A64Pilot

Link doesn’t work for me, too many redirects. What was it saying?

It was fairly obvious to me that this fuel was a safety concern from just what it did to O-rings, that was enough for me, the paint issues came along and that again screamed it was an aggressive solvent, I’m not talking about staining I’m talking about dissolving Jet-Glo. I wasn’t surprised at all when it ate fuel tank sealer, I expected that after the paint problems. Paint I see as the canary in the coal mine. I think in time we will see fuel pump leaks, maybe fuel servo problems and or fuel spider problems, anything in the fuel system that has “rubber” components. Maybe even fuel hoses. Then as it became apparent that “fresh” fuel wasn’t as big a problem as was what was left behind when the more volatile fluids flashed off made sense as assumption that only the fresh fuel was tested during the STC process. I can accept that as an honest mistake. But you need to own up to your mistakes, mistakes don’t get better with time. 1 in 1000 problems is unacceptable, 7 out of 100 is crazy, especially how quick the problems popped up, I’m used to mistakes only showing up months or years later, not within days. Over time that 7 out of 100 will increase I’m sure. I’m amazed it hasn’t been voluntarily withdrawn, will it take a fatality for that to happen? Do they think these issues are made up, that they don’t exist, or do they think they will just go away on their own? I guess I expect that in time the FAA will pull the STC

Crosswind capability depends on gross weight, speed, power applied and even on which side the wind is coming from, obviously if your carrying power as surely most all of us are in a cross wind landing then you need a little right rudder and that cuts into what’s available, wind from the left does just the opposite. Additionally most every aircraft I’ve been around has a range of allowable rudder travel, if yours is at the min then you have less rudder authority than one that’s at the max So we end up in most of GA aircraft rather conservative cross wind numbers, there are some exceptions to this of course, Gulfstream killed a couple of test pilots and crew with a rather ridiculously difficult short field takeoff procedure because they wanted to advertise that the G650 could get into and out of very short fields, so they had no “fudge” at all. https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/AAR1202.pdf Long and short of this is that crosswind capability is very variable, oh and I forgot grass runways too, grass is much more forgiving if you don’t touch down perfectly straight so cross wind landings are easier on grass, so add that to the list.

I believe a primer has two check valves, one opens when you pull it back and allows it to fill with fuel, then as you push the primer it closers and the other opens allowing fuel to go to the engine, the way they are they both will open and allow fuel to be sucked through the primer by gravity or engine vacuum. I think when the primer is closed it blocks these valve openings so fuel can’t flow. I think maybe on the 140 in question a swelled O-ring was keeping the primer from fully closing, maybe. Just a guess actually but I can see it happening, and we know the Gami fuel swells Buna-N O rings.

They do as of course Viton didn’t exist back then. Almost certainly due to its resistence to wear Cessna I believe recommended the switch to Viton in primers some time ago, not sure how long ago Viton is tougher, has I believe a higher durometer. Years ago when I was cave diving I switched to Viton on all my tanks because it’s an unlikely but possible point of failure. I don’t believe Viton is a direct replacement for Buna-N in all uses as it’s tougher to compress, at least the Viton I’ve used is. Anyway it’s one thing for Gami to recommend it, but a completely different thing for average guy to know this, and a third thing for them to understand the importance. Average person is sure it’s safe or the FAA wouldn’t have approved it, right?

I pay $120 a month (residential), my neighborhood is full of them as it’s Starlink or phone line internet nothing else. So much for the Billions spent on Rural high speed internet. Musk applied to participate years ago and yiu wont believe why the Government turned SpaceX down. Speed is all over the place, I’ve seen as high as 300 and as low as 30. I think it switches Satellites ever 2.5 min I’ve read. Although speed is up and down it has plenty of bandwidth for me to stream 4K and us both to be online.

$7 bucks on Amazon, cheaper if you don’t want the hose, my hose was dry rotted

They are metal tanks held into the wing by metal straps, very much like an old car. The fuel lines to the strainer are steel, I don’t think there is any rubber in the fuel selector, but there may be one under the cap where the lever is attached. The original carb float was brass and the original needle and seat are steel, but I think modern floats are plastic of some kind and some needles have neoprene tips as the original steel on steel could leak slowly. Primers can be a source of engine failure / low power as if not closed they can make an engine run stupid rich. Normally the O-ring wears and I think the primer leaks slightly when used. Real easy to change but can be a significant airworthiness issue.

Report I saw said 1172 FPM, that 72 isn’t insignificant, that combined with the fact that the right gear took almost all of the load instead of half if it touched down normally is probably well in excess of ultimate load. Touch down was at 7 deg right roll, so the right took most. The pitch attitude at touchdown was from what I read 1 deg nose up, meaning to me no flare. We can all demean the little CRJ, and maybe one of the old gen Boeings would have shrugged it off, but I think the Pilot takes the blame on this, but the non flying Pilot shares some too in my opinion unless they were raising hell for a go-around and were ignored. They have a vote or are supposed to surely, Military they do anyway. Pilot reduced Ng to 40 ish percent (idle) higher up than called for too so I assume he perceived he was high and or fast. I think he was over 100 ft and the Airline called for 50 I think, the approach was otherwise on speed etc. normal until right at the end from what I read. Turbo- props normally have two idles, ground and flight, flight is higher to help reduce spool lag, but the bigger PT-6’s anyway you can slam from flight idle to full and it’s about three seconds before it comes back, but when it does you had better reduce throttle quickly or you will overtorque and over temp in a hurry, Garrets being single spool engines respond nearly instantly just like a piston does. I have no jet time, but assume they are similar to the PT-6. Smaller PT-6’s respond more quickly than the bigger ones.

Sorry I can’t help you. I’d guess due to the vintage of the aircraft that it’s likely you may be looking at an Owner Produced part, if your unfamiliar a quick search will lay out everything that’s need to produce your own FAA legal part, it’s very straight forward

You keep saying that, but don’t understand what I am saying. I’m saying that there is a range of say 1 to 5 oz weight measured at the trailing edge. If your at one ounce then your biased towards nose heavy, 5 oz and your biased trailing edge heavy. That weight is just numbers, I have no idea what a Mooney’s weight is but strongly suspect it’s different by model based on VNE, but haven’t looked. Not that I’ve seen that many flight controls balance specs, but I’ve never seen one that you weigh the nose, always the trailing edge, so they are all trailing edge heavy The only point is that if you’re towards max trailing edge heavy, it reduces your flutter margin, meaning flutter is more likely than if you’re at the light end of the range “nose heavy”. A catch 22 that I’d expect to see if weight is added aft of the hinge line is that it takes more weight to return the flight control to acceptable limits, the problem is that your only allowed a limited amount of weight that you can add, you may be at max weight and barely in the range. But if your having to change weight, I recommend balancing to bias nose heavy, within limits of course, the reason is as an aircraft ages the flight controls weight changes to bias towards tail heavy from any repairs, paint touch ups or just dirt accumulating over the years. It does that because almost all of the area of the control is aft of the hinge line. I have never seen one’s CG move toward the nose.

Validate the gauge, easiest way I know of is to remove the sender and put it into boiling water, the outside of the sender might have to be grounded to the engine.

It will be immediately apparent upon visual inspection, usually. Never say always. I think rarely a scanning electron microscope is needed to see the beach marks, but that’s above my pay grade. Classic fatigue leaves witness marks called beach marks and they radiate from where the crack started. Not sure why they are called beach marks, maybe because they look like wave marks on a beach, maybe? https://www.quadco.engineering/en/know-how/material-fatigue-how-can-it-be-recognized.htm You find an inclusion prior to failure by NDT, often either eddy current or x-ray if we are talking aluminum, other methods for composites and magnetic steel although eddy current works fine for steels like 4130 etc.

How deep do you want to run a Lyc IO-360? Mine will continue to run smoothly well below the point where it loses a LOT of power, (D single drive mag) at least 75C LOP, although a hotter spark will allow larger electrode gap and that will ignite lean mixtures better. Oh, and the throw away Slicks were decades ago, back then they were cheap, so much so that a new one wasn’t much more than an overhaul, but they ain’t cheap anymore. You overhaul them now I’m told. Nickel is much better than SS

It’s also not necessarily real definitive, the defect must be present at the surface for dye penetrant to discover a crack, then of course the test is only valid for the time the test was done, unless your willing to strip and rest yearly or whatever the interval the experts determine is less than the time between a discoverable crack and failure is. I couldn’t even hazard a guess. A better test would be eddy current as it will find sub surface defects, and I think doesn’t require paint stripping, but don’t quote me on that My SWAG is this prop had an inclusion in it, and that was the defect that the crack propagated from, or possibly if it had an avoid range that the pilot ignored it, in short I hope this was a one in 100,000 kind of thing and won’t effect the series. If it was an inclusion they will find that pretty quick.

Issue I believe is they can’t just take a part off of an old engine and use it, it will have to be overhauled IAW the manufacturers overhaul manual, unless the FAA allows otherwise which I doubt. I did build several crop dusters with customer supplied yellow tagged engines and props, but only because the FAA specifically allowed those two items, a customer could have given me a brand new set of wheels and brakes and I couldn’t have used them.

Believe it or not but a few of us did on long distance cruising sailboats. Reasoning was that God forbid but the weather was so bad that the boat rolled you didn’t want the engine coming loose in the cabin. What could you chain it to in an airplane though? It’s not just the rubber that breaks on an aircraft, it’s the tubular engine mount itself. We did it only on the left side of drag cars if memory serves because torque pulls the L side up.

That to me on a mid time engine is NOT normal, I can buy maybe what Lycoming says is OK on a new overhaul, but a mid time engine in my experience makes essentially no metal in 50 hours. I’ve seen what amounts to a tiny bit of powder so fine it feels like grease on internal filter magnets that is normal. I’m talking like maybe a drop total, which is I guess 1/4 of a CC or less? Just because you have metal now doesn’t mean it was there last time, if it made this much every 50 hours there wouldn’t be any left. So we can’t make any judgement calls on the prior mechanics inspections. I think investigation is in prudent myself, especially if you fly nights or IFR

It is. Sometimes essentially ripping the engine off its mounts. The attached report from memory rendered the aircraft unable to maintain altitude because the engine was mostly ripped loose and hanging down or sideways maybe but whatever it created a large amount of drag. https://asn.flightsafety.org/wikibase/36677 The cause of this prop failure was traced to “reactionless mode” and I think this high profile accident is what caused it to be addressed, essentially reactionless mode is a harmonic that causes extreme stress and therefore blade fatigue, what’s so bad about this mode is when it occurring there is no vibration felt, it’s actually very smooth, hence the name reactionless, but it’s why yiu hear some Pratt four and five bladed aircraft with such high ground idle speeds so high they sound like Garrett’s. I dealt with it by having the MVP-50T flash yellow if you were in the range instead of turning the idle up real high. https://hartzellprop.com/FAA/NE-06-13.pdf

It seems almost every year someone crashes after a door pops open, never understood why. A couple of years ago someone had I think a Cessna Corvalis I think it’s called door pop open, being as it’s one of those cool gull wing doors it tore off of the aircraft, apparently it didn’t take the tail off and they went around and landed. I guess it’s happened more than once, one guy even opened the door. How do you do that face palm emoji? At least he owned up to it. https://asn.flightsafety.org/wikibase/291808 https://www.aerotime.aero/articles/32818-cessna-door-falls-off-lands-in-parking-lot

I bought my Mooney it had an old KT-76A in it, worked but wasn’t a digital display and of course didn’t display the alt I was transmitting. It simply just didn’t match the rest of the radios. A yellow tagged kT-76C was maybe a couple of hundred bucks, slides right in and is plug n play with an A. What I can’t wrap my head around is all these people that spend tens of thousands of bucks on new glass, when their engine is past TBO, sure it may last a little longer but the clocks ticking. I just don’t fly IFR anymore and my dual ILS, with Garmin 430 old King instruments is just what I want, and guess what, I can still buy replacements cheap, and or still have the old King stuff repaired, but bet the much newer 430 if it’s not already but soon won’t be supported anymore.

I think I would roll a piece of say .032 to match any curve, then coming from the inside use structural adhesive to adhere the patch clamping the two together, then once the adhesive had set a little body putty ought to make the repair invisible and a good painter could I believe make it look like it never happened. You could dimple and flush rivet shaving the rivet heads and make it invisible too, but I’m not that good, I had a guy who worked for me that was, I could take a pic of my 140 fuselage where I removed two stupid big venturi’s and he patched those holes and paint covered the patches.

That is the way it is most often done and is the safest as the two pins aren’t “hot” until the external power is plugged in. However for the Thrush as an example the plug is just wired into the battery direct. Probably because it’s easy to keep a charger on the battery thru the Aux power plug, so you may want to check just to see. Easy check, just take a multimeter and see if the pins are hot or not. However I agree for starting you need a big battery to connect, a Golf cart is an excellent start cart, just connect to the correct voltage battery on the cart because they are often between 36V and 48V, Golf cart also makes an excellent tug. As I assume your 12V your car or truck is just fine, I travel with jumper cables that had the clamps removed from one end and the aircraft plug installed so any car or truck could jump me.

No telling, good point though, anything that will dissolve Jet-Glo is a serious solvent. Problem with actual testing is it takes a long time and for metals it takes a lot more than just eye balls, like does it cause Hydrogen embrittlement in steel etc. However I still think that a real issue here is that the stuff that’s in this fuel is likely more damaging to health than the lead it’s meant to replace. Being as how everything in California causes Cancer or at least anytime I buy anything it has a label attesting to that I’m surprised that hasn’t been brought up, but suspect it’s because of the Laser focus on lead must go. On edit, I’m not saying the testing that has been done isn’t without merit, just saying sometimes the damage doesn’t present itself so quickly and sometimes it’s not visible to the naked eye.