andrew172 wrote: Thank you Colonel Sanders, that link seems to be very useful. I don't answer you because it would be a non-sense offtopic. What I don't understand is why should I read them myself and I was not told about them.
The point most people are trying to get across here is that there just isn't enough time to tell a student pilot about everything so your instructors generally will concentrate on the most common issues. I only have a limited time on this earth after all, and you got a limited ammount of money and time to get your private license. The license, as they say, is a license to learn. Personally I learn something new about airplanes all the time, some of which might help one solve the issue that you're concerned with. For example, the latest bit of information squirreled away which might help some day was the differences between the control cables on the Cessna 180 and 185. I had previously assumed they were similar enough, but turns out there are some key differences. Its possible that little bit will never ever be used again during the course of my lifetime, but then again, maybe not.
Something to think about is that the PPL is a pretty general skillset that is given to you. Remember that little chunk of paper lets you fly pretty much every single engined contraption you can think of that uses a fixed wing for lift and doesn't go too fast or carry too many people. That's a lot of different airplanes to prepare you for, we can't assume after all that once you got that piece of paper that you're going to stick with the humble Cessna 172.... Which I might add aren't all the same either, though the differences seem to be magnified in the minds of some.
In my small time as a pilot, I've had a lot of things go wrong with airplanes, some of them minor, some a little more dire. I could compile a list of all of them and what I would rate as your highest probability problem to encounter (incidentally its mag problems when it comes to rental aircraft, most likely fouled ones) and somewhere down the list, way down, is a jammed control yoke, which I have had happen, fortunately we discovered it prior to start up. Some points that have already been mentioned and maybe a few that haven't.
1) It occured immediately after work was done on the airplane - as many here have said. In this case there was a new engine analyser installed and whomever cut the hole in the plastic panel didn't chase down where the extra plastic rolled off to. Guess where it ended up?
2) The jamming at full deflection happened the first time we did a control check on the ground. A good reason to make sure one is thorogh with this bit. One should note that in most planes, for the majority of the private flying that gets done this might be the only time that full deflection to the ailerons might ever be applied. So jamming fully one direction is unlikely in flight with a small airplane since you have to make that input first to get it to jam there. Of course if you're doing aerobatics this will be different, but not really in the realm of PPL training. The point is, if you do get this failure mode, you're more likely to have it happen on the ground before you go flying than in the air - again in run of the mill PPL type flying.
3) There is the possibility that such a jamming can be readily solved. In our case my gorrilla of a student merely forced the controls and broke the offending piece of plastic. I should say I counseled against this, but it was his airplane and he's a grown man who can make his own decisions. Knowing the control set up of the 182 reasonably well, and extrapolating from what was recently done, I figured already what the problem was, but someone couldn't wait for me to get a flashlight and see. I did manage to convince him that we should get an AME to check it out before flight to make sure there wasn't further pieces or damage occured during his solution. |
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Do they rent 172s, what are their rates?