Years like the just past one make one doubt one’s sanity about aircraft ownership.

This year, GXRP has been grounded, undergoing maintenance, for a record amount of time. The list of events was like this:

month	reason	downtime
January	bad magneto again	1 week
February	leaky fuel bowls	1 day
May	50hr + avionics upgrade	3 weeks
May	heater fuel valve crack	1 day
June	nose oleo flat	1 week
June	50hr	1 day
July	bad magneto again	1 day
August	magneto overhauls	3 weeks
September	annual inspection, propeller overhauls	4 weeks
October	right alternator overhaul	1 week
December	50hr	1 day
December	left alternator overhaul	2 weeks
December	cylinder ignition problem	2 weeks

The grand total, in terms of downtime, was 18 weeks out of 52, many of which were around prime flying season in late summer and early winter. The grand total, in terms of cost, was entirely too high to quantify and archive here. Only about a third of that time was discretionary. About half of it was related to what might be called “collateral damage” during prior maintenance, i.e., stuff that became more broken than it was. The rest was due to parts simply wearing out.

I hope 2006 will be better, and I don’t have to frequently answer people who ask … “no, the plane is still down …”. Perhaps I will move to another town & airport, where I can have timely attention of local mechanics. That would have made about a month’s difference of extra uptime.

If you’re in the mood to read about a somewhat likelier doomsday scenario than melted icecaps drowning New York, read this article by Mark Steyn.

The two Lycoming engines in GXRP are about 70% done with their expected lifespan. They are showing annoying but not alarming signs of this.

There are several ways in which aircraft piston engines can show signs of decay. Metal in the oil can indicate impending failure with the crankcase widgetry – something that cannot be repaired short of an overhaul. Poor cylinder compression can indicate leaky intake or exhaust valves, which too suggest impending failure, but at least can be repaired with a cylinder exchange. Increased oil consumption accompanies wearing piston rings, which is thankfully a gradual process.

GXRP has the last of these problems. Oil usage per hour of flight is well below the manufacturer’s “alarm” limits, but well above that of a fresh clean engine. What’s worse: some of the oil that’s disappearing is entering the cylinders’ combustion chambers, and can foul spark plugs. Oil-fouled plugs tend to not fire, and show up on the engine monitor and as excessive RPM drops during the runup magneto checks.

During this phase of the piston ring wear-out, there is not enough oil spewage to foul spark plugs in flight, so the magneto check glitches are somewhat of a nuisance. In fact, oil-fouled plugs tend to clear up within seconds of a lift-off, when the engine produces full power. That’s partly because then the piston rings are squeezed back into their normal, high-combustion-pressure physical dimensions; everything is warmed up and expanded; things just seem to seal better. Note that oil fouling on spark plugs is not burned off the same way as lead fouling, by highly leaned medium power runs.

If one runs the engines on the ground for a long time, bad news. The piston will smear oil into the combustion chamber, but the oil is not blown or burned back out. Lucky me: as a part of an electrical system repair in GXRP, a number of low-power ground runs were performed. This appears to have collected just enough oil to interfere with both spark plugs of a particular cylinder. This grounded the plane again, right after it came of maintenance. ARGH. At least the problem wasn’t a more nasty metallic omen like stuck valves.

In the short term, I need to clean the plugs one way or the other, go flying, and get back to a cleaner state of cylinder existence. In the longer term (next few months), I expect to need some flavour of cylinder repair. Perhaps I will outright replace all 12; perhaps I’ll have a few individual ones re-honed and piston rings replaced; perhaps the situation will stabilize enough to defer a solution until next year; perhaps a very unlikely in-flight upset will prompt immediate maintenance.

The cost of what sounds like the most conservative approach (outright cylinder replacement with new parts) is high enough to counteract my normal problem-solving tendency to go for the higher-cost but longer-lasting fix. Plus, the work is so invasive to the engine guts that, should collateral damage occur, it would be significant in hazard and expense. So conservatism in this case might best be practiced with the “it’s working well enough; attempts to fix it can hurt more than help; let’s wait a while” option.

A handy insight arose during a long-delayed flight with GXRP (yes, it’s back up).

I noticed that, after almost a month off, I was slightly bewildered, like a student. It was not that the basics were difficult, but that there was a lot of distraction. Auxiliary sensations, behaviors, others’ actions all vied for my attention far more now than when I’m fresh with the skills. The main problem with the lack of recent practice was my lessened ability to tune out those distractions. It’s weakened discipline.

Looking back on other types of activities I’ve stopped then started, there may be a similar tendency. The basic mechanics of driving still operate well, automatically, after a bunch of days off, but the focus is missing. My eyes rove all over; I miss some important cues; I’m clumsy. More noise intrudes on the signal.

If this is a wider phenomenon, maybe to regain a practiced state of mind is to better filter the irrelevant again.

James Randi wonders about the efficacy of prayer in his weekly newsletter.

The last paragraphs:

And I must note here that when the first news came out on the NBC-TV Today Show about the disaster, the governor of West Virginia began his comments with “Here in West Virginia, we believe in miracles, and we’re praying for the miners.” When the first report was made that all 13 had survived, people were quick to attribute it to God. One miner’s young wife, 27, clutching her baby girl, said, “It just shows you enough prayers went out. It’s a miracle.” And, President Bush said, “We send our prayers…” On that same program, there was an item about a woman who’d won a huge lottery prize. The first words out of her mouth were, “God has answered my prayers!” Forgive me for not grasping the situation here: are we to believe that God ignored all the prayers for the trapped miners because He was busy arranging for that woman’s lottery number to be chosen? And to the young mother: do you suppose there weren’t quite enough prayers, or your husband would still be alive, and is that the miracle you cite? God allowed the miners to die because the pleas for mercy directed at Him weren’t properly phrased, while the lottery winner’s prayers were better formulated? Just what are this deity’s priorities?
Maybe He doesn’t care, at all.
Maybe He isn’t there…

Federal election season is on in Canada, so the phones are ringing.

Who’s calling? Representatives from all the parties, of course. They receive lists of residents, and like telemarketers, carpet-bomb them with questions about support. “Will you vote for the X party?”

My guess is that a significant people are naive and honestly tell the callers their intentions. It gets worse: at the polling site, representatives of the parties get to match actual voters with their telephone records. So, they not only know how people will likely vote – they even know when those people actually do vote!

Why is this a problem? Well, if you tell the truth to the parties other than the one you actually support, then these others get a good sense of the closeness of the contest. If the race is close on the final polling day, they can try to scrape the bottoms of their support barrels, borrow some dead Chicago ex-residents who keep voting for Daley, and try to turn the race around. Who knows – they might even succeed occasionally. Or, early on during the campaign, your information could let the bad guys decide to cut their losses in your area and redirect resources to more contentious ridings.

So, when some stranger polls you about your voting intentions, you may be doing a disservice to your candidate if you answer. Shut up and vote (or don’t).

I’ve been a multi-year client of Avidyne for avionics in GXRP. While I have no complaints about the hardware, two times now, their sole customer support person, one Jessica Power, has emitted a repugnant air of customer disservice.

The technical background of the service dispute is simple.

Avidyne’s multi-function-display units include a transceiver to talk to Orbcomm satellites to downlink weather and uplink some basic telemetry data while in flight. They charge by the message traffic, which comes out to about $20/hour for a bad-weather IFR flight. The data transfer is pretty slow, but covers parts of Canada as well as the US, and is good enough for me. They call this the “narrowcast” service.

In addition, an optional receiver is available that receives just weather data from the XM broadcast service. XM weather data is fresher and better (since it is continuously broadcast US-nation-wide). Since it does not include Canadian information, requires extra equipment (the receiver), and a separate XM subscription, I did not purchase this option. Note that nothing extra would be purchased from Avidyne in any case – both the XM receiver and the XM subscription are purchased from other companies.

They call having both the Orbcomm transceiver and the XM receiver as the “multilink” service.

Avidyne offers a web-based system for managing the narrowcast subscription. Since last summer, this system also allowed customers to view the telemetry data, specifically recent positions/speeds of the airplane. Superimposed on a map, this allows ground-dwellers to know where GXRP has been and where it’s going. There is also a separate two-way text-messaging service available, for pilots and (say) their families or dispatchers to exchange notes.

On to the customer disservice.

The first one relates to the text messaging system. According to the myavidyne web site, and according to the installed hardware, this feature is not available without a “multilink” subscription. I sent an email to the generic inquiry address a question about why that would be. After all, the XM system does not carry text message data (and this was confirmed by Ms. Power) – it all goes over Orbcomm (the plain “narrowcast” system). She refused to give any sort of technical rationale. I asked whether it was simply a marketing constraint (intended somehow to promote the XM system), but she said no, and that they have no financial interest in it anyhow. So she claimed there was a technical reason, but simply shut the discussion down when I asked what & why. For example, would text messaging work for someone whose XM receiver fails in flight? Or one who travels outside the XM (Continental US) service area? She refused to say, and refused to find out.

The current issue relates to the web-based telemetry viewing. A few days ago, this access went away (mostly). A login screen that has worked fine for months now says “multilink subscription is required”. Since I’ve been a happy user, I’ve sent another polite email wondering what’s up with the change. The answer, from the same Jessica Power, is that this too “does require XM and 2-Way datalink communication”. But of course that is false, since I’ve been using it perfectly well for almost a year. Requests for elaboration, and indeed escalation to a higher level person at Avidyne, have so far gone unanswered.

I don’t know what to think about this company now. I don’t know if Ms. Power doesn’t know the truth, or whether she cannot share the truth. Her own claims, even taken without my own experience, suffer several points of contradiction. These emails are just surreal. They make me worry about what other service might quietly disappear, with no explanation except that perhaps I should have sent someone else money for a service I can’t use and don’t actually need.

Come on guys and gals, try to be honest with your customers.

Here are some more amusing instances of companies messing with common sense in order to make another buck off of silly consumers.

Item. No-name brand “9V Size” battery that only puts out 7.5V when new. It is a poor substitute.

Item. Bulk box of baby wipes, containing seven little packs, rather the eight for which the outer carton was designed and would precisely fit.

Item. Snack and drink sizes that shrink over a course of months while maintaining the price.

… and many more.

It’s both funny and sad that these companies successfully assess customer mentality with such cynicism.

Ever since seeing the Japanese film After Life a few years ago, some isolated moments of experience have become poignant reminders of the film.

These are iconic events that summarize even years of one’s life. Here are a few.

Five years ago: Pyper (our big Collie), Juimiin, and I, all lazily stretched out over our bed. The bed is not entirely big enough for three large mammals, so some appendages hang off; some overlap. But all three of us are content for a few minutes, some spring evening.

Two years ago, no again, two weeks ago: Just flying around in the airplane, marvelling that we can casually visit my parents hundreds of miles away, that it’s beautiful, that this activity managed to keep my mind sharp even as so many others were dulling.

Today: Juimiin just left for the evening to join her family’s Chinese New Year event, so I look after the last half-hour of Eric’s evening. I bathe the little guy, dress him, coo him toward drowsiness. I wonder how come he smiles so much when I smile at him. I recall how much he has learned to do over just the last two or three months, just about making up for his unpleasant first year. He rests his head on my thigh, and goes to sleep.

Item. This month’s issue of the NRA magazine “American Hunter” has a cover story headlined “Brushes with Death”. However, they are not talking about the animals: the subtitle is A wildlife artists’s close encounters.
Item. US businesses fall over themselves to do business in communist China, which has both some anti-american ambitions and capabilities. Yet Cuba, which despite ambitions has zero capabilities, is isolated.