A Man and His Airplane

The previous post was titled "Flying when you can." Today the weather was so nice that there was no question about whether or not I'd go up. Today is Saturday, and if you have weather this nice on the weekend, at this time of year, you can't not go flying if it's at all possible. I'll probably go tomorrow, too. I hope so. With the work that was done during and after the annual inspection, my plane is finally fully functional. As far as I know, everything on it works. The intercom is even behaving itself, with a distinct lack of loud static during the last couple of flights. The shop didn't say if they did anything specific to fix it but either they did when I last asked them to take a look at it, or it's somehow sorted itself out. Hopefully it will work just fine, at least until I decide to replace the audio panel with one that has the intercom built in. As noted above, the weather today was absolutely gorgeous. I flew north out of Harvey Field up past...

A couple of days ago, the forecast for today was for very cloudy weather and probably some rain. This morning, the weather was considerably better than that. It was overcast, but at four or five thousand feet, and the METAR and TAF at Paine Field were VFR. So I decided to head out and take Ariel up for at least a quick flight. This is the first time I've gone up since the runway resurfacing project was finished last week. The new runway is very nice. There's nothing like fresh, smooth tarmac under your wheels. The runway is also six feet wider than it was, which doesn't sound like a lot but it makes a difference. Runway 33 was in use at the time, so after I took off I did the normal noise abatement procedure and turned to a heading of 290 when safe to do so. I continued to climb, then turned northward to continue my departure. I quickly realized that I was headed straight into a layer of clouds that were at about 900 feet. I turned away, headed south for a bit while continu...

I went out to the airport today to run the engine. It's been two weeks since the last time I ran it, which is also the last time I went flying, and I wanted to run it again this weekend if possible. With the Camguard in the oil, I could probably get by without running it for three or even four weeks, but it certainly never hurts to run it more frequently. The runway resurfacing project is not yet done, so if I'd wanted to go flying I would still have had to use the grass runway. As it has been raining the past few days, I wasn't sure how soft the grass surface would be, so my plan was simply to run the engine until it was warm, and also to put fuel in the tanks. If the plane is going to sit for any length of time, it is better to have full tanks, as there is less air in the tanks from which water could condense. Since I've owned this plane, I've yet to see any water when I've sumped the tanks, but it's still definitely possible that someday there will be. Wh...

Today I got the results from the latest oil sample I sent in to Blackstone Labs for analysis. The news is good. The technician wrote the following in the results document: It may not seem obvious at face value, but iron has improved significantly. Iron's wear rate (how much iron the engine made per hour) is significantly closer to what universal averages show as typical. If iron is stable from here, or happens to improve a bit more, this engine will be in good shape. Other metals are stable and at low levels to boot, so this engine's wear profile doesn't leave much to be desired at 1,583.36 hours SMOH. No contamination found, and the air and oil filters are working well. This indicates that the metal found in the oil filter during the annual inspection was from a single, short-term event. It could have been a wear event or possibly, as was suggested by the mechanic, a bit of rusted metal that came off a surface somewhere. Either way, this is a very good result and I feel...

The runway at Harvey Field is in the process of being resurfaced. So far they've removed all of the old asphalt, graded the dirt surface, and hopefully laid down the first layer of the new asphalt. I received an email the other day stating that they were scheduled to lay the first layer yesterday, and lay the second layer today. However, that would depend on the weather and it's been raining today. Once the second layer is in place, they have to wait at least three days to paint the runway markings. There are also a couple other things that need to be done. In all, the completion date is likely to be no earlier than October 10. I went flying the weekend before last. The grass runway was open, and folks were taking off to the north, so I joined them. I was a bit too aggressive on the takeoff when it came to my soft-field technique, as the stall horn sounded as I lifted off. I think next time I take off from the grass, I'll leave the flaps all the way up, instead of down one ...