Q1 2023 Newsletter
Updates from the FAAFC Board
Message from the President – Doug “Smash” Yurovich
Welcome to 2023!
This is our second year of the Quarterly Newsletter. I want to thank all those who continue to input information and put together the Club’s newsletter. The newsletter keeps all members better informed of issues and happenings in the club.
We continue to grow in membership, and have added a few new instructors. Welcome to all our new members! Our club possesses a vast amount of aviation experiences providing all our flyers a knowledge base benefitting all members. Please take advantage of that experience and fly with other members and our instructors.
We continue with the plan of updating and improving our Pipers in accordance with members desires and funds available. There is more information about the plan in this newsletter.
KHEF is having an open house on May 6th and the FAAFC will be present in booth or static display, volunteers will be needed. Please mark your calendar and consider some time at KHEF on the 6th of May supporting the FAAFC.
I want to thank all those members who continue to contribute to the Club’s effort to move forward and grow. There will be more openings for Club leadership opportunities as we near the Annual Meeting and elections in April, May, or June 2023.
See you on the flight line,
Smash
Operations & Maintenance Officer’s Update – Dan Botzer
N75382 – Maintenance contact – Dan Botzer:
- Remember to get an engine pre-heat from APP if below 32 degrees – club will pay for it
- Oil change is coming due.
- Right main fuel tank drain is dripping at a pretty good rate. I looked in the tank and the level is below the inside tab. Goal is to get this fixed with the oil change.
- New seat covers for the Warrior are coming. They are not inexpensive but the tear in the co-pilot seat is getting worse and really detracts from using the plane. Hope to get them sometime in February or March.
- The annual is due by the end of March.
- If you’d like to help with the annual (I usually do) while Kevin and Bill do the annual please reach out to Dan.
N9397W (Hangar B13) – Maintenance contact – Jon Lammers:
- New muffler has been installed.
- Please be aware when conducting magneto checks. If you accidentally switch the ignition to “off” (skipping over the right and left magneto), allow the engine to completely shut off and then go through the procedures for starting the engine.
- We also replaced the starter a couple weeks ago as the Bendix was occasionally not working.
N6472J (Hangar B11) – Maintenance contact – Andrew Baron:
- The plane is getting a lot of use. It helps that it is inside plugged in to an oil pan warmer so you don’t need to get a pre-heat when it’s cold.
- The muffler was replaced in December. It was leaking and caused my personal CO detector to go off. That was the first time I had ever heard my detector alarm. It goes off at 50 ppm of CO.
- I did order the stick on CO detectors for all three of our planes. Personally I think those are not very good so I bought my own portable CO detector (cost about $150). You might want to consider doing that also.
- There have been a few squawks with the plane that I hope to get fixed soon. The main one being the landing light is not working. Andrew and I found a bad connector that we’ll need to be replace.
- We got the board approval to buy a CGR-30P engine monitor for 72J. This will be the same one as in 97W (the premium version) that will monitor most engine parameters. This will take a few months to get on order and get installed.
General maintenance comments and reminders:
- Jeff Emsinger has now volunteered to do the Garmin GPS database updates in all three of our planes as well as the Savvy engine monitor data download and transmission to Savvy. Thanks Jeff for helping out with this. And thanks to Sam who has been doing this for a long time.
- The data from 97W is analyzed by Savvy
- We should pull the engine cowling off on pre-flights for 97W and 72J
- Continue to lean religiously all planes
- Please do not ride the brakes
- Please clean up the interior of the plane after you fly
- Please check the Oil Change tach hours on the cover sheet when you fly and when we are within 5 hours of oil change time, send an email to Dan, Jon or Andrew
Membership Officer’s Update – Todd Berry
- As of January 20, 2022 the Club has 34 active members with 0 candidate on the Club Waitlist.
- As Smash mentioned above, we’ve added a couple of new CFI’s to our ranks
- Welcome to new members:
- Colin “Dice” Caskey
- Max Greenlee
- Sam Yund
- Samuel Ragland, CFI
- Grant Holve, CFI
- Unfortunately, we’ve had a few members go inactive in the past quarter
- We are still actively looking for new members!
Safety Officer’s Update – Glenn Collins
Over the past couple of months, our friends at the FAA have been quite busy updating a few regulations and writing handbooks. In the past two months two regulatory changes have been enacted. If you are operating under the terms of BasicMed in lieu of holding a traditional medical certificate you can now perform the duties of safety pilot without being the pilot in command. This was a minor change buried in a larger more publicized change centered upon balloon pilots conducting tourist flights.
The second regulatory change took effect on the day I am writing this. Aircraft registrations have had a three-year expiration cycle for the past decade. The FAA had decided this is too short and they are now on a seven-year cycle. What I don’t like about this change is they will not be re-issuing registration certificates. This means for four years we will be flying with certificates marked with an expiration date in the past. I can’t imagine this creating an issue! The final rule includes a table listing the year of issue and the new expiration year. I’ve printed this out and will put copies of the table with each of our registrations.
There is also a new FAA handbook. The Aviation Weather Handbook (FAA-H-8083-28) was published in late November 2022. It consolidates weather information from six Advisory Circulars into a single document. Conceptually pulling all this information into a single source should reduce redundancy and facilitate finding what we might be looking for instead of searching six documents.
Secretary’s Update – Francisco Fuentes
The club officers met during the fall of 2022 to discuss future upgrades and a financial plan. In summary, the club needs to ensure that a rolling engine reserve is properly funded before any other major expenses are incurred. Good news is we do have a healthy engine reserve, so now it’s a matter of saving for those expenses.
Additionally the bulletin board has been maintained with announcements sent by the maintenance officers to ensure we all have access to important messages and notices. If you ever have an operational question about the aircraft, dont forget to check out the bulletin board.
If the information is not already there, please send a message and we’ll add it.