Category: Rant

As I already wrote about earlier, when I went to fly it on Sunday, the Lance had a flat nose gear strut, and red hydraulic fluid oil all over the cowling. At least one other member expressed concern about the amount of grease leaking out of the prop as well – it’s been leaking for several months now, and we’ve been advised by the guy who did the annual to “keep an eye on it” but there is no urgency.

Being Sunday, there wasn’t anybody around to call unless I wanted to pay huge call-out fees. So Monday, when I went flying again with Jim, I called the local on-field FBO, Peidmont-Hawthorne, recently renamed “Landmark Aviation”. They don’t normally do our maintenance because they’re expensive and geared towards jets – we normally take our planes out to Batavia so that Jeff Boshart can work on them, as he’s been doing for decades. Anyway, I was hoping that somebody at Landmark could come over, maybe pump the strut up enough that I could fly it over to Batavia, or tell us whether it needed a full overhaul. But the guy there said he couldn’t look at it until Wednesday at the earliest.

Now here’s where things went wrong – I’m pretty sure I told him we were going to try to find another alternative, but evidently he thought he had the go ahead to take it on Wednesday if he didn’t hear otherwise, and I thought I’d told him to call me first on Wednesday, but I wasn’t 100% sure.

I talked to the Maintenance Coordinator for the Lance (I’ve recently become the assistant MC for it), and he said he was going to take it to Batavia on Tuesday, so I thought there would be no problem about the ambiguity with Landmark. But on Wednesday, he called me and he was extremely irate. Evidently he didn’t take it on Tuesday and when he came to pick up the plane on Wednesday Landmark had already taken it. Now, I’d taken a pretty good look at the plane on Monday morning, and the strut was utterly flat, leaving just inches of clearance between the prop and the ground. Even if he’d gotten it pumped up immediately before start-up, I had my doubts that he could get it to Batavia and land without hitting the prop, but he was determined to try. And he was pissed because once the Landmark mechanic had seen it, it would be a liability nightmare to take it out of the shop without the service being done. And he complained about me to the V.P. of Maintenance.

Anyway, I talked to the Landmark mechanic, and convinced him not to deal with the prop since Boshart has been monitoring the situation. But he confirmed my feeling that the strut was so badly gone that pumping it up wouldn’t work. He also didn’t have the parts, so he had to order them. They came overnight, and the plane was ready by about 1pm on Thursday. As soon as it was ready, I took it over to Batavia. Jeff Boshart looked at the prop and pointed out that the grease wasn’t as bad as the other members had thought – I figure it had picked up some dirt from the strut oil which made it look darker and more visible than before. He said the same thing he always says – we need to schedule a prop overhaul pretty soon, but we don’t need to ground the plane until it’s done.

Good news for me since I’m still hoping to fly it to Allegeny County (KAGC) on Sunday. Although there are isolated thunderstorms in the forecast – I’ll have to keep an eye on that, because dodging thunderstorms or waiting on the ground for it to pass can kind of suck.

I need to get IFR current again. I let 6 months go by without doing 6 approaches (actually, only did one). I wanted to fly to KAGC to pick up Laura on Friday, but I couldn’t because of a very thin looking broken layer at about 1500 feet – if I’d been IFR current I could have punched through that and been in VFR on top the whole way. This weekend was pretty clear, so I wanted to go up with a safety pilot and get current again. Saturday, I had to work. So it was Sunday or nothing. I had a brunch to go to earlier, so the plan was to get to the airport at around 1pm, and do some approaches with a safety pilot. My original plan was to do it with Jim, who wanted me to be his safety pilot as well, but he had to cancel. So I called another guy, Lance, who wanted to see what it was like to be a safety pilot. He was available.

When I got to the airport, I found the next problem: the plane I had booked, the Lance (yes, really) had a nose gear strut was almost completely flat. And even worse, the very slow leak of hydraulic fluid in the prop has turned into a veritable shower. There are red spatters all over the cowl, and a red streak covering most of the spinner. (Actually, I just this second got an email from a more experienced person who told me that the red oil is probably from the gear strut as well.) There is no way I wanted to be doing approaches in that. So Lance and I waited until one of the other pilots came back from their flight, which fortunately didn’t take too long.

Once we got into the air, I found the next problem: the breezy conditions made it quite turbulent, especially down low. I should have realized that this would be the case, but I’d put it out of my head. I went out to Geneseo VOR and did one turn around the hold – it was quite bumpy and hard to hold altitude and heading. There were two other planes doing holds there, one at 3,000 and one at 3,500, so I went to 4,000. It wasn’t any smoother up there. One turn was enough, and because of the bumps I decided to skip my usual non-precision approach to Le Roy or Canadiagua and go straight into the ILSes.

The first ILS went ok, except at about 300 feet above decision height there was a tremendous bump and suddenly the localizer needle went several dots off. I wasn’t at full deflection before DH, but it was bloody close. Getting vectored around for the second one, I was starting to feel airsick, so I told approach that I was going to make this one a full stop. Once again, I was right in the donuts until about 300 feet above DH, and it suddenly started going all wrong. At about 100 feet above DH I took off the foggles and landed uneventfully.

Now to figure out what to do with the Lance and its mystery oil leak.