“There I Was” story from an aircraft owner that listened to his aircraft.
A pilot was on a long cross-country flight with his family in his Cessna Columbia with a G1000. During his routine monitoring of aircraft systems, he noticed his EGT temperatures started to waver from their normally consistent readings. The pilot made a precautionary landing and asked the local mechanic to inspect. The mechanic found that the distributor electrode was loose on the distributor gear post and the electrode was contacting the distributor block posts. His precautionary stop prevented almost certain catastrophic magneto failure.
Another “There I Was” story from the world of aircraft operations.
A pilot was getting ready to take his Grumman Cheetah for a fun flight. The engine had just been overhauled only 175 hours earlier. As part of the overhaul, the magnetos were also overhauled. The engine started normally in a few blades and idled smoothly. During run-up, the pilot found the engine ran rough and sputtered on one magneto. He then called out his mechanic to inspect. The pilot demonstrated for his mechanic (a day later). The engine performed exactly the same as the first time. The suspect magneto was removed and inspected. The cause of the rough performance was the ignition coil. The coil would fail internally under the elevated temperature during operation. The OEM stood behind this failure and a new coil was installed.
