Points for Pilots

Rotax 912 engine The  Rotax 912 engine  in o ur plane, a Zenith 601HDS, has reached an important milestone. Over the past 29 years, it has run 2,500 hrs without major repairs. Zenith 601HDL, N314LB It's appropriate to reflect about this performance and muse how this is possible. After all, when we bought the engine, in 1994, the suggested TBO was 1,200 hrs.  Since then TBO has gone up, first to 1,600 hrs, and more recently to 2,000 hrs. Of course, those increases apply to later engines, not to our early model. Let's see how the engine performs after all this time. Want to learn more about flying?    My book Lessons from Piloting for 45 Years  covers close shaves over more than four decades involving thunderstorms, mountain weather, faulty runways, equipment failures, and more. Learn key strategies for coping with these dangerous situations.  They include two tools called Sully's Rule and Forecast Evaluation. Performance afte...

Until recently, collisions between aircraft were rare, supposedly because pilots used See and Avoid. But now ADS-B information displayed in our cockpit on the iPad reveals that this explanation just wasn’t correct. There were hardly any collisions because the odds of two aircraft meeting in the air were next to zero, due to the small volume taken up by two aircraft and the comparatively huge volume of available air space. But “next to zero” does not mean “zero,” as we found out during a recent trip, where in two instances, on the same day, we were mighty close to a midair collision. So how did we avoid these potential collisions? We saw those airplanes on our iPad, since we now have both ADS-B In and ADS-B Out, and thus are continuously served with the location and speed of all aircraft within a so-called hockey puck surrounding our aircraft. It has a diameter of 30 miles and extends above and below us for 3,500 ft. Hockey puck for which traffic is displayed. Source: FAA docu...

Pieces of wiring from Rotax 912 alternator to voltage regulator/rectifier During repair of the motor mount, a major project, we discovered that the wiring of the integral alternator supplying power to the ignition module and the voltage regulator/rectifier had badly corroded. The above photo shows fragments of the wires going from the stator of the alternator to the voltage regulator/rectifier. Next is a photo of the wiring going from the stator to the ignition module. Here, too, the insulation has broken off and the wires are badly corroded. Defective wires supplying power to the ignition module Surely the damage must have been building up during several years. How could we have missed it during the annual inspections? The Answer There are two places where the wires are visible: At the voltage regulator/rectifier, and at the ignition module. These wires looked okay until a recent major repair of the motor mount, where everything firewall-forward had to be removed. A...

Small label for airplane instrument panel You can make your own custom labels, displaying any text, even pictures, without use of a label maker. The labels have a waterproof surface, are self-adhesive, and stick to virtually any surface. The cost of each label is just a few cents. The above photo shows a label we made in 2016 for our airplane. It shows no sign of aging. In the meantime, we have become more adept at the process and produce a more accurate label boundary. We include the example since it is the oldest label we have made with the method. Another label, made in 2019, explains the readings of the Hobbs meter in our airplane.  Label for Hobbs meter The label tells that one must add 1,950 to the indicated Hobbs time to get the total in-service time of our airplane. Here is a panel label for Piper Cubs. Years ago, we saw a Piper Cub with that text taped to the panel. Clearly, the owner had a great sense of humor. Piper Cub operating restriction Needed Equi...