(1.2) 6/22/2016

A little bit of a bummer today! There was an issue during run-up, so we had to taxi back to the tie downs (after my hard work during the pre-flight!) and I didn't get to fly today. We were still able to use the rest of the time productively and I added 0.4 hours (hah), so I don't feel as bad about it.

Here's what went down. I did the pre-flight on N9091L as before, only we only had about 8 gallons left so we needed to re-fuel. It turns out that one of the other instructors had just taken her up for five hours, and left her pretty much with minimum fuel requirements and bugs all over the front window. THANKS BRAH.

I pulled Sharkie (that's what I'm gonna call her now, given her paint job) to the fuel truck, and put 6 gallons in each wing. Done and done.



Started Sharkie up, leaned for taxi, and taxi-ed to the run-up area. I pulled the stick around "the box" (front-left corner of range, front-right corner of range, back-right corner of range, back-left corner of range) to check that the controls were free and correct, and that the elevator was trimmed for takeoff. Cool.

Next was the run-up. Mixture full rich, throttle up to 1800 RPM, and instrument check. Looks good. Left mag check, about a 100 drop in RPM. Right mag check, about 200 drop in RPM and rough. Uh oh.

At this point we were thinking it could have been fouled plugs, so we leaned out the mixture for 2200 RPM for what seemed like 10 seconds. Did the mag check again at 1800 RPM, full rich, and there was the same issue with the right mag. Did the test one more time and still no dice. SIGH. Time to taxi back home. Breaking my balls, Sharkie. Breaking my balls.

As we were taxi-ing, Batelle and I were brainstorming what could have caused it. Loose spark plug? Maybe, but I checked them all in the pre-flight. Major fouling on the plug? Likely. We've had issues with spark plugs in the 180 and the ES, and sometimes you need to ultrasonically clean them to get everything off. The person who took Sharkie up previously did go on a longer flight, so maybe he ran the mixture too rich for a long duration of the flight or something. The maintenance guy at the club was going to look into it.

So yes, a bummer. But it was a good experience overall. Sometimes you have to make calls to NOT FLY as a pilot, as a matter of safety.

Batelle was cool about it, though. It didn't make sense to check out another plane (and there wasn't even another Citabria available), so we finished ground instruction for the next two lessons so that we could spend most of the next lesson flying :) I'm going to try to fit in two hours on Saturday and two hours on Sunday.

On the plus side, she says I'm doing great on the preflights and also at tailwheel taxi-ing! Next time she's going to play some tricks on me (move some inspection panels, etc.) and see if I catch them all. Goal: convince her that she can trust my pre-flights, and soon I won't have to take up any more instructor time for them.