A Man and His Airplane

For those who aren't familiar with how airplanes work in practice, the title refers to a characteristic behavior of single-engine airplanes when climbing, or when flying at a high angle of attack. I won't go into detail about this, as there are many available resources that explain it far better than I ever could, but the short form is that, in these situations, the plane will turn to the left unless you counter with right rudder. The most common situation is when climbing at full or high power. Countering this tendency by pressing on the right rudder pedal is one of the very first things a student pilot learns to do. Once you level off and enter cruise flight, you can remove that pressure and the plane should fly straight; "should" being the operative word here. As noted in an earlier post, my plane has always pulled to left a bit even in level cruise flight. Just how much varied a bit depending on the throttle setting. At about 2500 RPM, it barely pulled at all and

Not only did the shop re-attach the exhaust pipe, they also repaired the heat damage to the cowling. This meant it took a bit longer than if they'd just re-attached the exhaust. This past Friday, I was notified that the work was done, but I found out too late to go flying that day. The weather yesterday (Saturday) was too poor for flying but today it was good enough to take her up. It was VFR conditions, but there were scattered clouds at about 2000 feet. I flew along at about 3000 feet, weaving between the clouds to maintain sufficient clearance. It was fun, and the clouds were beautiful to look at. I remained relatively close to the airport in case the weather threatened to close in, but it never did and I flew for an hour. The engine started right up. During the run up, when I switched to the left magneto, the engine popped a few times, but then it cleared up and ran great after that. I checked both magnetos several times to make sure it really had cleared up. I don't know w

On New Year's Day, I took her up again for an hour. She ran great, and flew well, other than the issue where she pulls to the left described in my last post. When I checked the oil during the preflight inspection, there was slightly less than seven quarts in the engine, which is more than enough to go flying. Yesterday, the weather was good enough to go flying so I headed out to the airport in the early afternoon. During the preflight inspection I checked the oil and... there was a bit less than seven quarts. It had used very little during the previous flight which is an excellent sign that the engine is already wearing in nicely. One thing I did notice, though was that a bit of paint was coming off the cowl where the exhaust comes through. I didn't worry about it too much at the time. I started her up and taxied over to get fuel. When I went to connect the grounding wire to the end of the exhaust pipe, I discovered the source of that paint damage. The final section of the exha