Had a really scary experience yesterday.
Was flying from central Texas to Tennessee. putting along with a nice 30 knot tail wind when all of a sudden my Autopilot kicked off.
I was having just a little bit of turbulence, so my first thought was it was more than the AP could handle. However by the time I grabbed the stick and started to mess with reengaging the AP I realized something was very wrong.
My elevator trim had gone crazy on me, going full down deflection.
As you can imagine it is really hard to control an airplane in such a situation. I did (obviously) manage to get the plane under control, but I was unable to get the trim to move back to the proper position.
I wound up declaring an emergency (amazing how easy that is to do when you really need one). The controller was great and found me an airport close by so that I could shoot the RNAV approach, by hand, down to almost minimums.
Fortunately (very) I got the plane on the ground in one piece. Once on the ground I went about troubleshooting the problem.
I was able to unstick the trim, and run it to full stops numerous times with no issues, however I had to do it from the soft keys on the G3X touch. The buttons on my stick not only aren't working properly, but are performing the wrong function. the trim down button now works as right alieron....
Beyond that, and sending Garmin the logs they requested I haven't tried much troubleshooting yet.
Any ideas?
-Dan
Was flying from central Texas to Tennessee. putting along with a nice 30 knot tail wind when all of a sudden my Autopilot kicked off.
I was having just a little bit of turbulence, so my first thought was it was more than the AP could handle. However by the time I grabbed the stick and started to mess with reengaging the AP I realized something was very wrong.
My elevator trim had gone crazy on me, going full down deflection.
As you can imagine it is really hard to control an airplane in such a situation. I did (obviously) manage to get the plane under control, but I was unable to get the trim to move back to the proper position.
I wound up declaring an emergency (amazing how easy that is to do when you really need one). The controller was great and found me an airport close by so that I could shoot the RNAV approach, by hand, down to almost minimums.
Fortunately (very) I got the plane on the ground in one piece. Once on the ground I went about troubleshooting the problem.
I was able to unstick the trim, and run it to full stops numerous times with no issues, however I had to do it from the soft keys on the G3X touch. The buttons on my stick not only aren't working properly, but are performing the wrong function. the trim down button now works as right alieron....
Beyond that, and sending Garmin the logs they requested I haven't tried much troubleshooting yet.
Any ideas?
-Dan