Search Results for: Cessna 172

It’s Saturday morning at 0730. Weather is VFR and a million, and most of the flight schools and weekend warriors are calling up Ground with the ATIS, ready to go. Add student pilots, crosswinds, a runway closure and more. What are the chances of pilots missing something critical or letting expectation bias hit? That risk […]

Dalton Caldwell, a native of Brownsboro, Texas, was not one of those kids who lived and breathed airplanes from the time he was born; it took a couple of years for that passion to take hold. When his mom first introduced him to his soon-to-be stepfather, she mentioned he was a pilot, a Boeing 747 […]

Learning to fly a single-engine piston-powered airplane starts your journey in aviation in a place from which you can take any next step that you wish—or lead you to a lifetime of flying satisfaction on its own. Your basic licensing path takes you to the private pilot certificate, and most people complete this training in […]

For example, a large flying club I was in a few years back had a pair of Cessna Cardinal RGs. They were getting a bit long in the tooth, but were roomy and relatively fast, and they were good cross-country airplanes. They also were configured basically the same, with two nav/comms but little else: no autopilot, for example, GPS or DME. After getting to know them both, I came to prefer the blue-and-white one over the orange version, since it was a bit younger and cleaner. Neither let me down, but one was sold to someone outside the club and, shortly thereafter, another pilot landed the remaining Cardinal RG gear-up.

Normally, I might have panicked, but with my experienced copilot at my side, I stayed calm. We talked through our options and decisions along as I continued to fly the plane. I began a series of small adjustments to the throttle and mixture to see how the engine responded. We quickly discovered these changes only made matters worse, so we left the settings as is. My buddy reminded me to stay high-altitude is our friend-and we looked for landing spots in case things deteriorated.

About 30 minutes into these touch and goes, one requested a stop and go. I could not have five aircraft doing touch and goes with one doing a stop and go; it would mess up the pattern and Id be making student pilots do a lot they didnt need to. So, I come back with, Unable. I have five of yall. He came back with, Well we need to do stop and goes for training. I thought about putting that one airplane on the other runway, but I had started to have a line of departures and arrivals. Unable, I repeated. I thought the matter was closed, as it should have been.

At FL400, the autopilot started porpoising and was turned off. Afterward, the aircraft would not trim properly. The crew diverted; it was difficult to keep it pitched down while descending. During the final phase of flight, the yoke was very difficult to input pitch changes, but was okay in the roll axis. After landing, troubleshooting duplicated the problem. Elevator servo (p/n 4006719914) was replaced with serviceable unit.

According to the pilot, he was delayed about 10 minutes by traffic before completing the engine run-up and takeoff roll with no anomalies noted. After the pilot lifted off and retracted the landing gear, the engine stopped producing power about 300 feet above the runway. There was no time to perform remedial actions to restore power, so the pilot lowered the landing gear and touched down on the remaining runway. The airplane went off the departure end of the runway, down an embankment and across a road before coming to rest upright 384 feet beyond the runways departure end in low brush.

Following a scheduled oil and filter change, the technician noted lower-than-normal oil pressure at idle. The new filter (p/n CH48110-1) was replaced and oil pressure indication was normal. Examination of the replaced filter noted some paint chips had been removed in the flange area. The submitter suspects that a paint chip could have contaminated the filter, causing it to go into bypass. These filters are packaged in cardboard boxes. There was no damage noted to the box containing the filter.

I used up my entire allotment of blunders for the year in our July issue, where 1) I incorrectly referred to a Robertson STOL conversion as Robinson; 2) I said that the small forward lifting surfaces on the Robertson Wren 460 (a modified Cessna 182) were nicknamed “Wren’s teeth,” when in fact that name applied […]