In this thread I mention tiny birds that flit about the back yard and chirp merrily. I don’t know what they are, so I call them ‘cheepie birds’. I was just thinking about airplanes as I [del]often do[/del]… [del]frequently do[/del]… constantly do, and I remembered my ground school instructor. (I took ground school at a community college.) He stressed the importance of checking the pitot tube for debris, because there were ‘packer bugs’ in the area that filled the opening with mud. I never saw one, nor saw an impacted pitot tube, but I assumed they were some kind of small wasp.
But anyway… ‘cheepie birds’ and ‘packer bugs’. Names for things whose names I don’t know. What do you call specific things you don’t know?
Those are LBTBs: “Little Brown Tweety Birds”. In reality in the US they’re usually some flavor of sparrow. But they’re LBTBs to me.
I used to live in an area that had lots of 4-6" lizards. Cute little things. Their unique habit was to sit in one spot while repeatedly raising and lowering their upper body using their forelimbs. AKA “push-up lizards.” I have no clue why they do that. Looks hot for the girl-lizards I suppose.
It was mentioned. If he stressed it, I didn’t catch it because dad always covered his pitot tubes.
‘Look how many push-ups I can do!’
I’d probably call them ‘push-up lizards’ too.
I used to use caddis nymphs as trout bait when I was a kid. They lived in little cylinders they made out of large sand grains, so I called them ‘rock rollers’. Turns out, they’re actually known as rock rollers.
The stall warning “system” on a C-150 was a simple plastic horn (akin to the traditional kid’s bike horn with the red squeeze ball to blow it.) In Cessna’s case the horn was plumbed to a 1/2" x 3/4" hole in the leading edge of the wing. As long as airflow was normal the pressure blew through the horn in the direction which didn’t stimulate the reed & the horn was silent. Under near-stall conditions the flow would reverse, the reed would vibrate & the horn would sound.
I worked a write-up once that the stall warning horn wasn’t working. Sure enough, the inlet screen had been breached and the opening behind it was now a wasp’s nest. We didn’t operate in an insect-heavy part of the country and never had any issues with pitot intrusion despite not using covers. Birds’ nests in cooling ducts or on top of cylinder banks was much more our issue.
