Slight change of plan

For the last few days 55C has been at the maintenance shop receiving a few minor fixes and having things looked over by an aircraft mechanic I've known for a while. Nothing major was found but the mechanic did find an issue with one of the airplane's magnetos, no not an evil super-villain flying around inside the engine, but a device made of copper wiring and magnets that spins and generates an electrical pulse to the spark plugs. The mechanic tells me that having the magneto refurbished is very straightforward but unfortunately it won't be available until Monday - not in time for our planned Friday departure.

The magneto's job is to deliver electricity to the spark plug just as the piston is near the top of its travel in the cylinder. The spark ignites the fuel and air mixture pushing the cylinder back down and providing the engine power.

When this spark isn't timed correctly the engine doesn't produce the optimum amount of power. In this case the tachometer read a 150 drop in RPM during runup and the magneto was found to be 20 degrees off of the proper timing. This is problematic because we will be needing all the power and ignition redundancy we can get for the trip through the higher elevations going west.

This is about where my technical knowledge of the issue ends. But, while this may seem like a "big deal," magneto issues are not uncommon. In fact, I've returned at least 4 rental aircraft back to the tie down over the course of my training because of a faulty magneto during the engine run-up.

However, plan B is in effect now and we will be shoe horning ourselves into the back of an A320 for the rest of the trip back to California while the plane gets the attention it needs. In the meantime, the folks here have been extremely gracious in letting our bird bed-down in a comfortable hangar for the duration.

Now the question is... how to get it back to California? Will we decide to:

a) Fly back in the next week or two to finish up the adventure?

b) Hire a local pilot to ferry it the rest of the way home? or

c) Say "to heck with the world" stay here, upgrade the panel with a GNS 430 GPS, slap in a few Aspen Avionics PFD/MFDs, Wipline amphibious floats, and have my fly fishing rod meet us in Alaska?

To be continued...