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Today was the annual Smoketown Airport (S37) flyin. This is my favorite local flyin - it's a short 20 min hope from my home base, great food, friendly people, and a free nice t-shirt to anyone who flies in! The day couldn't of been better for flying.  Crossing over the Susquehanna river.  The kids ride was powed by a marriage of a fiberglass water tank and a lawn mower.  The instrumentation is pretty good. I was impressed with a TruTrak pictorial pilot.  I am always impressed when I see an AirCam takeoff.  The airport was packet with airplanes.  My friends went around and counted all of the planes - 150 total!  I needed to bug out of Smoketown early because I was getting my first instrument rating lesson this afternoon. I met my CFII back at KDMW and we went over a basic flight plan - hoodwork, VOR approach, then a GPS approach. We took off from KDMW and climbed over the clouds to 6,500'. From there I went under the hood and we did turns, climbs, descents and a combination of climb/descents and turns. Next up was a VOR/ILS approach into Capital City airport. We ran into some technical issues figuring out how to use the GRT EFIS HSI. We eventually figured it out and did a successful approach. Next was a GPS approach into York Airport, after a hold. This is where the flight got interesting. As we were approaching a fix to do a hold, the engine all of the sudden started to run very rough. As if it was a reflex, I immediately went full mixture and turned on the fuel pump. This didn't help the situation at all. I looked at my engine monitor and the issue was very clear - the #2 cylinder EGT's were completely dropped off, and the CHT's were decreasing quickly. The #2 cylinder was clearly not making power. Even down a cylinder, the engine still ran somewhat well and produced enough power to keep up airborne. I aimed for York airport to make a landing, and all of the sudden after a very long 2 minutes, the engine came back to life. Not wanting to be stuck at York if I didn't have to, we climbed up to a high altitude and flew a quick 10 minute flight back to KDMW for a uneventful landing. Upon landing, we started looking at some basic things about the engine. The spark plugs looked fine. The compression was 78/80. Nothing obvious was wrong. I didn't have time to muck with the engine much because Captain John from Plymouth was in town and we were heading downtown Baltimore for the evening.  The captain and I had a blast downtown.  John took a page out of my book and imported some Baltimore beer back to Plymouth, MA.  Smoketown posted their arrival pics just recently. Here is the arrival of yours truly.  And right behind me was Captain John.  While perusing the internet on searches including my tailnumber, I ran across this great picture snapped on takeoff by Paul Kanagie found at https://www.flickr.com/photos/runway27r/19813774704/in/photostream/ . 
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Last Modified: August 13, 2023 |