What Flight Schools DIDN’T TEACH YOU About Your Airplane

I made years of mistakes when I first got an

airplane

because I operated them the same way I did when I was in

flight

school and unfortunately there are some very bad habits that develop in

flight

schools

that can be really detrimental once that you really own the plane. Now, some of these I learned the hard way and then others became more apparent to me once I read all 500 pages of this Mike Bush book on engines and it's fantastic. I wish I hadn't put off reading it for so long. long because it's a little daunting because it's literally 500 pages of deep dive on engines, but for someone who learned in flight

schools

and then owned a plane like some of this stuff, I really wish someone had taught me this before, so I bet that

your

flight school

didn

't

teach

you or

didn

't

teach

you the things that I'm going to talk about in this video and once you have a plane, these things are so important that I really learned them the hard way, first you should definitely consider Get a digital engine monitor of some type that allows you to monitor individual cylinder temperatures.

The analog gauge on most of their

airplane

s isn't very useful because it's vague and also only really pulls data from one of the cylinders, but rather a digital engine monitor. It will help in many ways, especially with managing those temperatures because heating the cylinders too much is a really easy way to limit their life and cause expensive repairs. If you're like me, you probably didn't train an airplane that was equipped with one of these gauges and you obviously didn't know how to use it, but secondly, you also didn't know its importance and a major part of flying where you can accidentally damage

your

engine is that during the climb you can overheat. your engine very easily while climbing because the engine doesn't have much aerodynamic cooling, not much air passes through it and the air is hot because you're still low and you're running the engine like As hard as it is and then to make it worse things, if you're somewhere like me in Texas and you're flying in the middle of summer, you're probably baking on the ramp because you're number nine for takeoff at Addison and Running and all that, the engine got pretty hot, so which if you're not careful, like a couple minutes after takeoff, you can get very high cylinder head temperatures, but you wouldn't really know it unless you were equipped with one of these. digital gauges and depending on who you ask, you really don't want to run continental cylinders over 400 degrees and lycoming engines over 420 degrees, so the best thing about these digital monitors is that you can set off an alarm long before you do. you do. get to that threshold that way you can start to intervene and prevent them from getting too hot.

The second bad habit I formed in flight schools was not to lean the mixture on the ground during taxi, actually we would just lean it during cruise and that was it, but unless you want dirty spark plugs you really want to lean aggressively even in the ground, especially if you are now at sea level. They never taught me that until my mechanic told me my spark plugs were dirty and he asked me if he was supporting me. the ground and that's the first time I've heard that one of the common themes here is that you can develop these bad habits and training and literally never pay the price for it until you actually own the airplane and own it for a long time. enough to realize that every time I don't stand on the ground valid spark plugs are being created because in reality you are the one paying the maintenance bill and that is not necessarily the flight school's fault or problem because they are not necessarily there to teach. about owning an airplane, they are there to help you get your license, but I think more focus and emphasis could be placed on, hey, we know we're teaching you the legality of being a pilot here, but if you ever own an airplane, airplane, here's some other things, like the practical implications of

what

's happening, like if you're training here in Dallas where everything is like sea level and it's hot, but

what

happens when you go to another state or want to fly in winter?

These are things you have to think about and I feel like I was a little undertrained and underprepared when it came to that and I learned a lot of lessons once I actually owned the airplane. A good example is when it comes to oil. changes now, the flight school is doing all of its own maintenance, so oil changes and stuff never come up during training, but once you own the airplane, there are some key components of oil changes that don't They were evident to me immediately. The first thing is that not only is this a time to change the oil and keep it clean, I mean, it's definitely for that, but even more importantly, this is also a very good time to take a snapshot of the engine's health without having to disarm anything.

This happens by inspecting the oil screen and filter to visibly check for metals and see if the engine is producing metal, so to speak, but then also sending a sample of that oil to the lab to be analyzed for metal particles. They are microscopic, they are too small to see. and at first I never got an oil analysis and Kenny could say, hey, do you want an oil analysis? No, I don't really understand it, but then I realized how important they are, like you get data on how many different metals are present in your oil in parts per million, I mean, these are microscopic traces of metal, but they can be signs early warning of trends in your engines.

Now all engines produce a little bit of metal as they run, which is part of it, but analyzing this for trends will help you figure out what. to start monitoring or inspecting before it becomes a bigger problem depending on the type of metal you are starting to increase now you will also want to monitor oil consumption at each oil change basically big changes in oil consumption rates Oil can be a warning sign for cylinder material. and for other things and because I hadn't really noticed a change in oil consumption, you know, over the last few years as an airplane owner, I hadn't really thought about that, but in the future because of this book I'm going to keep a record to monitor how much oil the plane uses between oil changes, so basically when I first had the plane I really thought oil changes weren't too far off in your car, like they just changed it every x miles and they kept going. your life, but it's actually a really very important inspection point if you treat it as such and speaking of inspection, if you're using one of those digital engine monitors you should be able to have a download function where you can extract all the data.

The information that this monitor collects not only shows you in real time in the cabin, but also stores all that data that you can later analyze in a transparent way. I've never done this because I didn't really know how to analyze them, but then reading this book, I realized different ways you could analyze it, but also savvyaviation.com, which is my. I'm looking at the book here. Mike Bush's company offers a really unique service that I'm going to try and I'm going to report on this where you can basically upload all your data from dozens of flights and they will analyze all the different metrics that you know this is collecting about your engine, all the temperatures, fuel flow, whatever, if you collect it, they're looking at it compared to all the other similar airplanes in its cohort and then they'll basically just send you a report saying, "Hey, this is where you're at versus the entire cohort in terms of fuel consumption, in terms of engine temperatures and terms like all those things. and they give you practical information about how you're actually operating the airplane and maybe where you're out of line with others and basically you can get training on how to manage your engine because that's a big hole that I've really noticed in training, I mean, you're really just trying to learn the regulations and how to talk on the radio and how to fly the plane in the first place, but once you actually own the plane, there's a lot more in terms of it. of managing and monitoring the engine that I just didn't appreciate until I actually got it, so a tool like this one from savvyaviation.com can really help you get a second set of eyes on this so all that data can be analyzed. and it should probably be analyzed, the other thing they can do with it is look for trends to see if it has any signs of exhaust valve failure or impending failure and things like that, and they will send you notifications after analyzing some of your flights.

If they spot something going wrong, well I can't wait to try this. I'm definitely going to look at another great thing you can miss while training at a flight school. The danger of cold starts now in Texas is not frozen. That's a lot and even when it does, the planes I was training on slept in hangars, so even on cold mornings the planes weren't that cold, so true cold starts weren't really a problem other than Just prime the engine a little more. It is normal, but if you start the engine and the internal temperature is below freezing, it can cause serious damage to the engine very quickly and that is because the metals inside the engine, particularly the pistons and cylinders, are made of different types of metals that expand at different rates. speeds, so when you start the engine and it's below freezing, you can easily create metal to metal contact that the oil doesn't help you with regardless of the oil temperature and that can cause damage very, very quickly now in Texas, that just was It doesn't really stress me out for the reasons I just mentioned, but then what happens when you own the plane?

You get adventurous and say, hey, let's go to Idaho and even in the summer in Idaho, I have a photo here. We built a snowman in June. in idaho because a cold front came in and then what happens when you left your plane on the ramp and you didn't think about it and all of a sudden, hey, it's 30 degrees 25 degrees, whatever the plane probably takes off and you take off? You can do a lot of damage very quickly, so you really want to avoid cold starts, either try putting it on a hanger or definitely preheat it.

It is not just about preheating the oil, but rather preheating the entire engine to try to have a uniformity. temperature, that danger was definitely stressful for me, but when you're the one paying the bill, the maintenance bill, these things get your attention pretty quickly, so it's a 500 page book in a few minutes and, if you want, my five years as an airplane owner. experience in five minutes is on the screen now, so I'll see you there