Sunday, June 03, 2007

Wing skin crack repaired

Ok, so here's what the fix for our lower wing skin crack looks like:


My friendly A&P suspects oil canning of the lower wing skin. Sounds like this can be caused by a couple of things. Walking on the wing walk area for one and putting the plane on jacks for another. This type of repair is somewhat common for Arrows. There was another one in for annual, sitting right next to ours and it had both sides done. Now I have something to look for when crawling around other Arrows. Reminds me of my brother and how he pokes around homebuilts looking for things that other folks (like me) would never notice.

The plane is out of annual and I performed the required test pilot duties this afternoon. The funny thing is that I was planning to have a friend fly his plane back to my home airport so that he could fly me back to the airport where we had the annual done, I could pickup my car, and go home. All was well and good until we hop in his plane for the return flight and it won't start due to a solenoid problem. So, we put his plane in my hangar then flew back back where we had the annual done. Hopefully the stars will align tomorrow such that he can get someone to look at his plane and we can get our respective babies back in their normal nests. Not that another excuse to go flying is a bad thing :-)