Monday Log

First, on this Memorial day I want to honor those that have given their lives so that I had the freedom to fly today!

Been slow going around here due to giving finals and completing the year end stuff. I should finally have some sim content within the next couple days

1.0 Cessna 172- Student that is looking to get back into GA as a sport pilot decided to go for the more traditional steam gauged Skyhawk over the Skycatcher. As he was expecting, it made him much more comfortable and confident which is always important.

.8 Pa-28- This was much more eventful!  Lesson 2 with a private pilot student.  We were working on getting comfortable with controlling the aircraft, configuration/speed changes, and slow flight.  There was enough time to do just a couple more maneuvers but then I started smelling a weird odor and thought I been "I've been down this road before..." (that story later).

I asked her if she was smelling it too, and she said yes so I headed back towards the airport since it was that weird smell of avionics getting hot, but luckily no smoke.  I shut down the avionics master and then the main master to troubleshoot. The smell seemed to get slightly better.  I turned back on first the battery side of the main master, then the alternator side, then the avionics and that all seemed ok, By now we were just about to enter the pattern so I tried to get one quick transmission even though it is an uncontrolled field.  I got maybe two words in before the avionics shut down.  I turned back off the now mushy switch/breaker avionics master switch.

During all this I when the main master was on the intercom still worked so I was able to tell the student what was happening.  She later mentioned I was pretty nonchalant about the whole thing, and for the most part there was no reason to not be since we were going back into an uncontrolled field.  I used it as a learning experience to help to show that the plane does fine if the electrical system isn't working (in day VFR at least!).  While it was not that big of deal, I can't say I didn't get a little worked up on the inside just for the reason of heading it off before it may have caused a cabin fire.  In retrospect for that reason, it would have probably been better not to attempt to make the transmission coming back in and just left the avionics master off.  We are hoping it is just the avionics switch/breaker, but we will see.

I've pointed out for a long time that those silver switches with numbers on the end in newer Cessnas are actually switch/breakers and one of them may be off not because you forgot to turn on that light, etc., it is because it was overloaded.  Now it looks like I've lived that in a Piper.