Hi All,

You are right Randy. Mark is absolutely the best- in communicating. And he has done a beautiful job in putting just the right equipment on the airplane for this flight. Icing/navigating/flying (autopilot) etc. etc..

But if you look closer in his pictures you find that he was using the blue hose couplings that have not been manufactured in years.

The blue ones are much thicker and jellylike allowing them to slip out from under clamps.

Continental recognized this problem back when I started flying mine in 1995 and issued a service bulletin. SB 94- 3A /1995-05-23

converting to the thinner but thicker consistency red silicone.  We need to get the word out to pilots/mechanics to throw away these old blue couplings. And-- looking closer we see that the clamp used was not the proper one. The one used and shows in the picture is for the turbocharger exhaust pipe-- not the turbo boost to the intake manifold. The one shown in the picture will not clamp down beyond a certain value.

There have been many stories over the years about these hoses coming off. Don G. has an especially good one. Communication was not good that day and the controller interpreted his report to be a C-130 with four engines out! Then things got interesting.

Almost all Lancair training manuals address this problem and direct the Mixture to be pulled aft untill engine runs smoothly.