A little redundancy for a mere $95...priceless!

It's funny how anything less than $100 seems cheap when it comes to fixing something on an airplane (especially when it's your own airplane). Hmmm, must be because after the inevitable $1000+ repairs, anything less than $100 seems like chump change. Go figure.

When we bought the Arrow, one thought I had when looking at pictures of the panel was "Cool, dual glideslopes!"...only to later discover that the glideslope in the #2 nav head didn't work. I don't recall if we were told or if we surmised that we may not have a glideslope receiver for the #2 nav. After just now poking around a bit on the web, I've learned that our nav radios have built in glideslope receivers.

We had the plane at the avionics shop to get the VORs tuned since it's never good when the #1 VOR indicates six degrees left of course when the #2 VOR indicates (correctly) that you're on course. It turns out this was an easy fix for the avionics guys. While doing the work, they informed us that we do indeed have a glideslope receiver on the #2 nav and that our problem can likely be fixed for an hour of labor ($95). We authorize the hour for diagnosis and the problem turned out to be a few recessed pins in a connector. The end result? We now have a functional #2 glideslope and it only cost us $95...ah, life is good. Compared to a rough estimate of $1700 to buy/install a second glideslope receiver, the $95 option is...well...chump change.

Of course, now we *need* to go test fly the plane. Like I said, life is good! :-)