GeeBee

One time good deal just for me!

I started my G1000 M20R for a 300 mile trip this morning when I found my standby attitude indicator inop. Flag in view. Reset breaker, no help. Got behind, pulled the cannon plug, reset. No help. Took it over to my favorite avionics shop. They checked the power to the plug as good. So need a new standby indicator. A call to Mid-Continent, the manufacturer, 2,700 OH/EX. I asked what a GI-275 would run installed. 3600. So I am going with the GI-275.

The had a "Sperry Engine Analyzer" at the FE station which basically was an oscilloscope on the ignition system, both the high tension and low tension sides. I can remember in my college days having to take a test on it and analyze what was going on based upon traces of the scope. They also had "BMEP" gauges and had to take a test on how those work. 48 years ago! I still have my book somewhere, but you can buy one on. Ebay https://www.ebay.com/itm/Sperry-Gyroscope-Co-Engine-Analyzer-Operators-Handbook-for-18-28-cylinders-/382477940805

An age when actors and athletes were great Americans. My late wife's father was in the same bombardment group in the 8th Air Force as Captain Clark Gable. They tried to keep him on the sidelines 'for show and morale" but he insisted on flying real missions over real targets. Eddie Albert (Oliver on Green Acres) was another great American. Bronze Star with Combat "V" when he piloted a landing craft on Tarawa. Rescued 47, directed the rescue of 30 more under heavy machine gun fire. Other than Pat Tillman, I can't think of any modern day examples. They don't make them like they used to!

Ah c'mon man! That was Jimmy Stewart! American icon. He could sling a fast ball equal to his age right to his last day. However let me tell you. General Stewart (then Col. Stewart) did all his own flying for Strategic Air Command in both the B-36 and the B-47! By the way, anybody know without looking it up another movie that starred Jimmy Stewart and June Allyson as a married couple?

That old movie, "Strategic Air Command" I have on DVD. I love that take off scene because after going through a before take off checklist the length of War and Peace and the checklist is called "complete" then they call to start "jets, 1, 2, 3 and 4" Old airplanes what a pieces of work. Note also the low pressure hydraulics and how long it takes to get the gear up. Someone asked if there are any around. There is one at Wright Patterson with a wing off. There is one at Offut AFB in Omaha, also Pima Air Museum and. Castle AFB. There was one at Lockheed in Forth Worth some retired General Dynamics/Convair folks were trying to get flying but became a bust. Too much work and too much corrosion. Most the skin was magnesium which did not make for long airframe life. So it was trucked off to Pima. Anybody remember where the B-36 was built?

Just an inquiry, not knowledgable. Powder coating requires baking at 400. degrees. Are you not worried about annealing the metal?

One of the reasons I elected to purchase a Mooney over others was the way it was constructed. I had considered a PA32R or a BE-36. I decided on the Mooney for both performance and structural reasons. The Cherokee wing attach method is not a "50 year" method. It is sad, because the old high wing Pipers had a simple, effective and durable system. I also shy away from Beechcrafts with "bathtub" spar attachments. Believe me, the Beechcraft "bathtub" fitting is no fun.. I had a King Air which was one of the first to get the production installed Monel bolts inspected at the 5 year mark. Deciding I did not want to be on the "bleeding edge" I elected to replace the bolts rather than NDT the factory installed units. When we went to pull the old bolts out found the factory had installed the chamfer washer backwards and gouged the bathtub fitting beyond repair. Ended up hanging a new wing on the airplane. A lot of Beechcrafts out there with mis-torqued and mis-installed wing attach bolts. The methodology required to properly attach the wing is too error prone.

Only have experience with the Lycoming and big bore Continentals. Lycoming is easy, use a rubber stopper with the feed tube through it and stick it into the dipstick tube. Continental, I put a funnel into the dipstick tube to bypass the breather outlet then stick the rubber stopper with supply tube through it into the funnel. Breather tube feeding would be nice were it not for the ice. hole. While you could masking tape the hole shut, it would be a "MUST DO" preflight item that is not easily discoverable if you fail to perform. Worse it would have dire consequences if it was needed. I've thought about one of those "expanding tube ends" where the tube end expands upon pressure, so you could push the tube up past the ice hole, then turn on the pump and it would seal in the tube, have not actively pursued it.

Do you think this Piper Arrow needs a rework?

Thank you for the compliment but it sounds like you are doing great work! Heck, I didn't do that fancy sensors stuff!

If they are silicon, fuel will not affect them.

Push that bulge on top of the vertical stab a little further and you could put an HF antenna in it!

When I was a line boy, 50 years ago, no commercial product existed. I used rubber backed outdoor carpet. It is heavy and bulky but for constant use works great. Now I keep one in the airplane and like you want light weight. I find silicon baking mat the perforated type work very good. You can also use perforated tool box drawer liner. All of these work good.

I'm going to consider the source, NY approach. I find the "institutional attitude" of facilities never seems to change. Rather it gets passed down from Journeyman to trainee and it seems to be a difficult to break. We often laughed when at JFK and comment that ATL would have recovered and launched three to JFK's one. For whatever reason, NY Tracon seems to believe it only needs to serve NY Tracon. They don't want to even begin to understand a pilot's operational problem. A good facility has a rapport with its users and if so, the users will support them. The best at this is ATL, the. worst is NY. It is often interesting to see this attitude at work when the airlines meet with ATC to go over FOQA data and trends they see, like slam-dunks and flap overspends. ATL always has the "how can we help" where as NY always was, "Well that's the way we always have and WILL do it." Not "how can we work this out?". The OP's cite reminds me of flight attendants who would complain about full airplanes. As I used to tell them, full airplanes mean job security. It means we are meeting the needs of our customers. The controller in the OP does not see the users as customers, but rather interruptions. As one famous airline CEO once said, "Our customers is the reason for our work, not an interruption of it".

Kroil fan

Every time you are handed off to Milan control they tell you (and everyone else) to squak 1000. The Italians have no problem with everyone on the same code!

Did your friend pull out and reference his iPad after the airplane had rolled past 60 degrees of bank? Do this experiment, bank over to 60 degrees then activate your panel app on your iPad and see what happens.

So let me get this straight. You depart in severe IFR conditions with one AI because you believe the other will "eventually come up". Is that what I am reading here? iPads are nice, but the MEMs modules are not reliable either. How many times do you pull out your IOs device and it will not align to earth?

Well let me ask you some thing. What did you think. the purpose of "bend the curve" meant? Did you believe it meant fewer total people get the virus or did it mean the same number get infected over a longer period of time so as not to overwhelm the hospitals and care facilities? Then when it turned out the hospitals were handling the load, was it "mission accomplished" or was it, "I need you to stay home and out of work to save lives."? Does it make sense to you? Because again, if it is to save lives then we have to stay here until there is zero virus threat. Does that make sense from your 9th grade biology class? That there will ever again be zero virus threat? Second, did you really believe the nation's top experts when they stood at the podiums at the center of power, the White House and tell you that. "masks do not work". Did that really make sense to you after 9th grade biology? Do not know about you but I knew it was a lie the moment it was uttered. Since you brought up cockpits one of the things I started to do when I made Captain was never lie. People can look out the window as good as I can. I did not give them "30 minutes more" routine. I told them straight up what was wrong and what it was going to take to fix it. If I did not have the answer, I told. them, "I don't know, but I am trying to find out". I updated every 15 minutes even if the update was "no news". People can handle the truth and they will be willing and sometimes if required active participants. Just tell them truth and what is required of them. If you require things of them that do not meet the exact situation, if you try to play them for you own or unstated agenda, you'll lose control, quickly.

The American people will decide when and where to open up the economy and when and where to keep things shut down. Governors seem to think they are in control, but believe me you only get mass compliance if you have mass credibility, and that is starting to get in short supply in some states. MI for example. You can operate a sail boat, but not a motor boat. Really? How does the IRS get everyone to pay their taxes? A combination of fear and good citizenship. Once fear is gone depending on citizenship demands a buy in by those governed. If that goes, it looks like the gates to the palace in October 1917 in Saint Petersburg. I live in GA which. has been much maligned for early opening. I can tell you even though restaurants were allowed to open last Monday, I can't name a one that has, even dine in fast food has not opened. My barber shop that was allowed to open a week ago Friday, just opened today, with a lot of their own restrictions in place. Still we support our governor's decision because he is giving "We the people" our choice and recognizing a free and informed people will make good decisions. The American people are not stupid and we can manage our affairs in this virus infested world IF given the correct information and not using fear as a method of compliance. We have heard unbelievable things initially from supposed "experts" such as "masks don't work". Just about anyone with common sense knew that was BS and.....credibility damaged. First it was "Lock down" to "bend the curve" and manage hospital surge. We bought in. Then it. became, "Lock downs save lives". Really? Well if so we will have to remain lock downed until no one dies of the virus as a moral imperative if we are to value each and every life. Credibility damaged again. We are now arriving at the point were the people have a pretty good grip on how to run things without the so called "experts" who keep moving the goal posts, indeed changing the shape of the goal. and that is when non compliance will begin. First a little then a lot. Then everyone storms the gates. Wise governments will have already unlocked them. Mr. Pelton like every other American is making a sensible and reasonable decision based upon a number of factors including, medical information and lead times in the face of uncertainty. Mr. Pelton is a great American. He has made his own informed decision and not waited for government to make it for him.

The present Mooney essential bus system IMHO is not adequate design for critical hardware like ignition. First of all the STC on these new electronic units require wiring direct to the hot bus. For a dual battery Mooney the only safe way if you had two electronic units would be to have two isolated hot busses, one off each battery powering a respective ignition unit. I have a similar set up on my boat where three individual bilge pumps are powered off triple batteries with triple independent hot busses. I can tie. them together manually or separate them.

I built my own engine saver. Not that hard to do although it does not have the fancy electronics. I took a Pelican box, which is water and air tight. Tapped some fittings in it and run and aquarium air pump through silica gel. I have recently been doing a lot of research on desiccants and found out that the properties of silica gel are great for bring down moist air but does not work good once down below 40% RH. At that point a molecular sieve with zeolites works better to bring it down even more. So I am developing a two stage unit in which the ambient air first goes through the silica gel then on to the sieve material. You can buy both the silica and the sieve material on Amazon for very cheap prices. On the output end, I found that a lot of commercial units do not filter the output. I put a Briggs and Stratton air filter over the outlet inside the box to filter the output air. For the Lycomings I found a rubber flask stopper with a hole in it works great. Put a piece of tubing through the hole and attach it to the output. The Continentals can be a little tougher because the breather tube at the filler neck will leak out the dry air. So I just put a narrow funnel in the fill tube and stick the stopper and tube in the funnel, that way the breather tube is bypassed with output going straight to the crankcase. I think altogether my home made one is ran about 120 dollars, desiccant included.

I would whole heartedly agree, it is a lot of eggs in one cart. I guess that is why they call them "Experimental" but it sure is not how I would go. I don't even think I would go with two batteries, two alternators and two electronic mags unless they were independent bus isolated. I've been around a bus fault and it is not fun because everything lost for good now matter how you feed it. To be fair, all batteries can overheat and blow up. I had an AGM blow on my boat as a result of my granddaughter playing at the helm and leaving the big bilge pump on the hot bus on. So despite the master being off, the battery became depleted. When the charger tried to keep up with it, it blew. The great thing about an AGM when it blows is there is no smoke, no acid, no nothing, just a separated case. The AGM battery has the softest "failure" of any battery out there which is why you will have to talk long and hard to get me out of a Concorde for my Mooney.

There is an article on EarthX in the latest Aviation Consumer. While the LIFe battery will not catch fire, it will smoke toxic smoke. I can tell you a fellow who borrowed my hangar in July 2019 with a Glasair had an EarthX go south on him. As a result of total electrical failure and a dual electronic ignition set up the airplane was a total loss and he sustained serious injury.