Tuesday, April 25, 2006

April 20, 2006

We have had our Skylane, N7598S on the line for a little over a year now and we have had great performance with very little down time during that period.

We have made many improvements. The most important improvement is a newly rebuilt engine. We replaced the existing O-470S engine with the correct O-470U 2000 hour TBO engine and it has about 180 hours on it already. The engine was overhauled to new factory limits by Pacific Continental Engines in Van Nuys. We had to replace the propeller because of the different engine, so we had a Hartzell 3 blade Scimitar propeller installed. It provides about the same speed with startling improvements in climb performance. It really looks great.

We replaced the TKM Mitchell MX-300 NAV/COM with a brand new NARCO Mk 12D/Cessna NAV/COM.

During the engine overhaul we completed our first annual on this aircraft and corrected a few minor faults. We replaced many of the plastic interior parts to improve appearance.

We had a complete alignment done on the 200A Autopilot, and for what it is, it works exceedingly well.

N7598S has made many great trip during its tenure at A&E Flying Club, including a jaunt to Oshkosh for Airventure 2005, as well as many trips into Mexico and Baja California.