jim plaster
Well Known Member
We had an interesting situation at our local airport happen last week and feel its worthy of noting here...especially since another airplane was severely damaged. We had a gentleman fly up from Florida for an overnight stay at his parents house here in nc. He purchased fuel and took his mom flying and had an un eventful flight. Worthy of noting ...I purchased fuel right after he did. Next morning it was 22 degrees f. And he had planned on flying home to Florida. He preflighted (?). ...which supposedly included sumping the tanks....he also had to jump start due to a dead battery. He warmed up ....did his run up and taxied out. Once he cleared the departure end of the runway things went south FAST! It started running rough....surging as well... Lucky for him he had enough intermittent power to maintain altitude / airspeed to make the dreaded 180 back to the runway. Touching down fast and overrunning the end of the runway...all three gear collapsed on the airplane,luckily no one was hurt. Investigating further we found the gascolator on the firewall inaccessible with the cowl on the aircraft...( if you're going to mount one...at least make it accessable on your preflight). Had this been done during the build,and drained prior to the flight ,we wouldn't have drained nearly 8 1/2 ounces of water from it post flight. Has anyone ever had water freeze in their gascolator or sump? If this could happen we could have a false negative on a preflight water inspection while sumping. This could have contributed to what happened here....all the while it began melting on the warmup ...finally making it to the engine on takeoff... It wasn't an RV and was a injected lycoming....details haven't been released yet so I'll leave that to the Feds.....I later sumped my ship,since I hadn't flown since buying fuel and found no water at all.....be careful folks....check that sump!