Sport Pilot Talk

yozz25 · Joined: 18 Dec 2009 Posts: 185 Location: vegas

How common is an airspeed indicator malfunction?

When I went up with the remos yesterday, on the takeoff roll, I eyeballed the speed and something didn't seem to add up, was too low but plane was fast, so I took off anyhow.

When we got up, I noted to CFI about this. This is a new guy since I wasn't happy with the other. He said to just go to the practice area and see if it corrects itself.

At the practice area, it was erratic, I knew we were going faster than what was indicated, I noted this again to CFI,

He said to bring the plane back, we attempted to land, the CFI had a confused look on his face, and said to go around, which we did. He probably wanted to think this one out before landing.

The second attempt I actually landed pretty good, felt good about that.

However, when we cleared the runway, we just sat there with the plane running, looking at the speed ind and noted that it was at about 35 kts. We werent moving.

We brought it back to the hanger.

I checked the tube before taking off on preflight, saw nothing.

Weird, is this common?

yozz
:?:

flyguy1 · Joined: 28 Oct 2008 Posts: 12 Location: Hillsdale, Michigan

Common....no, but not unusual.

I have had just one bad airspeed indicator that was just a sticky needle since I've been flying (1988), but I've seen bugs mess up the pitot tube and occasionally, the errant line boy blast too much water into the pitot tube and/ or static port when washing the aircraft and the pitot/statjc system wasn't able to drain off the water. Makes the airspeed, altimeter and VSI act goofy.

Yozz, if you can get a good landing without a accurate airspeed indicator, you're ahead of the game in my book. Keep up the good work!

drseti · Joined: 28 Nov 2009 Posts: 1387 Location: Lock Haven PA

flyguy1 wrote:
Yozz, if you can get a good landing without a accurate airspeed indicator, you're ahead of the game in my book. Keep up the good work!

That's really tough in an unfamiliar airplane. But, once you have about a dozen hours in a plane, your objective should be to know the normal sensations (sight, sound, smell, feel) of the airplane in flight, so that you glance at the airspeed indicator only occasionally, for confirmation. Then, I put a sticky over the ASI and let the student take off, fly the pattern, and land without it. If they can't do that comfortably, then I figure they're not yet ready for instrument failures, let alone the checkride. :wink:

Yozz, sounds like you're doing fine.

yozz25 · Joined: 18 Dec 2009 Posts: 185 Location: vegas

In reality, all I needed was some quiet from the CFI to land properly.

I think the amount of verbal input from the other fellows was getting me all scrambled. All this guy said to me was, "put the nose down a bit" and voila, that was it.

I explained to this fellow that I need someone very mellow, and he did play the mellow part, only giving input when needed.

Landing in my case was more or less of eyeballing it after running the pattern, the other one wanted to do stabilized approach", and making adjustments on the way down with only necessary verbal input, very brief. Once I get the condidence of doing it this way, then I can work on perfecting my own method or any other method of approach.

It's a matter of practice, but I need almost pure silence to concentrate on the task. Once it clicks, then I can experiment a bit.

yozz