One Step Forward and Two Steps Back
Owning an airplane, if my airplane is any indicator, is a mixed blessing. And sometimes a curse. We knew when we bought the thing it could be a money-pit; an old, used car has nothing on an airplane when it comes to that. A friend of my wife’s who used to own an airplane (She bought one for her son.) sums it up like this: “Friends don’t let friends buy airplanes.”
A couple of weekends ago, we flew the Cheetah from Pearland Regional (LVJ) where she is based to Stinson Field in San Antonio. It was the perfect day to fly. Not a cloud in the sky and probably 50 miles visibility, more than I had seen in this part of Texas ever. We navigated by chart and by GPS and landed at Stinson a little over an hour and a half after leaving Houston. We met with a bunch of other Grumman owners for lunch, a small meeting, and some picture taking. If you’ve never been to Stinson, it’s a pretty little place, with a terminal encasing a restaurant in a building taller than but somewhat reminiscent of the Alamo, at least in style.
The airplane backfired when I started it, an indicator I had primed the engine too much, but had not exhibited any other problems. Yet. The tower asked me if we wanted flight following when I requested permission to taxi out. I told them “no”. It was such a clear day I didn’t feel I wanted it. It would turn out that would simplify the situation that was about to happen.
We took interval on a Piper that took off ahead of us and turning left, headed east. I climbed the airplane at best rate airspeed, 91 mph while looking for two thousand foot towers nearby. San Antonio fell behind us as I climbed us up to 5500 feet, where we leveled off and I set 75% power for cruise. Visibility going east was still fabulous and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. No bumps. A perfect flying day…until I began hearing a beeping I couldn’t identify. Plus the voices on the radio were getting awfully fuzzy and the radios were starting to buzz. Looking around the cockpit for the cause, I noticed that the ammeter was showing a discharge. That meant the alternator had dropped offline and the battery was carrying the load. I checked the alternator circuit breakers and they were in. To try the Cessna alternator reset trick, I cycled the Alternator half of the Master Switch. Nothing changed. I turned off Comm 2, my extra VOR radio, and the DME leaving up the #1 NAV/COMM radio, the KLN-89B GPS, and the transponder. We had been heading over to the Brazoria County airport to land and gas up, so I changed course back slightly north toward our homeport of Pearland and told my wife what I was doing. Borrowing her handheld GPS, I reprogrammed it to fly direct to Pearland, using it to tell me the exact heading I needed to fly.
“Do we need to land?” my wife asked. “Yoakum is right over there.”
“Not unless we spot smoke or fire,” I answered. Probably not the most diplomatic thing to say, but it was what was on my mind. I wasn’t certain why the plane’s electrical system was dying. More than likely, either the alternator or the voltage regulator had quit, but my insight into the system were simply voltage and ammeter readouts. I’d need more than that to spot a short. I figured a bad one would get something hot.
“The engine has magnetos,” I continued. “It will continue to run until it runs out of gas. The only thing we need electricity for is the radios. We can fly just fine as we are. If it was night or we were IFR, it would be a whole different story.”
I had to admit that there couldn’t have been a better time for the electrical failure to happen: bright daytime, perfectly clear sky, and outside airspace requiring me to interact with ATC. I only had to decide now where to land. I was heading us toward Pearland because that was our homed and that’s where our vehicle was. My airplane’s mechanic was in Galveston, and I knew I’d probably have to get it there sooner or later to get it repaired. But Galveston had recently become a controlled field, and going in there would mean contacting the tower on a handheld radio. Pearland is, on the other hand, uncontrolled, so I didn’t have to have a radio to land there. I also felt that I wanted to put the airplane on the ground at a place where I could more easily assess my situation. So, I elected to go there.
I now the southwest side of the city pretty well, so I really didn’t need my handheld GPS to help me figure out when to descend. We let down to 1500 feet, low enough to put us underneath any of Houston’s Class B airspace but high enough to keep us out of the traffic pattern for Houston Southwest. I made position calls to the airplanes using the place using my handheld radio. I didn’t hear any calls from the Citabria we spotted at our nine o’clock and co-altitude at about a quarter mile away, but the Cheetah’s speed got us out of harms’ way.
A few miles to the west of Pearland, I began maneuvering to land on the airport’s runway one four right. It’s not really a runway. The main runway was being rebuilt so the taxiway, which had been rebuilt earlier, had been remarked as a runway with displaced thresholds. A little narrow runway with displaced thresholds. Over the handheld, which I had to pull off my headset to hear clearly, I heard an airplane call from east of the airport. Looking, I didn’t see him so I relayed our position and our situation as I turned downwind. It’s damn noisy in my cockpit with no headset on. I ran my landing checklist, made one final call on the handheld as I tuned on base (advising them this was the last call), and then put the radio up to focus on the landing. I turned on a close final as high and fast (having added five knots for mama). In one last act of total denial, I hit the flap switch to put them down; in a half-second I knew they weren’t moving and, with an instantaneous askew look at my wife, aggressively threw us sideways into a forward slip. The airplane barreled down to a landing right on the numbers.
“Hey! What was that? I liked it!” she cried as we were rolling out.
And this is the woman I have to convince to take the yoke at 2000 feet…
The taxi back in was kind of quiet. The instrument panel was dark, not lit like it usually is. Once we had taxied the airplane back into its parking spot, I called my mechanic, Bill Wynn, and told him what happened. Probably the alternator, he thought. He might be able to get up there in a couple of days, he said, when he came up this way to work on another airplane and could charge my battery and check it out.
Connie and I buttoned the airplane up and consoled ourselves by stopping at Las Casita for dinner. It’s a nice little family-run Mexican food restaurant close to the airport. As we waited for our food, we commiserated about how we couldn’t believe another failure was happening to us again. So far, the airplane had broken after every cross-country and then some. On the first one to Missouri, we discovered a leak in the passenger side gas tank when we took off from Longview, Texas and saw fuel streaming over the top of the wing. The small lip on the fuel tank where the fuel cap attaches had rusted through just below the rim. Right after we had flown to Alabama to escape the projected onslaught of Hurricane Rita, the flap motor went out. And there was the local flight failure of the left brake during taxi for takeoff that had forced me to fly the airplane down to Galveston from the right seat (I enjoyed that, actually.) and leave it there for a few days. We also had replaced the tach when we found it was reading a 150 rpm too low, not to mention the elective surgery of having the prop overhauled and repitched to give us more climb and the refurbished KLN-89B I had stuck in to replace the KLN-89 in the airplane that was failing. (It had always had a snaky display, but on our trip back from Alabama, it had failed altogether just outside of Houston. Luckily, I knew exactly where I was and where the Class B airspace was so I didn’t need its help. We still had my handheld Lowerance Airmap 100 providing good guidance, too.)
Our troubles were not over.
We bought a battery charger at Wal-Mart, one of the newer, “smart” type of chargers you could use on different types of batteries. I pulled the battery out of my airplane and charged it up and stuck it back in. Two days later and a day later than Bill and I had originally planned to meet, I flew the airplane down to Galveston to drop it off. Bill wasn’t there. His son-in-law, Robbie, his fellow airframe and power-plant mechanic and IA (Inspector, one level above a normal A&P) met me. He wasn’t sure why I was there; he thought Bill had seen the airplane the day before. When he understood that Bill hadn’t, he told me to wait and let him take a look at the wiring. Sometimes, the wire that energized the alternator field coil would break, causing the alternator to die. Robbie grabbed a power screwdriver and began removing the large screws that held the airplane’s cowling on its nose. Once he had them out, he pulled on it but it still clung to the airframe, at least until the red-haired college student and mechanic intern came out. Working together, they dropped the cowling down low enough for Robbie to look all the wiring over.
“Well, it all looks good, “ he said after a few minutes of peering in the engine cavity with a flashlight. Which really was bad news for me since it meant I’d probably be replacing the alternator and I had to leave the airplane there instead of flying it away.
That was on Tuesday. On the following Saturday, Connie and I drove down to pick the airplane up. Connie was just recovering from the flu and was not well enough to fly, so the plan was that I would fly it to a small fly-in lunch I had organized at Brazoria County. There’s a small diner there named The Windsock that has good food and small town hospitality. But before I could get going, Bill, who was back at work, pulled me aside.
“I think you ought to see this,” he said.
Sitting on a steel drum was my old alternator.
“An aircraft alternator has a data plate on it, “ he said, pointing. “Automotive alternators have a serial number stamped on them.” And I looked and saw what appeared to be very light numbers etched in the alternator’s case. And shook my head. Someone had taken the fact that Grumman’s used Motorola alternators a little too seriously. Or not seriously enough, depending on how you looked at it.
“There’s a hundred dollar core charge on these,” he continued, and I knew exactly where he was going. The service center where he had bought the alternator was likely to reject the core we would turn in, and Connie and I would be out an extra $100 because someone else tried to save a few bucks and cut some corners.
I was learning the hard way how often aircraft owners and their mechanics cut corners.
After getting my keys back, I started the airplane up and glanced at the ammeter and it was charging the battery and all was good, at least until I was taxiing out after having gassed her up. I had gotten clearance from the tower to taxi to takeoff when my left brake failed. I called the tower and told them I’d have to shut down where I was at and cursed the damn thing as I pushed it into a tiedown spot. Bill’s hangar was still in the line of sight. They had seen me shut down and were headed toward me in a golf cart.
I rode the golf cart back and told Bill that the brake had failed and he and I took the cart and some brake fluid in a squirt can back out to the airplane. Bill spent a few moments upside down in the pilot’s seat servicing the master cylinders behind the rudder pedals. I watched as he pumped the pedals up and down.
“It’s pumping up, “ he said. “For a moment, I didn’t think it would.”
But even though the airplane had brakes again, it had been completely serviced only a few months before. That meant that even though I had never spotted any hydraulic fluid during a pre-flight, there was a leak somewhere in the system. Though I could have chosen to take the airplane to the fly-in and would have been perfectly safe, it made no sense to me not only to take that risk but to have to make another trip back to Galveston and inconvenience Connie or someone else to get me back home. As Bill returned to his hangar in his golf cart, I re-started the airplane and taxied over to meet him. Shutting it down, I handed him the keys and asked him to find the brake leak and fix it. We both thought that, more than likely, the left brake master cylinder on the pilot’s side had died; and that it was the cause of my troubles.
We were right. And wrong. The left master cylinder on the pilot’s side was leaking. So, were the other three in the airplane. Rebuilding them was mostly a matter of replacing o-rings and seals and Bill had those parts in his shop. But the one big problem, and the major reason why the left brake cylinder had failed, was that the push rod connecting the pedal to the cylinder was bent about 30 degrees. Someone had performed a panic stop. A REAL PANIC STOP…an “I’m going to DIE!” panic stop at some point in the airplane’s life. (And I had a guess whom it had been.)…someone with very strong legs.
OUCH!
“You know what an airplane is?” a gentleman asked a friend of mine outside Bill’s hangar some days later. “It’s a hole in the sky you pour money into.”
We knew airplanes had that kind of reputation. But what we were seeing with this Cheetah seemed a bit ridiculous. Since last May (and it was the following January when this was happening), between the previous owner and us, we had invested $7950 in repairs and minor upgrades. It was eating our lunch financially. And I know we’ve still got a sticking altimeter that needs repair, a transponder and altimeter certification due in a few months, and the annual coming up in May.
It was beginning to look like we were going to have to win the lotto to keep the airplane at all.
A couple of weekends ago, we flew the Cheetah from Pearland Regional (LVJ) where she is based to Stinson Field in San Antonio. It was the perfect day to fly. Not a cloud in the sky and probably 50 miles visibility, more than I had seen in this part of Texas ever. We navigated by chart and by GPS and landed at Stinson a little over an hour and a half after leaving Houston. We met with a bunch of other Grumman owners for lunch, a small meeting, and some picture taking. If you’ve never been to Stinson, it’s a pretty little place, with a terminal encasing a restaurant in a building taller than but somewhat reminiscent of the Alamo, at least in style.
The airplane backfired when I started it, an indicator I had primed the engine too much, but had not exhibited any other problems. Yet. The tower asked me if we wanted flight following when I requested permission to taxi out. I told them “no”. It was such a clear day I didn’t feel I wanted it. It would turn out that would simplify the situation that was about to happen.
We took interval on a Piper that took off ahead of us and turning left, headed east. I climbed the airplane at best rate airspeed, 91 mph while looking for two thousand foot towers nearby. San Antonio fell behind us as I climbed us up to 5500 feet, where we leveled off and I set 75% power for cruise. Visibility going east was still fabulous and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. No bumps. A perfect flying day…until I began hearing a beeping I couldn’t identify. Plus the voices on the radio were getting awfully fuzzy and the radios were starting to buzz. Looking around the cockpit for the cause, I noticed that the ammeter was showing a discharge. That meant the alternator had dropped offline and the battery was carrying the load. I checked the alternator circuit breakers and they were in. To try the Cessna alternator reset trick, I cycled the Alternator half of the Master Switch. Nothing changed. I turned off Comm 2, my extra VOR radio, and the DME leaving up the #1 NAV/COMM radio, the KLN-89B GPS, and the transponder. We had been heading over to the Brazoria County airport to land and gas up, so I changed course back slightly north toward our homeport of Pearland and told my wife what I was doing. Borrowing her handheld GPS, I reprogrammed it to fly direct to Pearland, using it to tell me the exact heading I needed to fly.
“Do we need to land?” my wife asked. “Yoakum is right over there.”
“Not unless we spot smoke or fire,” I answered. Probably not the most diplomatic thing to say, but it was what was on my mind. I wasn’t certain why the plane’s electrical system was dying. More than likely, either the alternator or the voltage regulator had quit, but my insight into the system were simply voltage and ammeter readouts. I’d need more than that to spot a short. I figured a bad one would get something hot.
“The engine has magnetos,” I continued. “It will continue to run until it runs out of gas. The only thing we need electricity for is the radios. We can fly just fine as we are. If it was night or we were IFR, it would be a whole different story.”
I had to admit that there couldn’t have been a better time for the electrical failure to happen: bright daytime, perfectly clear sky, and outside airspace requiring me to interact with ATC. I only had to decide now where to land. I was heading us toward Pearland because that was our homed and that’s where our vehicle was. My airplane’s mechanic was in Galveston, and I knew I’d probably have to get it there sooner or later to get it repaired. But Galveston had recently become a controlled field, and going in there would mean contacting the tower on a handheld radio. Pearland is, on the other hand, uncontrolled, so I didn’t have to have a radio to land there. I also felt that I wanted to put the airplane on the ground at a place where I could more easily assess my situation. So, I elected to go there.
I now the southwest side of the city pretty well, so I really didn’t need my handheld GPS to help me figure out when to descend. We let down to 1500 feet, low enough to put us underneath any of Houston’s Class B airspace but high enough to keep us out of the traffic pattern for Houston Southwest. I made position calls to the airplanes using the place using my handheld radio. I didn’t hear any calls from the Citabria we spotted at our nine o’clock and co-altitude at about a quarter mile away, but the Cheetah’s speed got us out of harms’ way.
A few miles to the west of Pearland, I began maneuvering to land on the airport’s runway one four right. It’s not really a runway. The main runway was being rebuilt so the taxiway, which had been rebuilt earlier, had been remarked as a runway with displaced thresholds. A little narrow runway with displaced thresholds. Over the handheld, which I had to pull off my headset to hear clearly, I heard an airplane call from east of the airport. Looking, I didn’t see him so I relayed our position and our situation as I turned downwind. It’s damn noisy in my cockpit with no headset on. I ran my landing checklist, made one final call on the handheld as I tuned on base (advising them this was the last call), and then put the radio up to focus on the landing. I turned on a close final as high and fast (having added five knots for mama). In one last act of total denial, I hit the flap switch to put them down; in a half-second I knew they weren’t moving and, with an instantaneous askew look at my wife, aggressively threw us sideways into a forward slip. The airplane barreled down to a landing right on the numbers.
“Hey! What was that? I liked it!” she cried as we were rolling out.
And this is the woman I have to convince to take the yoke at 2000 feet…
The taxi back in was kind of quiet. The instrument panel was dark, not lit like it usually is. Once we had taxied the airplane back into its parking spot, I called my mechanic, Bill Wynn, and told him what happened. Probably the alternator, he thought. He might be able to get up there in a couple of days, he said, when he came up this way to work on another airplane and could charge my battery and check it out.
Connie and I buttoned the airplane up and consoled ourselves by stopping at Las Casita for dinner. It’s a nice little family-run Mexican food restaurant close to the airport. As we waited for our food, we commiserated about how we couldn’t believe another failure was happening to us again. So far, the airplane had broken after every cross-country and then some. On the first one to Missouri, we discovered a leak in the passenger side gas tank when we took off from Longview, Texas and saw fuel streaming over the top of the wing. The small lip on the fuel tank where the fuel cap attaches had rusted through just below the rim. Right after we had flown to Alabama to escape the projected onslaught of Hurricane Rita, the flap motor went out. And there was the local flight failure of the left brake during taxi for takeoff that had forced me to fly the airplane down to Galveston from the right seat (I enjoyed that, actually.) and leave it there for a few days. We also had replaced the tach when we found it was reading a 150 rpm too low, not to mention the elective surgery of having the prop overhauled and repitched to give us more climb and the refurbished KLN-89B I had stuck in to replace the KLN-89 in the airplane that was failing. (It had always had a snaky display, but on our trip back from Alabama, it had failed altogether just outside of Houston. Luckily, I knew exactly where I was and where the Class B airspace was so I didn’t need its help. We still had my handheld Lowerance Airmap 100 providing good guidance, too.)
Our troubles were not over.
We bought a battery charger at Wal-Mart, one of the newer, “smart” type of chargers you could use on different types of batteries. I pulled the battery out of my airplane and charged it up and stuck it back in. Two days later and a day later than Bill and I had originally planned to meet, I flew the airplane down to Galveston to drop it off. Bill wasn’t there. His son-in-law, Robbie, his fellow airframe and power-plant mechanic and IA (Inspector, one level above a normal A&P) met me. He wasn’t sure why I was there; he thought Bill had seen the airplane the day before. When he understood that Bill hadn’t, he told me to wait and let him take a look at the wiring. Sometimes, the wire that energized the alternator field coil would break, causing the alternator to die. Robbie grabbed a power screwdriver and began removing the large screws that held the airplane’s cowling on its nose. Once he had them out, he pulled on it but it still clung to the airframe, at least until the red-haired college student and mechanic intern came out. Working together, they dropped the cowling down low enough for Robbie to look all the wiring over.
“Well, it all looks good, “ he said after a few minutes of peering in the engine cavity with a flashlight. Which really was bad news for me since it meant I’d probably be replacing the alternator and I had to leave the airplane there instead of flying it away.
That was on Tuesday. On the following Saturday, Connie and I drove down to pick the airplane up. Connie was just recovering from the flu and was not well enough to fly, so the plan was that I would fly it to a small fly-in lunch I had organized at Brazoria County. There’s a small diner there named The Windsock that has good food and small town hospitality. But before I could get going, Bill, who was back at work, pulled me aside.
“I think you ought to see this,” he said.
Sitting on a steel drum was my old alternator.
“An aircraft alternator has a data plate on it, “ he said, pointing. “Automotive alternators have a serial number stamped on them.” And I looked and saw what appeared to be very light numbers etched in the alternator’s case. And shook my head. Someone had taken the fact that Grumman’s used Motorola alternators a little too seriously. Or not seriously enough, depending on how you looked at it.
“There’s a hundred dollar core charge on these,” he continued, and I knew exactly where he was going. The service center where he had bought the alternator was likely to reject the core we would turn in, and Connie and I would be out an extra $100 because someone else tried to save a few bucks and cut some corners.
I was learning the hard way how often aircraft owners and their mechanics cut corners.
After getting my keys back, I started the airplane up and glanced at the ammeter and it was charging the battery and all was good, at least until I was taxiing out after having gassed her up. I had gotten clearance from the tower to taxi to takeoff when my left brake failed. I called the tower and told them I’d have to shut down where I was at and cursed the damn thing as I pushed it into a tiedown spot. Bill’s hangar was still in the line of sight. They had seen me shut down and were headed toward me in a golf cart.
I rode the golf cart back and told Bill that the brake had failed and he and I took the cart and some brake fluid in a squirt can back out to the airplane. Bill spent a few moments upside down in the pilot’s seat servicing the master cylinders behind the rudder pedals. I watched as he pumped the pedals up and down.
“It’s pumping up, “ he said. “For a moment, I didn’t think it would.”
But even though the airplane had brakes again, it had been completely serviced only a few months before. That meant that even though I had never spotted any hydraulic fluid during a pre-flight, there was a leak somewhere in the system. Though I could have chosen to take the airplane to the fly-in and would have been perfectly safe, it made no sense to me not only to take that risk but to have to make another trip back to Galveston and inconvenience Connie or someone else to get me back home. As Bill returned to his hangar in his golf cart, I re-started the airplane and taxied over to meet him. Shutting it down, I handed him the keys and asked him to find the brake leak and fix it. We both thought that, more than likely, the left brake master cylinder on the pilot’s side had died; and that it was the cause of my troubles.
We were right. And wrong. The left master cylinder on the pilot’s side was leaking. So, were the other three in the airplane. Rebuilding them was mostly a matter of replacing o-rings and seals and Bill had those parts in his shop. But the one big problem, and the major reason why the left brake cylinder had failed, was that the push rod connecting the pedal to the cylinder was bent about 30 degrees. Someone had performed a panic stop. A REAL PANIC STOP…an “I’m going to DIE!” panic stop at some point in the airplane’s life. (And I had a guess whom it had been.)…someone with very strong legs.
OUCH!
“You know what an airplane is?” a gentleman asked a friend of mine outside Bill’s hangar some days later. “It’s a hole in the sky you pour money into.”
We knew airplanes had that kind of reputation. But what we were seeing with this Cheetah seemed a bit ridiculous. Since last May (and it was the following January when this was happening), between the previous owner and us, we had invested $7950 in repairs and minor upgrades. It was eating our lunch financially. And I know we’ve still got a sticking altimeter that needs repair, a transponder and altimeter certification due in a few months, and the annual coming up in May.
It was beginning to look like we were going to have to win the lotto to keep the airplane at all.
posted by Andy Foster at 6:52 PM
1 Comments:
What a GREAT post! Most of us renters dream about buying an airplane, and the Grumman line is what I've been looking at. Thanks for putting a bit of sanity in my thinking, as I often see A5s for under $40K (they never mention what additional costs to expect). I'll continue to follow your exploits and adventures with the Cheetah. Thanks again for sharing your experience.
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