon tape around the edges of the glare shield.

Ah, that explains it -- I didn't look far enough back. Thanks. Still curious from what source did you get the safety alert? Also, interesting that the FAA doesn't disseminate this stuff internally -- apparently. Skip

K factor is so many thousand pulses per gallon. After the pinwheel, it's an all digital system. Therefore, if the things were accurate, you wouldn't have to mess with the K factor - just set it to whatever is marked on the transducer and DONE. But as the evidence mounts, apparently they are not very accurate (except they probably meet the factory spec of +/- 2% at 16 gph). Mine had a calibration tag that read 28.965. My college professor would have referred to that as being overly precise about something that is fundamentally inaccurate. Skip

Hey Anthony @carusoam, since we've drifted off in the weeds anyway, what are your thoughts on old ABS? It seems easy to solvent weld ABS and even patch things up with a little glass cloth and solvent-liquefied resin, but doesn't the stuff lose plasticity over time? Just wondering why my glareshield keeps cracking (other than it's a terrible design-- too thin, lots of small radius bends and requires a lot of flexing for installation and removal). Skip

Well, this is interesting. There is no NOTAM I can find under FTG or CFO relating to this in the FAA NOTAM search tool: https://notams.aim.faa.gov/notamSearch/nsapp.html#/ A quick search didn't turn up anything in the most recent National Flight Data Digest (the source for charting updates). https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/flight_info/aeronav/aero_data/nfdd/ But... If I search the FAA Location Indentifiers Search Tool, I find entries for both FTG and CFO, though CFO does not show up in Foreflight. https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/flight_info/aeronav/aero_data/loc_id_search/Encodes_Decodes/ It must have been published in an earlier NFDD. Where did you find out about it? Skip

Proper American pronunciation is: FLYING Brits say: AVIATION (and will forever argue about the pronunciation)