Sport Pilot Talk

Jon V · Joined: 21 Apr 2011 Posts: 156 Location: Dallas...

So I already mentioned how last Monday I had a great lesson with a different instructor (someone I had never flown with before) ... apparently I'm not the only person who think that lesson went really well because the next time I see him my regular CFI says I am ready to solo. Unfortunately the winds (gusting 21 or 22 knots) are above comfort zone, but, "Next time we fly, weather allowing, you'll solo."

Saturday rolls around. Winds are a bit strong but we figure we'll fly either way and see how it goes. I preflight the plane...

Sumping the fuel I notice a few little flecks of something in the first sample I take. No big deal. Get rid of that and drain some more. Looks good.... move on.... but notice that about once a second a spot of pavement under the plane turns dark, and then fades back to light concrete grey. My first thought was that it was just some extra fuel clinging to the drain, but it keeps going. I went back and tried jiggling and twisting the drain valve a little bit to see if that would seat it and stop the drip. I finish the rest of the preflight, watching to see if the dripping tapers off. It doesn't.

The plane had about 13 out of 21 usable so it wasn't overflowing fuel from a vent.

We mess around with the valve a bit more, looking under the plane, counting drips, trying to see what's actually leaking and whether it's getting better.

It's possible that a little bit of whatever came out in the first sumping was stuck to the valve seat... but that stuff didn't look large or particularly rigid so I wasn't too convinced of that explanation. It could as easily have been bits of a decaying gasket.

CFI and I discuss it a bit. It's a slow leak, at that rate there is no real chance of draining the tank dry. On the other hand, it could speed up, it could make other situations worse. He said something about how if he was alone he might take it for a spin around the pattern and check it again. He then asks, "What's your call?"

I hate that. I've spent enough time around gasoline powered devices to know that a little bit of fuel in the open air, especially in 97+ degree weather, really isn't a big deal...and my gung-ho side says "fly"...but I also know that a little crack can become a big problem in an hour, the same amount of fuel in a trapped space can go boom, and anyway unexplained fuel leaks + powersports = bad.

"No go."

We squawked the plane, hoping that it would be something simple that could be addressed that night. We even made arrangements to fly first thing Sunday if the plane was back in service. Got a call later that night. It was a gasket in the sump valve and would take until at least Tuesday to replace. That means I won't be flying until Thursday.

So, as the subject says... I blew my chance to solo. For a week or so. By Thursday I'll have gone more than a week without flying so I'll need time to get back to where I was. Good thing I'm not on a schedule. :)

zdc · Guest

I wittnessed an emergency landing of a sport plane with a Rotax engine. The engine didn't quit all together but was power was intermitent. Turns out, the fuel sump had come loose and fell off and fuel was pouring out the hole.

Good call on your part. Fuel is something you gotta have.

Jon V · Guest Joined: 21 Apr 2011 Posts: 156 Location: Dallas...

It certainly was the cautious move, and when it comes to leaking fuel a bit of caution is hard to argue against. It was one of those, "shouldn't be a hard decision but kinda was," calls.

I had preflighted that plane quite a few times and had never noticed a leak. On the other hand.....looking on the hangar floor, there were blue rings staining the paint in various areas around where the plane would've been parked. Blue like 100LL dye. As the CFI pointed out, that probably means it has been leaking for a long time. Or something has been anyway. OTOH I've never seen wet fuel under the plane, or seen it drip, so maybe the leak was speeding up...or maybe I was just unobservant before.

My suspicion, based on the fact that nobody else squawked the plane, is that it was getting worse, but I don't count on other people finding problems for me.

Anyway... hopefully by Friday or Saturday both the plane and I'll be ready for my second first solo. I was all excited to be hitting that milestone, but I can wait a little longer.

zaitcev · Posted: Mon Jun 13, 2011 12:20 pm Post subject:

I also think that this call should not be hard, unless you really want to practice emergency decents while on fire. Leaking fuel is no joke.

My solo was also endlessly postponed.

Jon V · Guest Joined: 21 Apr 2011 Posts: 156 Location: Dallas...

:)

I don't mean hard in the "outcome ever in doubt" sense. I have too much experience with boats where leaking gasoline into bilge = kaboom to ignore a fuel leak. It's just...when you, as a student, find something like this it's easy to wonder, "Why am I the first person to say, 'no,' to this?"

Especially when you start looking at blue rings on the hangar floor with new eyes.

fredg · Guest Joined: 04 Sep 2010 Posts: 13 Location: Iowa City

"when you, as a student, find something like this it's easy to wonder, "Why am I the first person to say, 'no,' to this"

Sounds like good judgment, to me. Not everybody has it.
fg

LeafAngel · Posted: Tue Jun 14, 2011 7:13 am Post subject:

An old pilot friend of mine always says " When the day comes that you are faced with an inflight emergency, you want to be sure you have no idea what caused it. The same is true of the parts you make when you are building an aircraft. If when finished with a particular part, you look at it and have any question what so ever that it's perfect, throw it away and start a new one."

Jon V · Guest Joined: 21 Apr 2011 Posts: 156 Location: Dallas...

Sigh....

I'm now at two weeks with no flying. The fuel leak was fixed but we've been seeing breezes ranging between ~20G25 and ~22G30 every time I've wanted to fly...it's blowing pretty much straight down the runway but the G3 POH states a max takeoff headwind of 25kts so no go.

To make myself feel better (heh) I attended a WINGS presentation in Saturday, held at a/the local airplane scrapyard. Surrounded by Cessna and Piper fuselages with the firewall forward/tails cut away, wings off, grass growing up through the cabins, a crowd of about 150 played Morbid Cletus gawking at four disasters...three crashed planes and an equally bad powerpoint. Apart from lacking any theme/feeling very thrown together it was interesting. The powerpoint part of the presentation (ignoring the little SNAFUs like incorrectly titled slides) was about pilot fatigue, which was not a factor in any of the crashes they talked about. Two of the three crashes were mechanical issues that put the pilots in no-win situations. The only crash that really served the "pilot safety" mission was flown by someone who got out over the Gulf of Mexico at night and, while technically in VMC, lost spacial awareness long enough to hit fast and inverted.

OTOH I'd never seen a Tecnam Sierra in person before.... not sure I'll recognize the next one I see though. http://www.ntsb.gov/aviationquery/brief.aspx?ev_id=20100123X64746&key=1

Only marginally related side note: Years ago I started installing long (3-4') lanyards on the flashlights I used when working in the bilge of my boats. I did this after losing one in the compartment behind the engine... it slipped and managed to drop down under the propeller shaft and into a place where in rough seas with the motor running it could've caused serious damage. After spending about two hours getting it out the inconvenience of a lanyard seemed trivial, and the long lanyard tends to drape over something and be reachable no matter what. It also had the advantage that if you opened a hatch and set the flashlight in a compartment to work, the lanyard would be hanging out of the hatch as a visible flag when you went to close things up. Handy when working on cars too.

Anyway...maybe the winds will have calmed down by Thursday.....

drseti · Posted: Mon Jun 20, 2011 11:07 am Post subject:

Jon V wrote: I'm now at two weeks with no flying.

Sounds like you're suffering withdrawal symptoms.

Quote: breezes ranging between ~20G25 and ~22G30

Them's not breezes. Them's winds!

Quote: OTOH I'd never seen a Tecnam Sierra in person before.

They're a great plane. The only thing they lack is a convenient place to stow your flashlight. :cry:

Jon V · Guest Joined: 21 Apr 2011 Posts: 156 Location: Dallas...

drseti wrote: Jon V wrote: I'm now at two weeks with no flying.

Sounds like you're suffering withdrawal symptoms.

Yes. Worse than caffeine withdrawals.

Quote:
Quote: breezes ranging between ~20G25 and ~22G30

Them's not breezes. Them's winds!

I'd say we've been at about 4 or 5 on the Beaufort scale, which IIRC are named "fresh breeze" and "strong breeze" ... if I had my sailboat (and wasn't 300+ miles from an ocean) I'd be very happy right now - these are the conditions I loved when sailing.

Funny how quickly your perspective can change.

Quote:
Quote: OTOH I'd never seen a Tecnam Sierra in person before.

They're a great plane. The only thing they lack is a convenient place to stow your flashlight. :cry:

I advise against using the tailcone. Torsion tubes/bell cranks/etc can mar the flashlight finish.

zaitcev · Posted: Mon Jun 20, 2011 10:49 pm Post subject:

Jon V wrote: I advise against using the tailcone. Torsion tubes/bell cranks/etc can mar the flashlight finish.
Very funny. But actually, I heard about a Mooney guy who had a hard ailerons jam because of a flashlight that wedged under a bellcrank (remarkably he even managed to land it, after making a few cicles over the airport... thanks for the power excess, he was able to compensate with a rudder).

Jon V · Guest Joined: 21 Apr 2011 Posts: 156 Location: Dallas...

Black humor comes naturally when faced with that sort of thing.

Unlike the Mooney, this plane just crashed.

The "unofficial probable cause" was that a mechanic, in the process of installing an ELT in the Tecnam, left a flashlight (complete with initials/name) in the tailcone (which in that plane is a sealed/blind compartment so nobody doing a preflight could have found it) which subsequently jammed the elevator controls killing a CFI and a high school student/3-hour student pilot. Oh, and a program that was trying to encourage GA by reaching out to high schools. There was a side of, "he knows who he is and now he has to live with that..."

Jon V · Guest Joined: 21 Apr 2011 Posts: 156 Location: Dallas...

This weekend, after cancelling yet another flight, my CFI and I decided to try an experiment. After all the miserably high winds in the afternoons, and the heat, and everything else, we thought that maybe flying in the morning would be better.

Which means I got up at 4:45 AM and zombie shuffled my way through a shower before stumbling out to my Jeep, barely able to remember why on earth I was awake. Fortunately I had only fired up the engine before realizing that I didn't have my headset...back and forth, doing my part to advertize the perils of caffeine deprivation, and I managed to arrive at the airport more or less awake, more or less 20 minutes before sunrise. Just enough time to preflight and taxi.

My last lesson was 17 days ago, give or take a few hours. I've been feeling more and more frustrated knowing that my already limited skills are disappearing like free liquor at a wedding reception. It may have shown in some of my posts around here. If not, well, blame my dry persona 'cause I was definitely frustrated.

Back to this morning...one turn around the pattern...two...on the third downwind he says, "give me your logbook...."

I now have a great big smile that should last me all day. :D

And the little Remos can hit TPA before the end of a 7000' runway when the density altitude is low (1500') and only one person is aboard.

This wasn't really my first solo. Just my first in 6 years. With my .5 from today I now have 1 hour logged as PIC. Last time was at a small (3200x60) untowered field where the only other traffic the entire solo was a little high performance plane (an experimental of some sort) that called asking if I minded him joining the downwind ahead of me because he was faster. I welcomed him in and I think he was on the ground before I turned base. Today I was on a much larger (7000x150) towered field with another plane doing T&Gs in the pattern with me, other planes arriving and departing, just a lot more going on even if it was 7:00AM.

...another page in the logbook started.

drseti · Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2011 12:12 pm Post subject:

Jon V wrote: I now have a great big smile that should last me all day.

Congratulations, Jon! And when you look back on today, that smile will last you the rest of your life.

Welcome back to the ranks of PIC.

Bill · Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2011 3:31 pm Post subject:

Heya, Jon. CONGRATULATIONS.

And - keep on smiling... :D