At the airport on an IFR day

I just got back from the airport. The weather isn't good enough for flying VFR, at least as far as my comfort zone is concerned, but I had other reasons for going out there.

The first was to take some cleaning supplies out to the hangar. It's not an enclosed hangar but it does have a small cabinet mounted to the short wall section at the rear where you can keep stuff. I have several quarts of oil that I received with the plane, along with cleaning supplies. There's a roll of paper towels, a half-gallon bottle of water, a spray bottle of water, and a spray bottle containing Simple Green diluted with water. When I took over the hangar, all three bottles were almost empty so I picked up some Simple Green, brought the bottles home, and refilled them. Today I took them back out.

I also took the opportunity to use the newly-filled bottle of Simple Green to clean off the bird droppings that had landed on the wing during the past week. I'm going to submit a request to the airport to install some anti-bird spikes or something on the supports where they like to sit. Hopefully they'll be able to accommodate that request.

Finally, I went out there to test the communication system after the issue I ran into on my last flight. Armed with much better knowledge of how the radios, audio panel, and intercom work, I tested the system to see if the problem still occurred, and also to make sure I had everything configured correctly. I also brought both my David Clark passive headset and my new Lightspeed ANR headset to see if the choice of headset made any difference.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, everything worked just fine. I could transmit and receive on both radios. The intercom was set correctly and was working fine. And everything worked with both headsets. I said "or unfortunately" because I don't know what the actual cause was, which means I didn't solve it, which means it could happen again in the future. Next time I go flying, I'll use my David Clark headset, and I won't take the iPad or Stratux receiver with me, to reduce the number of variables. If everything works fine for a couple of flights, I'll re-introduce the new hardware one item at a time and see if it happens. Fingers crossed it was a one-time glitch and everything is perfectly fine.

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A Man and His Airplane

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