01.06.2011: The new wheel pants brackets arrived today, so I went to the airport to install them. The new ones have reinforcements, as the picture below shows. A few of the British builders have reported similar problems with the old brackets on the Yahoo forum, so I guess the reinforcement is a result from their experience and should cure the problem. They also mostly operate from grass runways, as I do, where the load on the bracket is probably significantly hither than when operating from a hard surface.
I forgot to order the locking nuts which are fitted to the brackets, so we removed the ones from the old brackets by drilling out the rivets that held them in place. That was only a five minutes job, as Silvan and I did it together for both planes, mine and the one of the club.
From the Yahoo forum I know of three “teething” problems with early SportCruiser models, which have been reported by multiple owners, which are the cracks in the muffler, broken wheel pants brackets and cracks in the nose landing gear. I have now cured the first two, and the third one has mostly happened with rental or club planes, so I guess I should be fine now.
13.06.2011: I spent a longer weekend hiking in the Jura mountains, then went for a few days to Sweden on business, and then the weather was quite bad over Pentecost, so I could only go flying again today. I went with my wife to Wangen-Lachen, which is only half an hour south of Lommis, but that was about as far as we could go as the alps were fully in clouds. Humid air from the North-West was pushed against the alps, creating a wall of clouds as I have rarely seen it.
I have started planning some longer flights for this summer, and noticed that the French homebuilders organisation RSA has scheduled their annual fly in for July 1st to 3rd in Yannes, France. Yannes is only about two flying hours from Lommis, so I am considering flying there. Also high on the agenda is a flight to Denmark, but that will probably be in August or September. And then of course there is Elba, Venice… Too many places, too little time….
19.06.2011: Today I received a mail from a guy in Sweden, asking how I managed to convince the authorities to allow me to increase the MTOM of my SportCruiser to 630 kg. He has built one too, and would also like to have the higher weight. I sent him all the papers I have submitted to the EAS, as well as the Swiss Federal Office of Civial Aviation FOCA, let’s hope that this will convince the respective Swedish authorities.
29.06.2011: Last September one of our pilots aborted a takeoff with our club’s Archer III much too late, with the result that he ended up in a ditch around 200 m beyond the end of the runway. Luckily nobody was hurt and no fire broke out, but the plane was damaged significantly. Even though the cost estimate for the repair was close to the residual value of the plane, the insurance company asked us to repair it non the less. That included changing one of the wings, repairing the other one, overhauling the main landing gears, exchanging the main spar box in the fuselage and having the engine and propeller checked due to prop strike.
This was the first repair we did in our Part-145 maintenance that required an EASA approval, so paperwork was complicated too. Finally, after about six months, we finished the plane and passed the final airworthiness check by the FOCA inspector without any deficiency. Today I went with one of our mechanics to perform an extended checkflight, including re-calibration of the stall warning device and verifying stall speed in all configurations.
The conclusion was that flies nearly better than before.
