I’ll be honest. Writing this month’s column about engine data as thousands continue to die from the virus seemed – trivial. Then two things came to mind. First, you’re probably reading this to get a short break from the news. Second, so much of the story – the hockey-stick spike in unemployment, the colored maps,…
If you can have latitude in your attitude, then a properly-timed set of mags can have – magnetude. I guess it can have magnitude, too, but this column’s about the good, bad and ugly of mags and ignition spark. The EGT pattern of a perfect mag check can be a beautiful thing. But the analysis…
The flip side of a cylinder running too lean is one that runs too rich. If it’s too lean the usual suspect is an injector clog for those with injectors or an induction leak for carbureted engines. When it’s too rich it’s often because of something all too common – an injector misplaced into the…
Yep, I’m angling for the award for best mis-appropriation of a Latin maxim. The real phrase – de gustibus… – translates literally to “regarding tastes, it should not be disputed” which in common usage has become “there’s no accounting for taste.” If we took it literally, a lot of film, music, food and other critics…
The Estonian physicist Thomas Johann Seebeck died a couple of generations before the Wright Brothers demonstrated powered flight. Each December I remember to thank the brothers from Dayton for their courage and persistence that eventually led to the gift of aviation to mankind, and from now on I’ll be including Herr Seebeck. Because it’s his…
Some words just mean what they mean and that’s all you get. Some words give you options. Scramble can be a verb or a noun. It can mean to order fighter jets into the air immediately, or a way to cook eggs, or a disordered mixture of things. When we confuse or mask radio transmissions…
Last month I said I would write about this so let’s end the suspense. I’ve been saving data for well over a year. I noticed this pattern before that, but started saving examples in mid 2018. So what is it? In the spirit of good Puzzling, I’ll provide three examples and you can take a…
It’s that time in the baseball season when teams calculate their magic number – the combination of their wins and losses by others that will clinch the pennant. Computer programmers use the term for something unrelated to baseball. Either way, it seems like a mis-appropriation of the word “magic”. When I think of magic it’s…
When it comes to troubleshooting issues with an aircraft engine, it’s probably safe to say that any engine data is better than no data at all. Data from cruise flights can tell us about the airplane’s normal operations, and when we have enough data from an airframe & engine cohort we can generate report cards…
I have written about this before, but not in two years, and with lots of new clients and a couple of new Savvy services in that time, it seemed like a good time for a biennial review. The comedians are fond of saying, “Timing is everything.” I think the quality of the material is pretty…