What a mess, flight 23&24

Another appointment was cancelled so I got some time for myself. What better use of this than taking two flights and then change the oil?

It was really bumpy in the air, the autopilot performed great in the turbulent air. 

After the flight I removed the cowling and got an even better look at the pressure sensors as part of performing the new Vans/Garmin service bulletin, mine are definitely leak free :D

After that I lifted the tail, placed the bucket and removed the oil plug. I was just about to congratulate myself and take a picture of the oil going into the bucket, when it started to spill. At first it flowed straight out of the opening and into the center of the bucket, then it starter running from the back side of the hole and onto the air intakes and then down to the side of the bucket, what a mess!

Håtuna Flight 21 & 22

First grass landing. Why sit in the car for at least three hours when you can make two short flights instead to buy oil and filter for the last part of the annual.

 Not the easiest strip to land at but with a 4 knot cross wind resulting in a possibility to land uphill and take of downhill could not be passed.

I am also done with the Vans/Garmin/Kavilco service bulletin. Perhaps I will exchange the sensors later on but for now they are fine.

Flight 20 Noise test training

Flight 20 was a flight to train for the upcoming noise certification test. For the pilot, the test is mainly about performing several repeatable max performance climbs.

What I did was to set the autopilot in FD (flight director) mode already on the ground, with the runway heading set as the horizontal mode and IAS climb at Vy spped.

I then started, established myself in the expected attitude and turned on the autopilot who then smoothly fine tuned the climb until my set altitude of 1500 feet (for the test I will climb higher.

Test was very successful. I also made two landing where I set to land just at the numbers, I could easily stop within 300m of the numbers and I touched down within 25 meters of my target.

 

Autopilot installation, flight test

Finally everything lined up and I could perform the autopilot testing. I could not get the trim to work properly thru the autopilot but as it is recommended to do the first test without autotrim, I performed the other ground tests, disabled the autotrim function and then went flying.

First I flew around with just the flight director enabled, after being satisfied that it guided me correctly I climbed to safe altitude.

At 3000 feet I had one finger on the cws/ap disconnect button, the other at the AP controller, I took special care to where the AP servo breaker was and then activated the autopilot. At first I just had it in heading and alt mode. verified that I could disable the AP with a push on the AP/CWS button on my stick.

I then tried some turns just turning the heading knob, did some VS climbs and descends, happy that it captured my set altitude. With these tests done, I flew with less concerns and got down lower.

I have now done altitude captures from high and low, altitude hold directly. only done VS climb and descents so far. For the horizontal part, I have done heading and nav from the GTN625.

All have worked great. The autopilot is precise and very smooth, I think I will set it to be a little more aggressive later on, but for a first test with just the recommended values from Vans I think the result was amazing. It is already better that 90% of all other autopilot equipped aircrafts I have flown :D

Autopilot installation, wiring almost done

Sorry for the lack of updates.

Not only have me and my family moved to a new house this spring, I have also been more busy at work due to covid-19. And as if that was not enough to shift my focus away from the RV, I have started a new demanding position at another company this monday.

This evening I finally found time to continue my autopilot installation. At first it was a complete mess, the roll servo did not even show up on the configuration screen and the rest of the system showed huge amounts of canbus network error:

It stayed like this for weeks, I did some improvements in my wiring, installed a shielding ground but nothing helped.

I began suspecting that it was a canbus termination problem as the instructions from Vans did not clearly indicate that the servo harness was designed so that pin 3&4 on the servos were connected (this makes the servos use the built in 120ohm canbus terminators)

After posting on the Vansairforce forum this afternoon, I quickly got some trouble shooting assistance and this evening I went to the hangar to check.

I could quickly determine that the canbus termination was as specified. I then disconnected the roll servo as that LRU showed the biggest problem (not showing up at all)

With the roll servo disconnected, the bus was fine again. I went back to my documentation and after reading the relevant documentation several times and scratching my head, I finally found my error. Due to this mistake in my documentation, I had switched the can-hi and can-low wires.

After redoing this part of the wiring harness, I was presented with this pleasing screen:

 Time to put everything together, set some values in the configuration and go out testing...perhaps on Sunday.