Wing skin crack...ah, it must be annual time!

It's been far too long since posting anything. Add to that the subject of this post and...well...I'm not sure what to say...other than owning an airplane is always an adventure :-)

After a trip to Redding, CA Friday for an eddy current inspection on our prop hub (another subject altogether...but I'll resist the temptation to digress), one partner and I were crawling around under the Arrow cleaning stuff up a bit. I was under the right wing wiping out the wheel well and generally cleaning the goo off of the landing gear. I started working inboard of the gear, wiping off dirt and grime when I came across this:


The crack is in the forward wing skin, just forward of the rivet line attaching the skin to the spar. It is approximately three inches in length. At the moment, I'm getting some initial feedback from various friends and owners associations. Overall, however, the jury is out on a final solution for fixing this. Judgment day will come next week as we drop the plane off for the annual inspection. Fortunately, we deal with a great repair shop so I'm confident that we'll get the strait scoop on how best to proceed. Bah...just when we were hoping for a more reasonable repair bill than last year when two wing ribs had to be replaced as a result of performing a Piper service bulletin (the dreaded SB1161 for any Piper owners out there). We were on the bleeding edge of that one and it was a rather costly repair. Thank goodness for a partnership and cost sharing!

Here's to hoping for better future posts.