Ice

I flew this morning and learned another thing about airplanes first hand.  I love these practical lessons.  You see, there's a phenomena that occurs with aircraft using carburetors where the carb. builds up ice inside and the engine starts running rough and eventually may cause the engine to stop.  This is kind of bad, so we have a knob in the airplane that we can pull and it sends hot air into the carburetor to melt the ice so the engine continues to run. 

When I started the engine in Artesia this morning, the temperature was low and the humidity was high.  This is a good combination in the atmosphere to produce carb. ice.  When I was taxiing to the end of the runway, the engine seemed to be missing quite a bit.  I thought it might just be a cold engine or a rich mixture.  I leaned the fuel/air mixture a little and started my run-up at the end of the runway.  This is where I hold the brakes and rev the engine to 1700rpm to test the systems.  While testing, the engine RPM dropped to 1200rpm.  I thought, hey, I may have carb ice.  I pulled the know to send hot air in and presto!  The engine started running like it was supposed to.  I kept it on while on take-off and for a while afterward.  It is neat to see the real effects of something only spoken of in theory during training.  That's another experience to mark up on my list.

I also flew around a bit of fog this morning.  I stayed legal the whole time, but I could see fog forming, burning off, and moving, but I didn't get into it.  When I was ready to leave Artesia, fog had brought the horizontal visibility down to 1/2 mile and I had to wait for better weather.  Good flight today.

Tomorrow I fly to Amarillo and back.  That will be a fun trip.

Joshua