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…

DFC90 Update #2

Just prior to dropping the plane off for annual, I flew it to Gardner Avionics to get the DFC90 swapped out.  This is the third unit to be installed and I was hoping that this one would work as advertised.  Due to crappy weather, I could only fly it home and didn’t get to put it though any real testing.  It seemed to be tracking well and flew with no issues.  I stopped for fuel at Enterprise and as I held short of the runway to depart, the PFD completely blanked out!  After a couple of minutes it came back on, so I carefully flew it home and put the plane away for the night.  The next day I flew it to its annual and all seem to be working.  During annual, the mechanics said it failed three times on them as well.  During this annual, I also had the mechanics completely re-rig the aircraft to make sure that it was set up properly since this might also have an effect on the autopilot.  All of this PFD failures has me thinking that the PFD has been the issue all along and not the DFC90s.

On April 2^nd, I went to pick up the plane from annual.  I did my preflight and all was well.  About five minutes after start-up while doing my checks, the PFD failed again.  Since the weather was severe clear (VFR), I carefully flew it home and called Avidyne.  The following week they sent my old PFD back (now upgraded) and the avionics shop at Dothan swapped it out.  Fingers Crossed!

Saturday April 14^thit was a beautiful day with no wind, so I took the plane up and ran it though all the autopilot testing.  Overbank, stalls, envelope protection, ILS approaches coupled, and just with flight director, all went wonderfully.  Things seemed to be working great! 

Today (April 20^th) I finally got to get the plane up and put it through some more testing to make sure the DFC90 is working.  I flew my father over to 06A (Tuskegee Field).  It was a nice day, but a little windy and a little bumpy.   The autopilot failed repeatedly blowing through heading bug settings, “servo limit” warnings constantly, unable to hold a coarse and no trim annunciation.  I did the Cirrus trim test and the plane still turned to the right like a P51 and to the left like a B747.  CRAP! 

This really puzzled us and since I just had the plane re-rigged, two different PFDs and three DFC90 boxes, I figured it would only be one of two things.  It was either my trim tabs were not adjusted correctly and were overwhelming the servos (unlikely), or a servo(s) was bad and causing the problem.  When we were about to go, I bent the right aileron trim tab down quite a bit to see if that made any difference.  Since the day I bought it, it had always been severely bent up and numerous mechanics had made mention that it seemed excessive.  Here is what I bent it to:

After touring the museum at Tuskegee Field we departed to fly home and found that the autopilot had gotten even worse.  Now regardless of what we did, the “servo limit” came on instantly every time I engaged the autopilot and now I had zero trim control to the left.  The plane would peel off to the right like a P51, but wouldn’t even bank left when I held the trim hat over to the left. 

Well the only change was the trim tab, so we landed at Dothan and I bent it back to its original high angle setting:

After a quick test flight the autopilot tracked almost perfectly and not once did I get the “servo limit” warning and it tracked every heading change perfectly.  What is baffling us both now is that we both felt that bending the tab upwards would have had the opposite effect on the aircraft, but for some reason, it fixed the issue.  Apparently having the tab bend down somehow overpowered the trim servo and wouldn’t allow it to work properly. 

After only one flight, it seems to work great now, but I’ll have to test it some more next week.  It might even need a little more bending upward, but so far it seems to be working.  Fingers crossed!!

2012 Annual

So this year I had to take my aircraft to a new mechanic to get the annual inspection completed.  Unfortunately this guy doesn’t allow owner assisted annuals, but he and his crew are very familiar with Cirrus and he seems to be pretty smart about the aircraft and prices are good.   He’s not the most expensive, but he isn’t the cheapest either.  Flat rate annual for a normally aspirated SR22 w/TKS is $1800 for just the inspection.  Any squawks are on top of that. 

 I knew that he was he was going to be very thorough, which is a good thing, but we started off on a bit of a rough start.  I dropped the plane off on Friday and on Monday he calls and states that the plane would not be done by Friday because I have a cracked cylinder.  My first question was, “did you do a dye penetration test to determine if it was really cracked?”  The response I received was a typical one, “I have been working on planes for years and this is definitely a crack.”  My compression in that cylinder was a 20/80, so there was definitely something wrong, but it’s a bit unnerving that the mechanics didn’t trouble shoot and assumed the worst!  For those not familiar with this type of issue, Continental IO-550s (especially Cirrus) sometimes show what looks like a crack, but in reality they are nothing more than a “dent” or imperfection in the casting that fills with fuel and dirt and looks like a crack.  If a mechanic would clean it up and use magnafux on it, they would see that it ISN’T A CRACK!  From my understanding, many a cylinder have been replaced over the years because of mechanics inability to troubleshoot and just jump to conclusions.  I guess some people have super deep pockets and just don’t care, or more than likely they use these types of expenses as a tax write off.  Regardless, I don’t/can’t work that way!  I learned about this once again from COPA, which in this case saved me $2500-$3000! 

Here is a picture of my cylinder with the "crack" circled in red:

Here are four more pictures of other “cracks” that turned out to NOT be cracks – see any similarities?

So after some discussion on the COPA forum board, I respond to my mechanic in a very nice manner.  I told him that I wanted him to clean up the cylinder with scotch bright and then dye penetrate test the crack.  IF it turns out that it isn’t a crack, then I told him to start the plane up and warm it up real good and check the compressions again.  This time, stake the valve and see if that helps.  I also looked at my EMAX data that showed my exhaust valve (EGT) working normally for about 15 minutes on every flight and then cooling off significantly.  My last oil sample also showed a spike in nickel.  Nickel us used in the valve guides, so I was pretty sure I had a valve issue to start with.  I explained all of this to him and sent him back to work.  Sure enough, an hour later I get a call.  “It’s NOT a crack.”  He did the rest and the best he could get was a 25/80, but he did determine that the exhaust valve was leaking.  YEAH!!!  The bad news though is that the cylinder still has to come off to fix the valve, but that should be significantly cheaper than a new cylinder.

Here is a picture of the cylinder head and you can see the exhaust valve guides are gone and there is a ton of carbon build up.  They will have to lap in the valve and replace the valve guides to fix this.

Other than the cylinder, the aircraft had only minor issues and now is back in service.  After picking it up I determined two mechanical issues that will need to be looked at again.  The first is the intermittent tachometers.  These have come and gone now for six months.  It is obviously something loose, since whenever I hit turbulence they come on or go off.  They were supposed to fix this at annual and they said they did, but what they did, didn’t work.  The second issue is the nose wheel has a wicked shimmy upon touchdown.  The mechanic said that the nose wheel was over tightened to 75lbs, when it should be 25lbs.  This was done by a Cirrus Service Center because it was shaking all over.  The mechanic says that they put it back to 25 and now it is WAY TOO LOOSE!  To fix it, they are saying I have to buy four large washers and a Teflon washer –cost around $50.  For fricken washers!  I will need to look into this some more since this seems a bit extreme for washers. 

The last issue I have that came out of my annual is that the mechanics managed to bend my rear baffling wall behind the engine and now you can see the crease.  How this happened I have no clue, since it would take a lot to bend this wall of aluminum, but somehow they did.  Of course they deny it, but there is no way in hell that it was there prior.  It might not look like all that big of a deal, but I don't like my aircraft looking like it's not taken care of.  I'm guessing I will just have to live with it, but maybe they will surprise me and do the right thing and repair it. 

Overall the plane runs great now, so it’s time to get back at fixing the autopilot!

Autopilot Issue Videos

Here are two examples of blowing through the heading bug with the DFC90 autopilot.

DFC90 Update

So after flying the DFC90 a bit more, I have noticed a couple of pretty significant glitches.  The first one is that I keep getting an intermittent “Servo Limit” warning on the PFD.  It seems that when this happens, the AP seems to get stupid.  Typically it is when I try to fly the plane on the heading mode and then the aircraft will either fail to turn, turn slowly, or turn very aggressively and then blow through the heading bug setting.  This has also happened a few times in NAV mode as well.

The next issue is the uncoupled envelope protection.  I have stalled the aircraft, I have dived the aircraft and I have over banked the aircraft.  Only twice have I been able to get any warning.  One time was an overbank and the second time was while flying with the Flight Director and as I reached short final I got an “Underspeed” warning.

The last issue is the Flight Director itself.  It doesn’t work!  I have tried to hand fly three different ILS approaches and the Flight Director is so far off that I am not even legal if I tried to follow it.  Very disappointed!

I called Avidyne and Gardner Avionics and the answer they are giving me is that it’s the servos on the airplane, not the autopilot.

I posted this issue on COPA and Dave from Nexair told me to not swap anything out until someone that knew how to check the rigging flew the aircraft.  Then he said he was coming to Montgomery, so I fly up on Saturday and met him.  He has installed a bunch of these autopilots in Cirrus and knows the workings of them very well.  We took the aircraft for a test flight and he determined three things.  Servos are fine, Autopilot is bad and the rigging on the aircraft was WAY out of spec!  One of the tests he performed was the setting of the servo.  He would hold the trim all the way to the right, but keep the plane straight and level.  Then let go.  It is supposed to take 4-6 seconds to reach a standard rate turn.  My aircraft peeled off like a P-51 in three seconds to the right.  Next we did it to the left.  To the left my aircraft banked like it was on a Sunday stroll in about eight seconds.  You could also see it on the ground when he put in full deflection left and right that they weren’t even close to being set up the same.  Once we landed he called the VP of Avidyne and got them understanding the issue, so now all I have to do is get my avionics shop to call Avidyne and call Dave and get it fixed.  Fingers crossed!

RNAV (GPS) RW18 Dothan

Here is my first attempt at videoing an approach.  This was shot yesterday when I was testing the new DFC90 autopilot that I had just installed.  It is a very precise autopilot and even with pretty decent winds, it tracked the course very well.  Much better than the STec 55X!