Cal Aggie Flyer ✈

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Davis represent!

He went to Jesuit, but I’ll forgive him. Quakes ‘til I die!

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So here’s our problem from last night: lead fouling.

Aviation fuel contains lead, and when the engine isn’t warmed up enough, the lead in the fuel builds up on the spark plugs. Typically when this happens, we are able to burn off the lead by running the engine hot before we take off.

After we woke up, we walked over to Home Depot to get screw drivers, a set of wrenches, sockets, and a wire brush. Within 10 minutes of getting to the plane and taking the cowling off, a guy drove up and asked if we needed help. He said he was an A&P; we got beyond lucky.

We should be good to go, and now we’re just waiting on the weather. It’s still overcast at 2,500.

I flew into San Diego on Friday night and now I’m stuck here.

My friend, who is a pilot, two friends, and I flew from Phoenix to San Diego (Gillespie Field) on Friday afternoon. Our flight to Southern California was uneventful, but we didn’t get so lucky tonight.

The ATIS reported few clouds at 2,000 feet, but we could see the marine layer on the horizon was rapidly moving inland. After refueling, we headed to do our run up, and that’s where our situation turned south. The right mag was showing a 250 RPM drop. We the engine full throttle and leaned the mixture to try and burn off the carbon on the spark plugs, but we still showed a 250 RPM drop. After trying various throttle/mixture settings, we still couldn’t get the right mag to run smoothly.

We decided to head back to transient parking to come up with another solution. While we called every FBO on field, the marine layer had moved in and the ceiling dropped to broken at 1700. All the FBOs said their mechanics had gone home for the day.

With the sun down, a low overcast, and a fouled spark plug, and our only option was to tie down the plane and find a hotel.

So now we’re in a Best Western 2 miles north of the field trying to figure out what we’re going to do tomorrow.

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