Stories from FL280...

[Swoop]

Serenity, please take my advice:  Keep writing these stories, keep posting them....and in 10 years you cut and paste em all into a Word doc, send it to a publisher and retire on the royalties.  And when you do I want a beer.

[Serenity]

Rudder lockup and hydraulic problems same aircraft?

No, the rudder was 081 (older aircraft) and hyds was 154 (newer. We're in the low 200s for "brand new")

At this rate, maybe you should review bailout procedures for the next op??    

 

No joke! I've planned our flights tonight so we're never more than 10 miles from an airfield lol

Serenity, please take my advice:  Keep writing these stories, keep posting them....and in 10 years you cut and paste em all into a Word doc, send it to a publisher and retire on the royalties.  And when you do I want a beer.

Hey, if I make ANY money, I'll take the whole BBS out for a beer. I wouldn't have made it this far without you guys!

[MiloMorai]

Just make sure the E seat works and the silk has no rips or holes in it because it sounds like they will be needed soon.

[HL117]

Aaaand tonight...

So there I was, on the ILS at Mobile. We decided to make it a low pass, since a regional jet was departing ahead of us. As we get our gear and flaps up, we get a hyd fluid low caution. So we slow to 150, drop the gear and flaps to takeoff. We were already on radar vectors for the localiser, and our pressure was stable in the green, so we kept on trucking. As we transitioned to a visual landing, I dropped flaps to landing, and the bottom fell out of our hyds gauge. Straight to zero. Flaps were about half way between takeoff and landing. Just as we touched down, a noise started, sounding like the engine was eating itself alive. Nose wheel steering was squirrely as we pulled off the runway, and with the sounds coming from the engine, we decided to do and emergency shutdown on the ground.

I wonder what will happen on tomorrow's flights...

Good grief Charlie Brown what the heell?........ guess it keeps the pucker factor high.

[Serenity]

First leg of today done. Nothing wild, but we got to do the river run in New Orleans. 200kts and 1000' over the river right through downtown NOLA. If that wasn't cool enough,  who is sharing the pattern with me at KNEW? A P-51 and a B-17!

[icepac]

Aaaand tonight...

So there I was, on the ILS at Mobile. We decided to make it a low pass, since a regional jet was departing ahead of us. As we get our gear and flaps up, we get a hyd fluid low caution. So we slow to 150, drop the gear and flaps to takeoff. We were already on radar vectors for the localiser, and our pressure was stable in the green, so we kept on trucking. As we transitioned to a visual landing, I dropped flaps to landing, and the bottom fell out of our hyds gauge. Straight to zero. Flaps were about half way between takeoff and landing. Just as we touched down, a noise started, sounding like the engine was eating itself alive. Nose wheel steering was squirrely as we pulled off the runway, and with the sounds coming from the engine, we decided to do and emergency shutdown on the ground.

I wonder what will happen on tomorrow's flights...

The noise you heard was aeration in the pump.

[eagl]

Apparently this is something that just happens with the T-6 with no known cause. They're tearing ours down to see if they can find something. It definitely felt like a mechanical issue, so my guess is something to do with the rudder portion of the gust lock, or FOD.

If I had any idea where to find you, I'd come kick you in the crotch.

There are some pulleys and bulkheads the rudder cables go through.  If anything jams in there, you're out of luck.

As for the FL280 call...  T-6 doesn't have equipment required for RVSM which is required above FL240, but ATC won't refuse military aircraft full use of the airspace so whenever a non-RVSM mil aircraft goes above FL240, all hell breaks loose as suddenly everyone needs to use old separation restrictions.  Many military pilots don't realize this is what happens, but there it is.  I tried to stay FL230 or below after the RVSM rules came into full use, but sometimes ya gotta do what ya gotta do.

On scene commander during a night instrument flight... That's a good experience. Next time you do that it might be over Iraq or Afghanistan, or literally the middle of the ocean.  Don't eff it up.

[eagl]

Next up is good old standby from mid-block USAF T-6s, the dreaded prop sleeve touchdown.  Better know where that circuit breaker is, 'cause you might have to pull it to keep the motor from eating itself and push it back in to land.

[Serenity]

As for the FL280 call...  T-6 doesn't have equipment required for RVSM which is required above FL240, but ATC won't refuse military aircraft full use of the airspace so whenever a non-RVSM mil aircraft goes above FL240, all hell breaks loose as suddenly everyone needs to use old separation restrictions.  Many military pilots don't realize this is what happens, but there it is.  I tried to stay FL230 or below after the RVSM rules came into full use, but sometimes ya gotta do what ya gotta do.

Thanks Eagl! That's a great bit of knowledge I knew nothing about! They never mention anything like that to us.

Next up is good old standby from mid-block USAF T-6s, the dreaded prop sleeve touchdown.  Better know where that circuit breaker is, 'cause you might have to pull it to keep the motor from eating itself and push it back in to land.

Is that still a factor with the Bravos? We have a note in our NATOPs they bring up in the first week of groundschool, but it's basically an asterisk, or so they tell us, as it supposedly doesn't happen anymore?

[eagl]

The prop sleeve touchdown was mostly limited to a known production run and set of serial number / build dates, however at Sheppard we did have a couple that were completely outside of the known suspect range.

Still, the newer motors use a modified bearing with a different design that is supposed to ensure more consistent bearing performance so it shouldn't be a concern anymore.  The ironic thing is that I'm told the whole prop sleeve bearing issue began with manufacturer having to extend that bearing length to make up for the weight of the US military ejection seats, so the motor was lengthened a bit to avoid having to change the motor mount or move the firewall or add ballast.  The prop sleeve bearing failures were in that lengthened part.  At least that's the story that went around back when the bearing failures first started.

Plenty of other strange issues with the T-6 although I never flew a B model so I don't know any of your particular avionics quirks.  Have you had a canopy fail to lock or close yet?  The older they get, the more finicky the locking mechanism gets and it takes experienced T-6 maintainers to get it right once they start to bend a bit.  We had a couple handles pop back in flight, luckily aero loads kept the latches engaged until they were slowed down after landing.  There was almost a year of persistent problems with the canopy latches until both the instructors and maintainers got more experience dealing with finicky canopy latches.

We had a rash of doors pop open inflight, never can be 100% sure if the latch failed inflight or if someone just forgot to get all the latches closed/locked right.  Tire failures were the other irritating thing with the T-6 especially for IPs used to flying the T-37 which you could go-kart around the airfield forever without blowing a tire.  Not sure if the B has the same brake system as the USAF models but there was little brake feel sitting up so high and no antiskid so blown tires were very common.

[cpxxx]

Wow fascinating reading. Have to say you come across as a pilot who can cope with anything. Your emergency issue reminds of a friend of mine who was on his Commercial flight test as if he needed any further pressure, when another nearby flight test crashed and he found himself flying overhead cover because it went down in a remote area and he had to direct in the emergency chopper. Imagine during your flight test!

He got his commercial and so far his life as an airline pilot has been dull. Sad to say the Examirer was blinded in the crash. I met him only a few weeks earlier. Made me realise how dangerous this business can be. Flying is so much fun but at this stage I've lost a few friends and I never flew military, much to my disappointment.

Enjoy it but remember it can all go wrong in an instant.

[Serenity]

Plenty of other strange issues with the T-6 although I never flew a B model so I don't know any of your particular avionics quirks.  Have you had a canopy fail to lock or close yet?  The older they get, the more finicky the locking mechanism gets and it takes experienced T-6 maintainers to get it right once they start to bend a bit.  We had a couple handles pop back in flight, luckily aero loads kept the latches engaged until they were slowed down after landing.  There was almost a year of persistent problems with the canopy latches until both the instructors and maintainers got more experience dealing with finicky canopy latches.

We had a rash of doors pop open inflight, never can be 100% sure if the latch failed inflight or if someone just forgot to get all the latches closed/locked right.  Tire failures were the other irritating thing with the T-6 especially for IPs used to flying the T-37 which you could go-kart around the airfield forever without blowing a tire.  Not sure if the B has the same brake system as the USAF models but there was little brake feel sitting up so high and no antiskid so blown tires were very common.

I've never had a canopy open when it wasn't supposed to, but man some of them are dammed near impossible to close! I've had to have an IP help me pull it down more than once, or hold it in place while f$%#@ing with the mechanism for a good 5 minutes to get it to actually latch. It's such a frequent issue, I consider it a miracle when I get the thing closed on the first try.

As for tires... Dear god, don't get me started. We don't go a single day without having to send a duty driver to pick up a crew that either blew a tire or is showing red chord. Part of it is, you're absolutely right, almost ZERO brake feedback, but from what I've heard, we also use some pretty cheap, crappy tires. They're a constant issue.

As for other little issues normal to the Bravo, Zeolyte Powder (SP?) is a pretty frequent problem in the Obogs. Obogs fails during aero is pretty common (I had it twice). Our TCAS seems to go crazy pretty frequently (False returns, sometimes COVERING the screen with yellow diamonds of doom). We also seem to have a hyds leak at least every other week.

[eagl]

Sheppard AFB has a great group of maintainers, sounds like some of the issues you guys have are either unique to your build aircraft or you've got a back shop that isn't quite on top of things.  Hydraulic leaks happened for us but it wasn't exactly a continuous problem.

Same goes for zeolite dust.  I remember reading all the warnings and we did have one defective batch that got replaced quickly but I don't recall a single time seeing any of that stuff inside my mask after a flight.  Maybe its your extra humidity but we got fairly humid in north texas sometimes, so I dunno.  OBOGS will fail on occasion but again I saw a "real" OBOGS failure maybe twice in 500 hours.  Of course, we had some pilots who didn't understand the system so they'd reset the OBOGS every 10 minutes after resetting it for the whole flight, which pretty much means they flew the whole flight with a failed OBOGS because it takes 10 minutes to reset and test itself.  I considered OBOGS to be a hard-fail no-go item because it utilizes bleed air, and you never know what is causing the OBOGS fail.  It *could* be a bleed air leak which can crash the plane from fire, you just don't know because you don't get any detail information when you get the OBOGS light.  Lots of other pilots (mostly younger ones who never had a real bleed air leak or AC turbine failure in flight like I had) scoffed at the OBOGS fail and would continue low level flights with that failure, but I always thought that was kind of dumb.

Our TAS birds were pretty good.  The skies near Sheppard aren't super high volume so the TAS was pretty good.  Even around DFW where its really busy, the TAS birds were sought after for cross countries due to the extra situational awareness it could provide in the terminal area.  Guys also liked it for 2-ship low level flying since the time to react for traffic conflicts on a low level with a wingman out there can be very short.

[colmbo]

OBOGS?  Explain please.

[Wolfala]

Onboard Oxygen Generator. Seren, when you get to Meredian let me know. You might still have Chuckles as your paddles.