Was engine replaced? How many hours on it?
Are you sure it really was out of fuel? An engine that old could just quit.
“Just Quit”?
See my previous post re engines.
A properly maintained engine can last for tens of thousands of hours - by that time, the only original parts are likely to be the casing, data plate, and maybe a carb body.
There was a company which made replacement parts for the Lycoming O-360 series; by the 90’s they realized that they were making every part except the casing. They started making cases and got their version of the engine certified. I don’t know if they are still in the engine business.
I used to own a Tri-Pacer engine - it was on an AA1-A Yankee. That puppy could scoot!
And a person so absent minded as to run out of fuel had surely maintain the engine properly.
Besides those well maintained engines do have problems. Rarely, but do.
I once had a partial engine failure during a take off in a 30-year old Cessna 172.
Fortunately by adjusting the pitch I could make it climb at 1 or 2 knots. So I just ended up flying a very extended traffic pattern. It turned out that one of magnetos failed.
You weren’t taught to test the mags during run-up?
Set engine to 2300 rpm, toggle mag switch - L, R, both. Observe power output. If it does not change between “both mags” and “one mag”, you have a dead mag.
And:
Do we know that the pilot of the plane was the owner?
Do you think that a person not familiar with pre-flight check list could ever get pilot’s license?
After I landed I told them what happened and we went with one of instructors to test the airplane. And he did the procedure once and everything was OK, he did it second time - still OK and only on the fifth try we saw on one of magnetos rpm dropped almost to idle. Some things just work intermittently.
I seem to remember that 200 RPM was the max allowed rpm drop between 2 mags & 1 mag.
So was the airplane heavy with fuel & passengers? A really hot day? I think it was meant to be 1 or 2 hundred feet per minute, climb is not shown as speed of 1 or 2 knots.
If the mag dropped to almost idle from over 2000 RPM with one mag off during run-up, why was a takeoff attempted?
If full throttle gave 24 to 25 hundred RPM, one mag should hold it to 22 hundred RPM. IN a 172, that is not that hard to make a circuit of the pattern. The pilot did fine. I want to know what the RPM drop was between mags in Both, Left & Right.
IMO, it was probably due to inadequate maintenance than ‘it just broke.’
If you all can get this plane at a price you can afford, have it pass an annual inspection after it is fixed of whatever is now wrong with it, he should have a great time using it.
The drive to the airport is the part of the trip you need to worry about. LOL
ISTR 125 rpm maximum drop when one mag is shut off, and a maximum to 50 rpm difference between the two mags.
LOL! Ok, now I’m totally out of my depth - those last 3 or 4 posts have words in them, but I haven’t the foggiest as to what it all means!
Anyway, I have no idea about the engine, but I do know that the pilot was the owner and while he was meticulous in maintenance schedules apparently his math wasn’t so good (small airfield & flying community, everyone knows everyone). He miscalculated for a headwind, let the arrogance and inviolability factor take over, and decided he could make it home anyway. And there was something about a reserve that was wrong too, but I’m not sure what. The plane I guess has two tanks plus an 8 gallon reserve? Anyway, yes it was absolutely pilot stupidity. He’s selling the plane because he figures if he can make that kind of elementary mistake he doesn’t care enough.
Which sounds like good sense to me.
Cars use a battery-coil system to make the sparks that ignite the fuel. Airplanes (and lawnmowers and minibikes – things that don’t have batteries) use magnetos to provide the power to the spark plugs. If your battery dies in a car that has a standard transmission, you can put the car in gear and push-start it. The alternator (or generator, on older cars) will provide enough power to start the engine. Once the engine is running, the alternator will keep providing power for the sparks (and charge the battery, if there isn’t anything wrong with the battery). If the alternator fails in a car, you only have the battery to run on. When you’ve used it up, you’re stuck.
Airplane piston engines use magnetos so that the engine will keep running even in the event of an alternator/generator failure. There are two magnetos (and two sets of spark plugs) because redundancy is important in case of failure. The engine will run on a single magneto, but it will not have as much power as it would if both plugs are firing; hence, the RPM drop when you shut down a mag. (The ignition switch has OFF, LEFT, RIGHT, BOTH, and START positions.) You shut off one mag, and then the other, before you take off to make sure they are both working. If you switch to one mag and the engine quits, then that magneto is not working and you’d better stay on the ground until it is fixed. If the engine keeps running, but the difference between the RPM drop when one magneto is running and the RPM drop when the other magneto is running exceeds 50 RPM, then the magneto giving the lower RPM probably has a fault and you need to have it checked out and fixed.
Many vintage aircraft, and new ones such as ultralights, don’t have electrical systems. Ever seen a movie where a pilot is in the cockpit of his WWI fighter, and there’s a guy who swings the prop? The pilot turns the magneto switch off. The guy propping the airplane moves the propeller in to the correct position and gets ready to swing it. The pilot turns the magneto switch on, and the ground crewman swings the prop to start the engine.
I may as well mention stopping an engine. In a car, you turn the key off. In an airplane, you pull the mixture control (sort of like the manual choke in older cars) until the engine is starved for fuel and it stops. Then you turn off the mags.
FAR 91.151 says that for VFR flight in the daytime there must be enough fuel on board to fly to the first point of intended landing at normal cruise speed, plus enough to fly for an additional 30 minutes. There isn’t really a ‘reserve tank’. You need to know how much fuel you have in the tanks, how much of it is usable (there are a couple of gallons per tank that can’t be used), and your rate of consumption. Airplane fuel gauges are notoriously inaccurate. Part of the preflight check is to visually inspect the fuel level in the tanks. Best practices dictate the pilot use a calibrated dipstick to check the fuel level; but many or most pilots don’t. If you’re not using a fuel dipstick, it’s very easy to over-estimate the amount of fuel in those flat tanks. Little airplanes aren’t very fast. A Tri-Pacer cruises at about 120 or 130 mph, so an unexpectedly strong headwind can slow you down considerably. At full throttle, it’s going to burn over 9 gallons per hour. (I used 10 gph in calculations for the Skyhawk, and always topped off the tanks so I had a safety margin.) Flying with partial fuel (a necessity sometimes), over-estimating the amount of fuel on board, and running into headwinds that are stronger than expected can result in a landing short of your destination.
As for ‘arrogance and inviolability’, that can be a factor. If the owner admitted to that, it may be true; or it may just be an admission that he screwed the pooch. Often it is easier for a person to admit over-estimating his abilities, than it is to admit making a simple mistake. There’s also the ‘I think I can’ factor. Like, ‘Geez, this headwind is stronger than I thought! Should I turn back? Should I divert to an alternate? I think there’s enough fuel to make it. It looked full enough. Maybe I’d better buy a dipstick…’
Being familiar with them doesn’t always mean *using *them afterward. Run-up checks do take a little time, and it’s tempting not to bother if everything worked on the last flight. Even doing the steps by rote instead of understanding their purpose is hazardous, since it lets you miss problems right under your nose.
It certainly is. The ability to be honest with yourself about your own performance and abilities is critical. That includes being aware that it may be time to go. “There are only two bad things that can happen to you as a pilot, and someday one of them will: You’ll walk out to the plane knowing it’s your last flight, or you’ll walk out to the plane NOT knowing it’s your last flight”. 
Back to the value of accident studies: The conventional wisdom is that any accident is at the end of a chain of events, and breaking any link in the chain prevents the accident. The goal is to identify events or situations that have been links in other accidents, so you recognize them when they occur to you and you respond appropriately. Failure to do and check and believe the basic arithmetic on fuel range is a very common such link in the chain, for instance.
It’s funny. Just yesterday I flew an airplane for the first time in my life, a 1976 Cessna 172. I asked the instructor/company co-owner how much it cost to maintain the airplane, and to be honest it was a lower number than I expected; he figured $5000 a year (on average) but this company’s aircraft are working aircraft that get a lot of use. $5000 doesn’t strike me as being an especially high sum to maintain a working airplane that’s in the air almost every day the weather is good.
The big bux are in BUYING airplanes and making the loan payments, which is why they’re so often bought used. A new Cessna 172 costs as much as a house.
I’d suggest he get an Instrument rating. While he may not use it in that airplane, it will make him a better pilot. I am a Private Pilot and currently working on my Instrument rating. I have about 115 hours now, so not much more than he does.
My wife is working with our CFI to at least get to her first solo so that she can feel confident in landing the plane. We are looking to buy a C182 or Piper Turbo Arrow. You might think about flying some - see how it goes with your motion sickness.
I’ve ranted here plenty on the cost of a new Skyhawk. I think they cost about twice as much as they should.
As far as the cost of maintenance, there’s more to it than that. Insurance and tie-down, for example. I posted a Cessna 172 cost of ownership spreadsheet a couple of years ago. Admittedly, I fudged some numbers that I didn’t know. I haven’t read past that post today, but I think others offered different numbers. But I came up with just under $112 per hour of use, based on 300 hours per year.
I’m a private pilot who elected NOT to get an instrument rating. Doing so would have required me to rent more expensive planes than I had been and reduced my flying time significantly. However, I, too, will strongly suggest continued training. In my case I went and got a tailwheel rating. There are other options beside that, such as getting a glider rating.
Those who continue training tend to be safer pilots. While “get an instrument rating” seems to be the default suggestion it is not the only option out there. I just wanted to throw that out there, because the more options the better. Also, after you get an instrument rating continued training remains valuable, so all those other alternatives will still be out there.
tl;dr all
If not already covered:
Not all planes have a “Start” position - mine had L. R, Both; the Start was a button on the floor.
Some planes have what is known as a “header tank” - a gas tank between the firewall and the windshield. Glasair is one. In addition to a tacky way to deal with center-of-gravity problems, they are sometimes thought of as “reserve” tanks - since they ARE required for CG, it is not a good idea, generally, to use the fuel in them (unless you want to make your next stall really interesting).
If the pilot does not understand the purpose of removing the tail cone, the pilot should not be the person performing the pre-flight.
There are two reasons to open a fuel tank drain during pre-flight. How many know what they are?
Things cost what people will pay for them. There is no other measure of price that means anything.
For the heck of it I looked around and your estimate seems pretty commonly accepted. It’d be interesting to see how this would be affected by frequency of use. I’d assume the cost per hour would go down slightly with greater use - some things are pretty close to a fixed hourly rate, but others (insurance) would become more cost effective as you used it more.
Of course, who the hell knows where fuel prices might take you.
It depends. If I make a thing and sell it for a million dollars to one person, it’s worth a million dollars to that one person – but who do I sell the rest of the production run to?
Here’s a chart of Cessna 172 prices I made at the same time as the estimated cost of ownership spreadsheet. I don’t have the time to find other research or to do calculations, but ISTR that a new Skyhawk today should cost around $175,000 based on historical prices compared to a middle-class income.
Another way to look at it is this: Textron-Cessna says the unit cost is very high, so they have to have a high price. Yet historically, they were able to pay their workers, build the aircraft, sell them to the target market for that class of aircraft, and even pay inflated insurance costs and still make a profit. I conclude that this was possible because they made enough airplanes that the unit cost was lower. Since the unit cost was lower, they could price them within the range of their target market; which gladly bought them. ISTM they’ve boxed themselves in. They can’t price the Skyhawk for its target market because the unit cost is too high, and they can’t bring the unit cost down because the selling price is too high.
Can Light Sport planes be rented out?
That was the big problem with Experimental (buy a kit and assemble it = 4 person pressurized 250 mph bullet - or - a rag wing over steel tube with a snowmobile engine).
At least the FAA (and Congress (just 20 years too late)) recognize the problem.
And I do wish Toyota had gotten into the game…
A few things about the Tri-Pacer. It’s part of the short-wing family of Pipers. They lopped off the ends of the wings used on Super Cubs and added more hp. The plane has an undersized elevator which means it’s basically impossible to stall it in level flight. If it’s a 1957 model I think it should have the 150 or 160 hp Lycoming O-320 engine versus the older O-290 which was 135 hp.
It’s Achilles heal is the struts. If they’re not sealed then they have to be punch tested every year or two to make sure they’re structurally safe. If these fail the plane goes down. I think they run about $1000 for a sealed set.
This is one of the easiest and most forgiving planes to fly. I’d recommend he get a really good GPS and learn and practice how to use it in a simulated emergency landing. It greatly increases his chances of survival at night by flying at high altitudes to gain coverage in case of engine loss.
Answer:
Factory-built LSA are rentable.
For those wondering: Putting a “For Rent” sign on a plane makes it a business proposition - and you can deduct much of the expense.
If you price it right (and ALWAYS include fuel*) you can actually have a good chunk of the expense paid by others**
-
- if the renter is paying for gas, they will set the mixture (yes, it is a manual thing on aircraft) to “really dry” - which can damage the engine.
** - you also incur increased maintenance cost - the inspection which is required annually becomes required every 100 hours
- if the renter is paying for gas, they will set the mixture (yes, it is a manual thing on aircraft) to “really dry” - which can damage the engine.