Aero-Tips!

A good pilot is always learning -- how many times have you heard this old standard throughout your flying career? There is no truer statement in all of flying (well, with the possible exception of "there are no old, bold pilots.")

Aero-News has called upon the expertise of Thomas P. Turner, master CFI and all-around-good-guy, to bring our readers -- and us -- daily tips to improve our skills as aviators. Some of them, you may have heard before... but for each of us, there will also be something we might never have considered before, or something that didn't "stick" the way it should have the first time we memorized it for the practical test.

Look for our daily Aero-Tips segments, coming each day to you through the Aero-News Network.

Aero-Tips 07.21.06

It was a warm summer evening, perfect for flying. My student, who had just purchased a well-equipped, high-performance aircraft, was chomping to begin his required Complex and High Performance logbook endorsements and the 15 hours of dual instruction required under his insurance policy. I'd agreed to let his CFII sit in because, although I am going to conduct most of my client's checkout, he may fly some with the "double-I" and I wanted to make sure the instructor knew some of the trivia that makes the difference between a safe flight and trouble. 

Trivia indeed came into play. After briefing my student and his instructor for the first flight we began a preflight inspection, looking closely at the type-specific aircraft items that have historically been problematic or led to mishap. About half an hour into an expanded "teaching" preflight we noticed a small-diameter spring, about three inches long and normally hidden partly by a canvas cover in the main wheel well, was broken. A small portion of the thin spring was dangling from the uplock arm. "This is a no-go item," I pronounced reluctantly. For as I explained, the small spring has a vital function. If it doesn't pull part of the uplock out of the way when the gear is in transit, the landing gear will go up on retraction-but it might not come back down.

Handling rejection

Everything in our attitudes told us we were going to fly. The airplane is beautiful, the skies were clear and warm, and my 200-hour pilot, his time-building instructor and I had spent half an hour briefing for a fun introduction to the airplane before another 30 minutes preflighting the otherwise spectacular airplane. It would have been very easy to miss the spring (in fact, I dug around under the canvas cover for some time looking for it, hoping it was attached, even though I should normally be able to see part of it uncovered) and launch... but with the very real risk of jamming the landing gear up in the wells.

Further, when we looked, the spring was broken in the other main gear well also. Somebody had actually stretched the remaining part of that spring and wrapped it around another cable, looking like a safety wire. Now we had symmetry -- no spring on either uplock. A peculiarity of human nature is that "symmetry implies correctness"... if it's wrong on both sides we try to convince ourselves both couldn't be broken, so it must be right.

Instead, fighting our urges, we handled the rejected preflight and turned the lesson into a long cockpit checkout, a valuable use of our time. My client will have the springs fixed while I'm at Oshkosh and we'll start again when I get back.

Aero-tip of the day: Don't submit to your desire to fly when you find something wrong in a preflight inspection. The short delay you experience now is nothing compared to the danger and down-time that might result from rationalizing away a critical preflight squawk.

FMI: Aero-Tips