The Savvy Aviator

Premature cylinder problems are epidemic. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t hear or read about an aircraft owner having to pull one or several cylinders at annual due to poor compression with leakage past the exhaust valve. More often than not, the afflicted airplane is powered by a fuel-injected TCM engine. The cause […]

Lately, my maintenance management company SAMM has been receiving an increas-ing number of requests to oversee pre-buy examinations on aircraft ranging from Skylanes to Cirruses to Bonanzas to Golden Eagles. Now, I’ve been an aircraft owner for more than 40 years, but in all that time I’ve only bought three airplanes. One of those was […]

Recently, my aircraft management company SAMMwas managing the annual inspection of a client’s piston-powered, single-engine airplane at a well-known maintenance facility in Texas. The inspection found very little wrong with the airplane, and it looked like the annual would be completed quickly and inexpensively. Then, quite unexpectedly, the IA responsible for the annual went to […]

On a winter Friday evening a few years ago, a Texas-based aircraft owner loaded three family members into his Baron and flew to Kansas City to attend a weekend function. One of the aircraft’s vacuum pumps failed over Oklahoma. Upon landing at Kansas City Downtown Airport (MKC), the owner asked the FBO on the field […]

Under the FARs, performing maintenance is the job of an A&P mechanic or FAA-approved repair station, but managing maintenance is the owner’s job. In essence, the FAA looks at each aircraft owner as the Director of Maintenance (DoM) of a one-aircraft aviation department. Unfortunately, few owners know how to do this important job, and most […]

On March 2, 2008, a turbonormalized Cirrus SR22 was destroyed when it crashed shortly after takeoff in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, killing all four people aboard. Shortly after the aircraft departed from Runway 20, the airplane’s engine lost power, and the aircraft hit a building and exploded. Further investigation revealed that the aircraft had been […]

Of the many tasks that we have to perform as pilots, leaning the engine is one of the simplest. Leaning is vastly easier than shooting a circling approach in low IMC, picking the smoothest route through a cold front or deciding when to overhaul the engine. Yet no subject I know seems to trigger more […]

During the century since the Wright Brothers first flew, the predominant perpetrator in aircraft accidents has shifted dramatically from machine to human. Today, human error is responsible for 90 percent of aircraft accidents and incidents. It’s not that people have become more careless, forgetful, inattentive or reckless. It’s that aircraft and aircraft components have become […]

I‘d been working with an aircraft owner in Memphis for several weeks helping him chase down a problem with his Lycoming engine. The owner initially reported that the engine had exhibited several episodes of rough running after startup, but that the engine seemed to run smoothly once it warmed up.The owner emailed me a data […]

I last wrote about this subject about 18 months ago (Savvy Aviator #37), but it seems as if jugs are still coming off needlessly, so perhaps it’s time to revisit the subject. Each week, I receive dozens of emails from aircraft owners seeking advice on maintenance. I really enjoy helping fellow aircraft owners, but I […]