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Sometimes I have trouble with the wastegates functioning properly at altitude, too, and I get some bootstrapping of manifold pressures (needle separation), which is unpleasant at best (because the props get out of sync), and is dangerous at worst (because the bootstrapping could be due to an exhaust manifold leak). I routinely fly over that altitude, but the cylinder head temperatures get a little high, and the engines burn more oil. However, despite a published service ceiling of 27,000 feet, the engines really don’t perform well over 15,000 feet. I don’t push the engines hard, running at 65% power or lower most of the time.
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While still scratching my head over that one, I heard from the owner of a cabin-class pressurized twin Cessna that made me start scratching my head again: What is this owner thinking? Exhaust leak? Good grief! I cannot imagine operating my LAWNMOWER with a known fuel leak, much less my airplane.
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Now he’s asking whether it would be okay to fix the fuel selector and continue flying with the fuel leak in the engine compartment unaddressed. He only brought it to the attention of his mechanic when he could no longer stop the leak when the aircraft was parked by turning off the fuel selector. Here we have an owner who knowingly flew his airplane for a year with a known significant fuel leak in the engine compartment. Usually I’d say let’s fix the selector and see if that resolves the problem altogether but I am concerned about the fuel pump going out at some critical time. However, they are now telling me that given that the aircraft now leaks in any position, it’s also a bad engine driven fuel pump. I am being told by the very competent maintenance supervisor that originally it was simply a fuel selector gone bad. Not understanding why the fuel now leaked regardless of fuel selector setting, I started the aircraft, taxied it around to warm-up the engine and then left it at the maintenance hangar. There was a big pool of avgas beneath the airplane, and the fuel gauges indicated that I had lost almost all the fuel in my tanks…at $4.75 a gallon! The aircraft was leaking fuel despite the selector being in the off position. I never established whether the fuel leaked while the engine is running.Īfter not flying for the past month, I went out to my airplane last week. Obviously one of the very important shutdown tasks for me was to turn the fuel selector off in order to stop the leak. The drip occurred with the frequency one drip probably every five seconds while the aircraft sat static with the fuel selector on either the left or right tank. Shortly after I bought my airplane last year, I noticed a drip coming from under the aircraft which pooled just to the left of the nosewheel. Check out this email that I received from an aircraft owner: Some aircraft owners apparently don’t share my fix-it-now philosophy. Not to mention that continuing to fly with a known mechanical deficiency can sometimes be hazardous to your health as well as your wallet. My five decades as an aircraft owner has taught me that it’s usually cheaper to fix a problem sooner rather than later…sometimes a great deal cheaper. Almost always, I fix such problems right away rather than putting them off. When something isn’t right on my bird, it drives me nuts until I fix it. On the other hand, when it comes to my own airplane, I have always had something close to a zero-tolerance policy about mechanical problems. In fact I’ve made something of a crusade out of saving money on aircraft maintenance, and for the past 10 years my company has helped aircraft owners save millions of dollars by avoiding unnecessary and excessive maintenance. Now I’m just as averse to spending money as the next guy (and probably more than most). Particularly amazing to me are some of the mechanical problems that aircraft owners elect to live with rather than fix. Sometimes I just can’t fathom what makes aircraft owners do some of the things they do.