Airplane Owner Maintenance - By Dean Showalter

What an adventure! The plan was to fly to a little country airport in New York for a day of specialized Cirrus training with a CSIP instructor named Jim. The flight there was beautiful and uneventful. But after landing and refueling, the engine would not start… all we got was a click-click-click when turning the […]

Tangier Island is a great little airplane getaway location! (Be sure to listen to the audio for the more detailed story.) Situated in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay off the coast of Virginia, it’s easily accessible with a small airplane. I borrowed my friend Tom’s Piper Cherokee and took my wife Maria there for […]

(Scroll down for video and photos.) When Dan, the owner of a nice A36 Bonanza called me and reported a “clunking noise” at the right main landing gear while moving the airplane by hand, I was stumped. So I did what I like to do when I have an airplane puzzler… I sent an email […]

This exhaust valve in a turbo-normalized A36 Bonanza looks quite good. The appearance is mostly concentric and uniform. There’s just that one area at about the 10 to 11 o’clock position that looks slightly uneven. If the compression test had been good, I likely would not have lapped the valve. But since it was 44/80 […]

It was a gorgeous VFR day, and we were flying in an Aerostar 601. The destination was an airport in Alabama and I was really looking forward to this trip. But soon after we leveled off at ten thousand feet and got the engines set and properly leaned, a strange but definite engine roughness occurred. […]

In the last podcast episode, we talked about an issue with my friend’s Cirrus SR22, and how the flaps occasionally would not retract. That problem got mostly resolved at the recent annual inspection when they made some adjustments due to the flap 50% and 100% travels being out of spec. However, there is now a […]

Don’t you just love intermittent problems?! This one has been just that… intermittent. In the 2005 Cirrus SR22, the flaps have 3 positions: up, 50%, and 100%. Our intermittent problem has been that occasionally, when selecting 50% or 100%, the flaps will begin to move down, but the “up” light will stay on. The flaps […]

This experience was a good one! (At least looking back in 2020 hindsight.) We had to dig deep to fix this one! I was about to give up and started thinking it might be time to take the airplane somewhere else for troubleshooting and repair. Thankfully Richard, our chief pilot, didn’t give up so easy […]

This morning I felt the inspiration to record a podcast episode… I got my hotel room set up with my computer and my microphone, and there it sat. I missed the window of opportunity… for whatever reasons, I did not record. And this afternoon, the inspiration was fading away. And then I remembered something. Often […]

(If you’re in a hurry, scroll down to see the tiny little chafed wire that caused this whole conundrum.) Now here’s the story… This landing gear relay breaker had been popping intermittently: It came time for annual inspection and we decided to replace the breaker with a new one, in order to rule out a […]