I want to fly Laura back to school this Sunday. Right now, there are two planes available in Schedule Master: our Warrior, which is slow, cramped, and doesn’t have much useful load, or the Lance, which is fast, roomy (relatively) and with enough useful load that she could be bringing bricks with her and I wouldn’t have to worry about it. Oh, and the Warrior doesn’t have an autopilot either. I’m not even sure it has a heading bug. The Lance, on the other hand, has an HSI which is a god-send for instrument flying.
Normally this would be a no-brainer, but currently the Lance is sitting there with a totally flat nose gear strut, red oil streaks all over the cowl, and more worryingly, there is one streak of oil coming up through the spinner right where the leaky side of the prop comes through. (The prop has a tiny leak, and for the last couple of years our mechanic has said “that’s normal, but keep an eye on it”.) Obviously, the nose gear needs a new o-ring to keep the hydraulic fluid in, but there is also a small possibility that the prop needs a complete overhaul. The nose gear thing is a small job and if that’s all there is, it shouldn’t take more than a day to fix. But the prop thing could be a big job – if I book the Lance and it ends up grounded, there is a good possibility that the Warrior won’t be available if I need it. On the other hand, if I book the Warrior, I might end up flying in the Warrior when I could have taken the Lance.
The Maintenance Coordinator for the Lance says he’s taking the Lance to Batavia for our mechanic to look it over tomorrow. He was supposed to take it today but he got busy with something else, and didn’t bother to call me in spite of me being the Assistant Maintenance Coordinator.
I certainly would never do this, not being an FAA-approved fix, but the local mechanic-on-my-field says the hot tip is to put a little bit of transmission sealer in the strut as soon as it starts leaking. It can buy you another year or two without replacing the o-rings.