Ownership

We’ve been doing it since our earliest days as student pilots. Now that we’re aircraft owners, we still do it as part of our standard preflight ritual. But are we doing it right?It turns out that there’s a lot more to checking the engine’s oil dipstick properly than just making sure that the oil level […]

There’s an unwritten rule in column journalism that you shouldn’t date the material by affixing it to a holiday boresighted by the publication date or, heaven forbid, even on that date. I mean, what’s more pathetic than noticing in February a piece of commentary tied to Thanksgiving traditions or something tied to the rites for […]

A funny thing happened to me on a coast-to-coast trip in my Cessna T310R from California to the East coast. I was headed from my home base in Santa Maria to teach a weekend seminar in Frederick, Md., and then to Atlanta to teach another seminar the following weekend.I first became aware of the problem […]

Recently I heard from a fellow Cessna 310 owner, obviously frustrated, who had been searching for a good shop to perform an owner-assisted annual on his airplane: “It’s getting harder all the time to find a shop that will allow any owner involvement in an annual inspection. The ones I’ve found that will allow it […]

Unless you’ve been around homebuilts, you’ve probably never heard of a Jabiru. (Sure, you may be familiar with the varieties of stork whose name comes from the Tupi-Guarani term meaning “swollen neck.”) I mean the Jabiru airplane — a tidy design that’s morphed into several varieties: two- and four-seat, 51% experimental and, soon, a ready-to-fly […]

In 2002, I did something unfortunate: pulled a perfectly good cylinder off of one of the engines of my Cessna T310R. If I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t have touched the cylinder. But at the time, I thought I was doing the right thing.It was the usual story. I had just downed […]

An aircraft tire is a sophisticated, computer-designed, multi-component product consisting of three major materials: steel, rubber and fabric. Taking this down a level, there are multiple types of nylon and rubber compounds in tire construction, each with its own special properties designed to complete the task assigned. The only thing they have in common with […]

I‘ve had wonderful luck with piston aircraft engines throughout my 37 years as an aircraft owner. All the engines on my airplanes have made TBO with minimal maintenance along the way, and in recent years they’ve gone well beyond TBO.For decades, I was convinced that the secret of my success was the fact that I […]

I subjected my still-new (and barely broken-in) Barrett-built IO-390-X to the kind of abuse that would make the old pelican himself, John Deakin, stand up in a crowd and shake his fist at me. I ran the cylinder heads to a temperature that would make any half-smart metallurgist cringe. I flogged my four-banger in a […]

Prop strikes come in all kinds of flavors. Some involve obvious sudden stoppages of the engine (for example, a gear-up landing). In others, the engine keeps running, perhaps with some short-term loss of RPM as the prop tips curl back. Still others occur when the engine is not running (such as when a car backs […]