Maintenance

What is Specific Range?

“What is meant by the term ’specific range’?”
This is the question that I asked David Wyndam of Conklin and de Decker after coming across this term while looking at some aircraft comparison performance tables.
The performance tables listed the specific range for various airplanes in both long range and high speed cruise.  For instance, the specific [...]

No rpm drop when checking magneto. What’s wrong?

Here is a very important question that came in from Travis:
I’m training in C172’s from the early-mid 80’s, and I’ve got a mag check question: Occasionally when I do the mag check, I’ll get an RPM drop on one mag, but not on the other. The engine always runs fine, just no RPM drop on [...]

Where is the source for the “W” in A.R.R.O.W?

John writes asking about the W in the A.R.R.O.W. acronym:
With regards to the acronym “ARROW” for required documents: Where in the FARs is the specific requirement for the “W”? I realize the requirement would be indirectly there because of the requirement for the AFM. But the acronym would be rather lengthy if we listed all [...]

Does an alternator handle all the electrial load?

Here’s the question I received this morning from Jorge:
Hi could you please tell me if the alternator handles all of the electrical load?
It would have been easy to answer this question (yes) but I thought it would be fun to use a flash animation developed by MSAviation with some narration to demonstrate this point.  Here [...]

What’s wrong with my airplane?

Here’s a question that was recently sent to me:
It has happened to me twice recenely. I fly a Cessna 172R (1997). Under very normal weather conditions at low altitudes like 2,000 to 3,000 MSL, the RPM ramps up very high getting into the red zone and I have to pull the throttle back to almost [...]