sfGnome

Serendipitously, I came across this article tonight which has some useful stuff to say about this.

I learned on a 160 (some years ago), and was taught to cut to idle when I was guaranteed to make the field. When I did a check flight in a 160 earlier this year (because it was the cheapest aircraft to hire), I dumped it on the ground for the first few landings. Turns out that it drops like a stone when you get too slow. The issue wasn’t that I was gliding; it was that I was letting the speed bleed off too soon (ie I was flaring too soon). That’s the fun of a high wing - no cushion of air between the wing and the ground - and flying low wing had got me into being a bit lazy.

Ok, dumb question (dumb, bearing in mind your extensive experience). Is there a hole in the side of the breather tube so that oil isn’t being pulled out by the Venturi effect?

Ok, I won’t, but if I was allowed to, then I would. 😜

What Neil said! The older we get (and you ain’t old), the more we need to challenge our brains with new stuff. Those challenges came thick and fast when we were younger, so we didn’t even notice them as anything special. 30 years of absorbing stuff slowly on the job, and suddenly a new challenge looks overwhelming. It isn’t. It just feels that way. If you do decided that cross-country isn’t for you, make sure that you find a new cerebral challenge. Older you will thank you for it.

Thereby proving the point that ASICs are pointless. Who’s going to bother hijacking a small plane when you can just use a drone? The world moves on, but the ASIC doesn’t.

Is your instructor suggesting that you use something now, or are you just thinking ahead? I would have thought that until you’re a fair way further down the track, you don’t need anything. A pad and pen become handy to note down call signs that you hear (I find it helps with situational awareness and knowing who to address if you want more information from another aircraft), but until you get to your cross country training, I can’t think of a reason to use anything beyond that. Maybe others might know something that I’ve missed.

Remember when you did the class 5; there were a bunch of conditions that you declared you didn’t have. You don’t get asked those sort of questions for RAAus, so it remains (slightly) easier to be able to fly under the RPC.

This was a Jab 160, and while I can’t tell you exactly how long it took, it wasn’t long. I hadn’t started to taxi to the run up area, so it couldn’t have been much more that 90 sec (or I was fritzing around more than I should have).

You would expect the resistances to be the same merely because they are built the same. Having said that, a thermocouple is a temperature controlled voltage generator (ie at the point of the couple), not a temperature controlled variable resistor, so the actual resistance shouldn’t matter greatly (the input impedance of the measuring device will be comparatively very high). Regardless of that, ‘divide and conquer’ is your diagnostic friend. As kr said, swap them. There’s no cheaper (or more accurate) way to diagnose the fault.

Some do, some don’t. My problem was that I expected the fuel valve to be in the right position, so I didn’t think about what I was checking. All I really did was check that the fuel valve existed. Don’t check for what you expect, check what’s there. A fellow I know told me that he once belly landed a plane because he didn’t realise that he’d been flying with the wheels down, so on final he carefully put them up…

I learned a good lesson, not in my latest flight, but the one before it. Something I knew “other people” did, but which I never thought I’d do… 🫤 I’ve heard of people looking at, and even touching, a gauge, but not actually registering what it was saying. Who’d do that? Me, it turns out. Working my way through the pre-flight checklist; Fuel switch on. Yep. I even remember touching it and checking it was in the right position. Couldn’t work out why the engine stopped (thankfully while I was still doing ground checks). I had actually, carefully, checked that it was off, not on. Oh, and of course I had to do that in front of the CFI who was setting up a student nearby. How embarrassment. 😵‍💫

Make sure that your instructors know that you have a hearing issue, and beg them to let you use a good noise cancelling headset (I’m sure they’ll have them, if only for themselves). My hearing ain’t what it used to be, and good headsets make the world of difference. My Lightspeed headset has tuneable equalisers so I can boost the higher frequencies. Helps with clarity, which is what you need when the other aircraft’s radio sounds like “bzzzfgzz”…

I think my mind is getting more spongy as the years roll on… 😵‍💫😝

Here’s something I found interesting (the rest of you might be saying “yeah, what did you expect?”). Just to give me a feeling of what a tensioned cable should feel like, I hung 6kg off a rudder cable (6kg being roughly the specified tension) as per Roger’s picture, and I was really surprised at how “un-tight” the cable felt. Using my thumb and middle finger about 50mm apart on the cable, and using my index finger to deflect the cable, it was quite easy to deflect it 10-15mm. In other words, if the cable is twanging like a guitar string, it’s way too tight.