Had an interesting day out yesterday in G-NATT my Rockwell Commander. Left Liverpool John Lennon for Llanbedra - land there without incident, took off to go to Caarnarfon landed there with out any real incident. However doing the ground checks at Liverpool I noticed the engine oil was low so dramatically low but at just under 6 on a scale of 1 to 8 so topped up with a quart and that brought her up to just under 8. On landing at EGCK i got out and did a walk around having felt the aircraft to be a little bit sluggish on takeoff 20 mins earlier. I notice a lot of oil on the front starboard gear door, not where you would expect to see any oil to be fair. So check the oil and it was at 4 after a total of 1 hours flying, not good. During the flight there was no degradation in oil pressure not any elevated EGT or oil temperature and she flew fine. I had a quick word with Druid the engineer and I did say Druid!! He said thats not right we took the cowling off and number 5 cylinder the rear left one had a bent push rod cover, again not good. Remover the rocker cover pushed out the rocker shaft and removed the exhaust valve push rod and this is what came out: As you can see well bent, and the sleeve you can see to the right is why oil was pissing out everywhere! So lucky boy, no in flight fire and no actual engine fail but had this not been noticed one or other or both would have happened on flight back to Liverpool. Lesson learned do a walk round every time you land and before take off.
Posted on: Thu, 04 Sep 2014 14:49:16 +0000
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