Not winning friends and influencing people

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.

Great Big Sea hove in the harbour…

Once again, the best band in the world played Rochester’s Water Street Music Hall. And once again, we were treated to a great, great show. (I unfortunately only brought my cell phone camera, so the pictures linked above suck.) My ears are ringing, my throat is hoarse, my clothes are soaked with sweat, and my knees are killing me, but the adrenaline is pumping and I’m extremely happy.

I’d write a full review, but fuck it, I’m going to bed.

Decisions, decisions….

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.

The bane of my existance

One of the worst tasks I’ve had at this job is working on the automatic upgrader. I hate doing it, because it’s not so much “programming” as it’s “cobbling together a bunch of system administration stuff”. I got it working as well as I can, but there are some various flakey problems in the way RedHat/CentOS works, as well as some dodgy Dell hardware, that I can’t make it work 100% of the time. I’ve written about it before. I get called in whenever something fails to try and forensically engineer what went wrong. Today’s fuckup was very similar to the one in that linked article – somebody started the upgrade before they went home at night, and somebody else came in in the morning and started it again. That left some things half installed and half upgraded, and some of the “cp” machines decided that they were being “plex built” (built from scratch in the manufacturing area) rather than upgraded, so they all made themselves into FRU (field replacement units) and shut down. Of course it took me nearly an hour to figure out what the idiots had done and how to fix it. And the upshot is that because these machines are now “bare” and physically powered down, somebody has to go out to the site and set them up. Oh, did I mention that the fuckup also caused all copies of the saved configuration for the entire site to be lost?

Current again

This morning Jim and I met at the airport to do some flying. Because I’d done a bit already yesterday, I let him go first. It’s always interesting flying with another pilot, because everybody does things differently. First difference – because this was a practice flight, he decided not to “cheat” with his GPS – and he actually hand-flew the whole time. Second difference – he decided not to pre-heat the engine, even though it was below freezing. Third difference, and this was a doozy – he overcranked the engine like hell. I’ve always been taught not to crank more than 4 or 5 blades at a time, but he cranked a good 20 or 25 blades. That just about killed the battery, and when he couldn’t get it started after a couple more short cranks (because that’s all it would do) he decided to pre-heat. We dragged out the pre-heat cart and heated it up, but then he put the cart away before trying again. The battery was still shot, so I dragged out the pre-heat cart again and used it to jump start the plane. It started in 2 blades that time, and so I got my first taste of getting in the plane while the prop was turning. I also clonked the back of my head really badly when I stood up while coiling the extension cord for the pre-heater cart and hit the hangar door. I have a big scab there now.

When he did the take-off, he used two notches of flaps like it was a short field take-off, and was airborne right off the hump that’s about 1/3rd of the way down Runway 7.

He went out to the Geneseo VOR and did the published hold for the Canadagua VOR-A approach. Or at least he tried – I don’t think he intercepted the inbound radial more than half a mile from the VOR once in three tries. The reason I “cheat” with a GPS was abundantly clear – each time round, even though he was south of the inbound radial, on the outbound radial he was still correcting to the south. Then when it came time to do the actual approach, he dialed the heading in wrong by 5 degrees on the VOR (even though it had been set right while he was in the hold). And yet, in spite of that, he managed to end up closer to the airport than I usually do when I do that approach. So maybe he knows something I don’t.

Then he came in to Rochester to do the ILS 4 a couple of times. Another difference between him and I: he slowed down to 90 knots for the approach – I like to do them at 110 to 120 knots, since an ILS is generally to a nice long runway and you never know when some kerosene burner will be breathing down your neck.

He did two, and both times he a fine job of holding the localizer, and a not quite as good job on the glide slope. But it was bumpy and it’s easier to criticize than to do.

I was a bit surprised when he requested a circle to land on runway 7 and a full stop for his second ILS. I thought he was going to do a full 6. But he’d had enough and it was my turn. I decided to skip the hold and the non-precision approach, and just do 4 ILSes to get current. And in spite of the bumps and everything, I think I did pretty good on them. They kept turning me onto the localizer about 2 miles from the outer marker, and sometimes I wasn’t even properly established by the time I got there. One time they didn’t switch me over to the tower, leaving me on the approach frequency right the way down to decision height. Another time, I heard the approach controller about to give a regional jet behind us a speed restriction and then change his mind, and then the tower controller cleared us for “the option”. If we’d taken the option and done a stop-and-go, I wonder what would have happened to that regional jet?

By the time I’d finished my 4 ILS 04s, I was well and truly finished. The bumps weren’t as bad as yesterdays, but there is only so much bumping around at low altitude wearing foggles you can take. I’m glad that’s over, and hopefully I can get some real approaches and stay current that way.