Airplane Owner Maintenance - By Dean Showalter

Tangier Island is a great little airplane getaway location! (Be sure to listen to the audio for the more detailed story.) Situated in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay off the coast of Virginia, it’s easily accessible with a small airplane. I borrowed my friend Tom’s Piper Cherokee and took my wife Maria there for […]

(Scroll down for video and photos.) When Dan, the owner of a nice A36 Bonanza called me and reported a “clunking noise” at the right main landing gear while moving the airplane by hand, I was stumped. So I did what I like to do when I have an airplane puzzler… I sent an email […]

This exhaust valve in a turbo-normalized A36 Bonanza looks quite good. The appearance is mostly concentric and uniform. There’s just that one area at about the 10 to 11 o’clock position that looks slightly uneven. If the compression test had been good, I likely would not have lapped the valve. But since it was 44/80 […]

It was a gorgeous VFR day, and we were flying in an Aerostar 601. The destination was an airport in Alabama and I was really looking forward to this trip. But soon after we leveled off at ten thousand feet and got the engines set and properly leaned, a strange but definite engine roughness occurred. […]

In the last podcast episode, we talked about an issue with my friend’s Cirrus SR22, and how the flaps occasionally would not retract. That problem got mostly resolved at the recent annual inspection when they made some adjustments due to the flap 50% and 100% travels being out of spec. However, there is now a […]