The Convenience of GA

There have been numerous articles written about how convenient General Aviation (GA) is and how it has helped many businesses flourish by allowing pilots/businessmen to travel to places quickly, when Commercial Airlines take too much time, aren’t convenient, and are plain painful.  I actually had an opportunity to use the convenience in my current job and here is my story.

As an officer in the Army, I am often tasked to attend numerous meetings around the country.  Typically things usually lay out in a fashion that allows me to space them out in a way that won’t allow me to be away from the family for long periods of time, or in a way that they are easy to attend, without having to be gone for long continuous stretches with back to back meetings.

For about three months now, I had scheduled a planning conference in Sedalia, MO to gather information to build a training exercise for the Army aviation unit there.  The plan was to fly there on Thursday 26 April and return on the 27^th.  However since this was so close to our old home of Kansas City, I decided that I would bring my family along and we would stay for the weekend.  This is allowable according to Army Regulations and since I was flying my own aircraft, there was no additional costs.  The only real catch was that they would have to stay in the hotel while I did my meeting, but once done, we could depart for KC and enjoy the weekend.  My wife and oldest son were extremely excited about this trip and were really looking forward to it.

On Friday the 20^th, I find out that I need to attend a conference at FORSCOM on the 24^th and 25^th.  Since I would fly this trip in the Cirrus also, the stars align and the trip is doable pending any bad weather.  If I was to fly this commercially, it would have been impossible since no flights were available on such short notice in/out of Fayetteville and because of the timing of the conference, I would most likely have had to fly there the day prior and also leave the following day.  This would of course screw up the trip to Missouri and I would have had to have flown straight from Fayetteville, NC to Kansas City, MO and then drive two hours to Sedalia to make the next meeting.  This option would not have been fun and my family would have been very disappointed since they were looking forward to going to KC.

So what happened…  I got up early on the 24^th and flew the Cirrus to Fayetteville, NC a mere 2:25 hour trip.  I attended my conference on the 24^th and 25^th and once completed, hopped back in the Cirrus and flew back home in 2:40.  The day was long, but I ensure that I had plenty of sleep the night prior and I got back into Dothan just before 9PM.

The next day I slept in and then loaded up the family in the Cirrus and departed for Missouri at 11:42am.  We flew to William Whitehurst Field (M08) and stopped for fuel and lunch.  Flight time was just under an hour at 1:59.  The manager took me into town and I brought back some food and we departed for Sedalia (KDMO) 1:54.  We arrived in Sedalia at 5:23pm and checked into the hotel. 

The only issue we had was the following evening.  After my meeting was complete, we were not able to fly to KC because high winds since a low pressure system had come into the area.  It was all still flyable, however Mandi isn’t too keen on turbulence and didn’t want to make the short flight (20 minutes).  Instead we elected to stay another night and let the kids play in the pool at the hotel.  The next morning we departed on a very nice flight to Kansas City Downtown Airport (KMKC) and enjoyed one of our favorite cities. 

On Sunday Evening we departed KMKC at 5:22pm and flew to West Memphis (KAWM), 1:59 flight time and stopped for dinner.  Unfortunately NOTHING was open at the airport, so we sat on the ramp and ate some snacks before departing for Dothan.   The last leg to KDHN was 2:04 and we arrived at 10:41pm.

Mandi and I hanging out on the ramp at West Memphis

Total flight time for the week roughly 13.2 hours

Total NM flown for the week 2,100 NM

Total fuel costs for the week $845 (approx 170 gallons, $4.99/gallon average)

Cost to fly the family commercial to KC ONLY $604/per person total cost $1,812.00.  Also probably another $150 for bags as well.

Endstate – I got to take my family with me on a work trip that turned into a mini-vacation for a fraction of the cost and none of the TSA/Commercial hassles.  Since this trip was for work and it was cheaper to fly my Cirrus vs. an airline ticket, the fuel costs were covered by the gov’t.  The only costs I had were the extra nights and a rental car for those nights and I also got another 13 hours of flight time!  More than likely I wouldn’t have been able to accomplish my mission with the tightness of the two meetings and if I was flying Commercially, I would most likely have had to leave the family at home.  Thanks GA!

**On an additional note, if the government starts to charge GA for ATC usage (currently they are only proposing to charge turboprop and jets $100/usage, not small piston aircraft), this trip would have cost me an additional $700!!!!

Traffic Down

I have had intermittent traffic failures now for the past six months.  Originally after about 10 minutes of flight, it would periodically fail and flash on the MFD.  Sometimes I could pull the circuit breaker, let it sit a few minutes, then restart it and all would be fine.  After searching COPA forums, I discovered that this is very common with the L3 Skywatch traffic systems.  Typically, most avionics shops will tell you up front that they won’t even do anything with it other than pull it, send it to L3 and make the owner payout $3-4K.  Before doing this, there are several things to check that could save a ton of money.

The first fix is to look for loose fittings and clean all connectors.  Even though my Cirrus is only eight years old, like any airplane vibrations loosen things over time.  I checked the box below the copilot seat and all is tight.  No change, still intermittent.
The second fix is to take it to an avionics shop that is competent and have them recalibrate it.  I flew the plane up to Gardner Avionics by Atlanta and they recalibrated the system.  This seemed to have fixed it and all was well again. 

Fast forward five months and the Skywatch has died again.  This time the breaker trick doesn’t seem to work and after about two minutes of flight, it fails and never comes back on.  After reviewing more COPA posts, I find another owner who has had some luck fixing issues like mine.  He was a mechanical engineer for Boeing, so he’s pretty competent to say the least.  The issue he found was in the antenna.  First off, he said to take the bolts off the antenna from the inside, but don’t remove the antenna.  Take a wire brush and clean up the bolts and washers, then Deoxite them.  These washers are supposed to help ground the antenna and over time they get corroded and don’t ground well anymore.  Grounding on an all composite plane obviously poses some issues and you can see in the picture the "metal tape" on the outside of the composite that is used to solve this issue. 

The next step is to buy some more washers and cover up the ½” of exposed thread, so that the proper current is maintained.  For some reason, Cirrus missed this and put too long of bolts in the antenna mount.  Ensure that the connections clean and tight and reassemble.

Left rear bolt has more washer, but I still need more. Right shows factory exposed thread.

To get at the antenna, all you have to do is pull the black door seal off, which slips outward and the headliner padding comes apart.  SUPER easy.  This is a really good design by Cirrus!  The first thing I found is that one of the three cables that goes into the antenna was loose.  I also found that a ground wire that was attached to the right rear mount was also loose.  I cleaned it all up and put it back together, but no joy.  I talked with a Service Center in Tampa and they told me that once you find loose cables, you need to recalibrate it again to get it to work.  I had my local shop do this, but once again no joy.  The system came up with numerous fail codes and L3 said it needs to come back to them.  They charge a flat fee of $2925 to fix it!  OUCH!!!!  I wonder if this is the reason Cirrus went away from L3 and went to Garmin for all future traffic systems???    To be continued…