LancairTalk

Columbia just announced that Sean D. Tucker will be flying a Columbia 400 in some form of aerobatics
in the “Columbia Airshow Tour”.
This should be a way for them to show off the utility-class certification of the Columbia aircraft. The
dates are all up there on their website and it looks like I’ll probably be able to catch it at Seafair August
5-6th.

This is going to torture for me. Every Seafair the Blue Angels fly and its all I can do to not get in my airplane
right afterwards and do some scary flying. After seeing Sean do it in a Columbia 400? Torture. The plan is that I’m
going to remind myself that I need appropriate training and scope out the E-PATS
program at Sean’s school where
they teach unusual attitudes for real in Columbia 400s. No info on the details of the E-PATS program yet, but it
sure sounds like a great safety training upgrade!

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Good news- it looks like the issue I’ve been having with Cylinder 1 is fixed. Apparently they noticed that the
ignition wiring was passing really close to the intercooler. If the wire heats up that can increase resistance
and be resulting in a poor spark when running LOP. The folks at Galvin moved the wire and I’ve test-flown the airplane
twice without the issue showing up. The bad news is that the 2nd time I flew the plane I had a CHT probe problem again
in cylinder 1. This maintenance stuff is getting a little old.

On another subject the new issue of Aviation Consumer arrived today. The main
article is coverage of the new turbonormalized SR22 that the Tornado Alley folks have been working on for some time (I saw prototypes
when I went to the APS class in November of 2004). Its great news that they came out with this and that Cirrus owners can now
see 200kts airspeed, but I was disappointed that the article suggested that the Columbia 400 can only do 200kts true LOP at 18,000
when I can pretty reliably get 206-210kts up there and more than 220kts up higher.

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The word is that there is a training scheduled on May 1st for the Columbia mechanics that want to do the de-ice installs. So
presumably the installs themselves start mid-may. Also I heard that there are something like 70 new Columbia’s sitting on the
ramp in Bend waiting to be delivered. This is the backlog because the factory started making only Garmin G1000 equipped models
but the FAA is holding up the certification of those changes.

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I finally got a chance to check out the new Garmin G1000 equipped Columbia models. Galvin, our
local Columbia dealers have one as a demo airplane and it was sitting on the maintenance ramp. Its
still marked experimental so obviously the issues with getting everything rolling again are still ongoing.

I got a chance to sit inside and overall it felt pretty nice. Despite the screens being horizontal the
panel felt pretty high and hard to see over- maybe the horizontal aspect increased the effect of it looking high.
Overall the key difference is a greater feeling of space since there is more room over your legs and the panel
in between the front seats doesnt go all the way forward.

Im still getting the engine stuff taken care of and am also dealing with the GNS430 terrain upgrade,
etc. Ill report back shortly.

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