Troubleshooting is an interesting art that I find immensely rewarding, but only when successful. To me, successful means a logical approach is followed using available data, research when needed, and maybe some tests which all culminate with a confirmed diagnosis....
It seems as though the change in the purchase price of aircraft over the years has outpaced that of automobiles. I’m sure economists have lots of data that they would sift through to accurately quantify these values. John Frank had a wonderful matrix for determining...
Before the Industrial Revolution, the vast majority of products were produced one at a time by individual craftsmen or small groups of craftsmen. Eventually, the volume of consumption forced new production methods to keep up with demand. One of the concepts that drove...
Every solution has its problems. The various devices used to trim an airplane for stable flight is a good example. I suppose elevator trim was one of the first secondary flight control systems available. It’s also one of the most needed, so necessity again proves to...
Every once in awhile an old adversary pops up its ugly head just to make sure I’m paying attention to the details. I don’t have a lot of taildragger time and fortunately have never ground looped a plane. However, planes have performed ground loops while sitting still...
Digging deep I’ve been working on legacy Cessnas since well before production ceased in 1986. I’m very familiar with the idiosyncrasies of the service manuals and parts catalogs. Of course, there’s plenty of information not included in the published manuals...
Don’t Be Late A couple of friends recently experienced incidences in their planes that initiated investigations involving the FAA. The incidents were not caused by some violation of the regulations, and no one was physically hurt. What did happen was that the FAA...
Situational awareness generally means one is fully cognizant of all the events involved with the task at hand. Most of us tend to limit our in-flight situational awareness training to basic aircraft operations and navigation. The idea of aircraft condition awareness...
Out of Sight, Out of Mind In aircraft ownership and maintenance there are some things that just don’t seem to get our attention even though they’re right in front of us, literally. The control column attaches to the yoke in plain view during the entire...
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