Whole lotta shakin' going on

[A64Pilot]

2 hours ago, Shadrach said:

 

Nothing is truly cold soaked in Florida when the OAT is in the mid 50s.  That is prime flying weather in my neck of the woods.  I don't preheat above 40° and the plane starts beautifully. In fact it will start sans prime in a few blades simply by cranking it with the mixture at full rich.  Diluting oil with fuel is fine for war stories and bush pilots in extreme situations but with modern oils anyone in the lower 48 ought to easily be able to ready an engine for start under temp conditions that won't cause it run poorly.

Agreed,

 February 2003 as part of the Army’s Test Activity Winter testing of their helicopters we flew up to the Upper Peninsula of Wisconsin for Winter testing, we left the aircraft outside and let them cold soak over night and in the morning just cranked the APU and did normal electronic start ups and engine starts and flew about 6 hours a day, every day for a couple of weeks. The AH-64 did OK with some issues, but nothing major, the Blackhawk broke pretty much the first day with its load demand cables and power available cables frozen up.

Without getting too deep the max allowed engine oil pressure for the GE-T701 engine is 120 PSI, on engine start we were seeing 199 for several minutes, 199 was the max the SDD, selective digital display could display, we had no idea how high the oil PSI was going, but they tolerated it day after day with no issues, elastomeric bearings were a major concern, but the rubber didn’t split like we thought it would.

Now I’m not from Wisconsin and that was 20 yrs ago, but I seem to remember -40 temps?

But the rental car was also outside at the Hotel and started with zero problems every morning too.

Any temp you get in Fl just isn’t cold, not compared to the rest of the world.

‘Funny thing was we were never cold in Wisconsin