Springtime, annual inspections and helicopter flights

We are enjoying an early taste of summer this year - the last week or so has seen us digging out our shorts again, the birds are singing and the grass is growing.

Since I got back from PNG I have been working on an annual inspection on a local plane that has been a regular at MMS for quite a few years. It is a 1959 Piper Comanche, and although it is in pretty good shape, it is still 18 years older than me, so it has a few wee jobs that are needing attention. Part of any annual inspection is a documentation review. This is where we make sure that airworthiness certificates and registration documents are valid, and that the Airworthiness Directives that are applicable to the plane are being dealt with. Airworthiness directives are mandatory requirements issued by the FAA to ensure that specific issues on airframes, engines, or accessories are handled correctly, so that they remain airworthy. These can be for anything from checking a specific part of structure every year for cracks, to ensuring that a particular engine component is changed within a certain time-frame. At the moment we have the plane up on jacks; we had an AD to work through on the landing gear, which involved checking tolerances on the bushings that the landing gear pivot on as they fold into the aircraft, measuring the “over centre” dimensions that lock the landing gear down, and replacing some time-limited parts. The main gear is all now back together, but the nose gear had some parts that had to be sent out to a specialist for repair. Once the parts come back, we’ll reassemble the nose gear and the plane should be just about ready to be returned to it’s owner.

The Comanche on jacks waiting for it's nose gear.

While I have been getting back into the swing of life here in Ohio, I’ve finally managed to pull together some of the video I took in PNG. While we were there we were able to take a short helicopter flight out to a village in the Finisterre mountains, where a Swedish Bible translator was working on translating the Bible into the local language. I thought you might like to see a bit of the kind of terrain around where we were. It really shows how much aviation is relied on for accessing remote parts of this difficult countryside.

(If you get this blog by email, here is the link to the video.)

http://youtu.be/B3zGtZChsak