by Mike Busch | Mar 1, 2019 | AOPA Pilot Magazine, Magazine Articles
Reviving an engine that has been inactive for months or years Piston aircraft engines hate to sit unflown. During lengthy periods of disuse, the protective oil film strips off critical surfaces like cylinder walls, cam lobes and tappet faces, exposing them to risk of...
by Joe Godfrey | Feb 16, 2019 | SavvyAnalysis Puzzlers
Phoebe Snow’s recording of “No Regrets” is on one of my playlists, and I can’t hear the song without thinking of the Milky Way ad where the distracted tattoo artist gives her customer something to – uh, regert. Sometimes engine data will...
by Mike Busch | Feb 1, 2019 | AOPA Pilot Magazine, Magazine Articles
When mechanics get interrupted, bad things can happen I was recently contacted by the owner of a Cessna Hawk XP (R172K)—I’ll call him “Sam”—who seemed rather shaken by a recent series of events. He told me he was a student pilot with solo flight privileges and ready...
by Joe Godfrey | Jan 19, 2019 | SavvyAnalysis Puzzlers
They say what goes around comes around. As the new year arrived and I began my 5th year of writing these Puzzlers, I wondered what I could do to keep things interesting and informative. You the reader and I, acting as your agent scrubbing the uploaded data for good...
by Mike Busch | Jan 1, 2019 | AOPA Pilot Magazine, Magazine Articles
Taking the complexity out of cylinder break-in From time to time, every piston aircraft owner faces the question of how best to break-in new cylinders. Sometimes this involves just one or two newly-replaced cylinders, other times all cylinders have been replaced...
by Joe Godfrey | Dec 15, 2018 | SavvyAnalysis Puzzlers
If zero tolerance means we won’t tolerate anything but a zero, then I guess zero zero tolerance means we won’t tolerate any zeros. Usually a zero on an engine data monitor isn’t a good thing unless it has an integer or a decimal point in front of it....
by Mike Busch | Dec 1, 2018 | AOPA Pilot Magazine, Magazine Articles
Mechanics should never make repairs without owner approval The co-owner of a Beechcraft Bonanza emailed me that his airplane had been inspected and maintained by a trusted mechanic at his home field in California until this year, when the mechanic retired. Forced to...
by Joe Godfrey | Nov 18, 2018 | SavvyAnalysis Puzzlers
In most of the Northern Hemisphere it’s the time of year to think about icing. If your airplane is certified and equipped for FIKI – flight into known icing – an encounter with ice isn’t the emergency that it is for the rest of us. When an...
by Mike Busch | Nov 1, 2018 | AOPA Pilot Magazine, Magazine Articles
What to do when you pick up your aircraft from the shop My company employs 14 A&P mechanics, 11 of whom are very seasoned IAs with decades of GA maintenance experience. The other day, one of them was asked by a client what he should look for during the preflight...
by Joe Godfrey | Oct 20, 2018 | SavvyAnalysis Puzzlers
I never had the guts to do it, but I sure thought about it more than once. Maybe you’ve done it or thought about it. You know – you’re in a mandatory meeting about some new company policy or initiative and the presenter is droning on from a pamphlet...
