Have you ever had one of those moments in your RV (or other airplane) where for a brief moment, you were so shocked, surprised, (terrified?) that a year's worth of adrenaline went through your system in a moment...and it turned out that in fact, nothing serious was actually wrong?
An example. Years ago, I was climbing through 9,000' in my big-engined Yankee (think RV-6a with poor performance) on an IFR flight plan when the cockpit was filled with a huge, sudden, loud BANG! Thinking I'd just blown a jug off the engine, I pushed over to keep from losing airspeed, thinking I was about to be flying an IFR glider , and started scanning the engine gauges. To my utter amazement, everything was normal - no loss of RPM, oil pressure and temperature were good, voltage...and the airplane was still flying. I slowly resumed my climb, and got my heart rate under control, trying to figure out what had just happened. All the windows were in place, no structure seem cracked - and then I remembered a bag of stuff that my mom had put in the baggage area behind the seats. One things in there was a mylar balloon. Now those things don't stretch like a vinyl balloon - they just over pressurize until the suddenly blow a seam! Wow - what a lesson! They were permanently added to my banned cargo list...
See the kind of story I mean? It might be useful for everyone to collect those kind of stories - things that scared us half to death, but turned out to be nothing. Instrumentation failures? running into a bunch of toy balloons? This is the safety section, and all the folks up north are complaining because the weather is too lousy to fly - so how about some hangar flying - lets see what we can collect!
Paul
An example. Years ago, I was climbing through 9,000' in my big-engined Yankee (think RV-6a with poor performance) on an IFR flight plan when the cockpit was filled with a huge, sudden, loud BANG! Thinking I'd just blown a jug off the engine, I pushed over to keep from losing airspeed, thinking I was about to be flying an IFR glider , and started scanning the engine gauges. To my utter amazement, everything was normal - no loss of RPM, oil pressure and temperature were good, voltage...and the airplane was still flying. I slowly resumed my climb, and got my heart rate under control, trying to figure out what had just happened. All the windows were in place, no structure seem cracked - and then I remembered a bag of stuff that my mom had put in the baggage area behind the seats. One things in there was a mylar balloon. Now those things don't stretch like a vinyl balloon - they just over pressurize until the suddenly blow a seam! Wow - what a lesson! They were permanently added to my banned cargo list...
See the kind of story I mean? It might be useful for everyone to collect those kind of stories - things that scared us half to death, but turned out to be nothing. Instrumentation failures? running into a bunch of toy balloons? This is the safety section, and all the folks up north are complaining because the weather is too lousy to fly - so how about some hangar flying - lets see what we can collect!
Paul