Today I was working on a 79 Tiger that had ‘wobbly flaps’. Turns out that the bushings at the end of the main flap torque tube were loose. This is a minor case, and in extreme cases can cause the bracket to start to move and wear out the honeycomb. Now that is a big repair job.

However, that said, that is the not the point of this post. Our flaps in the 4-seaters have a white arc that features an upper limit of 120. That means that the plane was certified with deploying flaps at that speed and not damaging the plane. In an emergency I would deploy flaps at any speed but using a lower airspeed reduces the load on the flap system and it components. After seeing the repairs that Fletchair had to do to some training Cheetahs in the honeycomb, I adopted the practice of slowing the plane down a lot more before I deploy my flaps. Sure there is the upper limit, but if you baby the plane, you will get a lot more life out of your components.

Another example is brakes. Sure you can land and stand on the brakes to make the first turnoff, or coast a bit and then exit further down the runway. Care to guess which one requires more brake pad replacements?

So my message is to ‘baby your plane‘ to help it make another 40 years of service.

The pictures associated with this are the flap torque tube bushings attached to the outside fuselage and the rear bulkhead aft of the passenger foot wells. The first shows them as they came out, look clean and all, then I have a picture of them in front of the jar of 100LL. Now they really are clean.