LancairTalk

I mentioned last Thursday that when I had my little CO incident I noticed that the EGTs on cylinder
1 were not looking right. The CO situation was the bigger emergency and it looks like that is all
fixed, but something with cylinder 1 is still not right. Whenever I got LOP after a minute or two
the EGT on cylinder drops 50-100 degrees and bounces around all over the place.

The initial lost of potential causes was a pretty long one. It could be sparks, injector fouling, cylinder valve issues,
exhaust gas leaks, the magnetos, induction leaks, or a probe. On my flight back from PDX to BFI I did a lean test. Everything was fine ROP and
all the cylinders peaked with a sweet GAMI-spread of .4gph. I forgot to do an in-flight mag check on that flight.
When I returned to Seattle I dropped the airplane off with Galvin who appear to have made some great progress
in getting their staff trained with Columbia’s. They opened it up yesterday, checked for any signs of exhaust
gas leaks (which would be one of the more serious potential problems) and swapped the sparks from cylinder 1 to
cylinder 3. By the way- Walter Atkinson recommended not swapping sparks but it was already too late, they had put
the cowl back together. His point is that if there is a problem with the spark it could cause pre-ignition which
could destroy the engine in 30 seconds. I wasn’t too freaked out about that since I knew I was going to be
hyper-monitoring the gauges for this maintenance flight and that usually pre-ignition could be arrested by going
full rich and reducing power. Plus in the previous flights the CHTs had been solid “normal” so there certainly
hadn’t been any sign of pre-ignition so far. In addition by keeping the spark it makes the diagnostic result
a bit more clear- if you destroy the old spark, take a flight and everything looks fine, did you fix the problem
or is it just hiding somewhere?

Today I took off from BFI on the Vashon VFR departure to the west and climbed up to 2500ft and then
7500ft for a pair of GAMI-lean tests.
I supposed I didn’t really need to do a full lean test but it gets me a nice clean set of data, eliminates other
potential problems and was also useful to check for induction leaks. You check for induction leaks by running
the tests at low altitude (where ambient pressure is higher than the manifold pressure) and then at 7500ft where
the ambient pressure is just about equal to the manifold pressure. If the lean-test results show a very different
pattern its likely there is some induction leak going on.

The leak test at both altitudes were just fine. But each time after I got about 20 degrees LOP EGT 1 would nose-dive
about 50 degrees and start bouncing around a bunch. I did a pair of in-flight mag checks on the way back in
both ROP and LOP and they all looked pretty normal, although I was only at about 50% power so this wasn’t the best
test.

All this leaves me thinking that an issue with the mags not providing strong enough power for good spark to
#1 being the most likely problem. It is clearly not a spark plug issue since the problem didn’t move. Injector
fouling doesn’t make sense since the lean tests are so good (with all the cylinders peaking at the same place).
Induction leaks don’t seem likely given the consistent test results at both altitudes. And a probe problem seems
very unlikely since the probes can’t tell the difference between 20 ROP and 20 LOP and the problem is only happening
on the LOP side.

In theory it could still be a cylinder valve issue, although given that I just had an annual with a complete
cylinder inspection 20 hours ago that seems unlikely. If its not a magneto issue about the only thing it could be is
some exhaust gas leak that somehow didn’t show when they inspected the engine compartment. Stay tuned as I try to
get to the bottom of the problem.

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It looks like I fixed the CO issue myself yesterday. I returned to PDX to pick up the airplane
with the intention of flying it back to BFI. I did a careful preflight and caught something that I must
have missed the previous flight- the hose attached to the air intake on the right of the cowl was a bit
folded up inside and not securely connected. I’m pretty sure that was the cause of the leak- I removed half the cowl
so I could get my hands in there and reattached the hose. The return flight to BFI was fine from a carbon
monoxide point of view although I’m still having something strange going on with the EGT on cylinder 1 when
I’m flying LOP.

Two conclusions from this- first of all I’d recommend that everyone be careful to make inspecting the intake
(with a flashlight- look in to the hose connection) part of the preflight every time. Second, while I probably
would have bought a CO detector if it wasn’t built in, I might not have, so in the end I’m very grateful to whomever
at Columbia decided to make this standard equipment on the Columbia 400- they may have just saved my life last
Thursday. For anyone who doesn’t have a built-in CO detector I’d consider having an accessory one manditory equipment.

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Today’s flight was a bit “exciting” in that way that you really don’t want to get excited while flying. I was
taking a short (3 hour) flight to San Jose for some business meetings. I had just leveled off at FL190 when the
CO (Carbon Monoxide) light came on. Uh oh. So I pressed the reset button, and bing it came on again. Tried a few
things and it was still coming on.

At this point it was time to get on the radio. I was just about 40 miles from Portland and I knew it would
be helpful to have a commercial flight available to get me to California. So I asked center to divert to Portland
and told them I had a CO warning light. They cleared me direct and to descend right away and were even so helpful
as to declare an emergency for me. At some point the light wasn’t going on anymore and I thought maybe the problem had
gone away, but I noticed at this point that the EGT of cylinder 1 wasn’t in line with the rest of the pack so
that clinched it for me. A 2500fpm descent brought me nicely in to PDX (while keeping myself within glide range)
and the nice yellow trucks escorted me to the ramp (although I did assure everyone I was ok on touch-down).

From this little fun, I have a few follow up thoughts. First of all, I was on an O2 mask at the time, and I’m
curious how much the O2 would help if there were a serious CO problem going on. I turned up my O2 flow and never
felt a thing, but given that the mask is designed to mix in cabin air, I’m not sure how much it would actually protect
you.

Second, the folks at the Flight Craft terminal at PDX were great. They helped me hop on a computer to make
a commercial reservation and were ready to shuttle me over to the commercial terminal right away. I’m a little
less happy with the maintenance folks who have apparently decided that they can’t fit into their busy schedule
looking at my airplane and figuring out what’s wrong with it. Given that the flight out of Portland to San Jose
took awhile to leave and in the end as late as I was an extra hour or two wouldn’t have been worse, I probably
should have landed in Redmond which was almost as close and has much nicer maintenance people. Oh well,
the last thing I’m going to do is try to second-guess my decisions about where to land with a potential
emergency.

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Sorry again about being a total slacker keeping this up to date. I guess I just got busy over the holidays
and I’ve been doing a few software upgrades in how I publish this thing and I guess I let that lead to some procrastination.

Anyway the big news this week is that it appears that Northcoast just got the de-ice system certified by the FAA
which is huge news for those of us in the northwest. No idea when installs can begin, but I’m hoping I’ll be able to
take advantage of a trip out of the country in April to get mine done. Stay tuned…

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