Hello guys

Not long go I wrote about this fellow who owns a Lancair 4p with a lot of troubles and a pilot who has no high performance time, little retract time, and did not flew for 1 year now (he was thinking to do his bi-annual in a Cessna 172).  I was visiting him yesterday and did see the plane.

The plane itself looks like a project (never ending) and the stories well......they are pretty scary. The engine did not ran for a long time as he was waiting for another alternator, and now it is not doing anything as one of the screens from his OP technologies gave up.

The sad part is that he has a old version of this OP system with CRT screens and they do not have them anymore, so now he is waiting for OP to program his system to have it work with the newer LCD screens (well.......I did not want to tell him but that probably will never happen, a company will not spend manpower on something like this, as this would be very costly, the CRT has a different pixel count than the LCD screens.....etc etc)

The exhaust pipes of the plane (chromed) were showing weather, and it was already letting go of the chrome inside the cowling. He did told me that the engine was running pretty good (although it is a performance engine...engine...)

Charlie Kohler did inspect the plane twice and he did gave this gentleman a list of things that had to be repaired...but I also noticed in our conversation that he does not have a real big budget neither, so not sure how far he did go with Charlie's recommendations.

So it will not flying for a while and to be honest even if you would pay me 1000/hour I still would not climb into this plane right now. I gave him my opinion and told him that if I would be him I would try to sell the plane and put this money into a plane like a cirrus.

In my opinion the plane is about 50-70k away from being ready and safer (new avionics, paint, interior, charlie's list). The plane was built by a father/son in Fort Pierce (people who know them know how to avoid them), the plane had so many issues like Ailerons not working when flaps were deployed etc that I am still in awe about his. (he was not able to make left turns when he had the flaps down, right turns were working well lol

He also explained me about the engine out issue he had, the CFII wanted to show him what a 'real' high performance plane can do, and was banking 45% while low on fuel, so he was so low on fuel that it ported out and the engine was sucking air. He than told him to level the plane, and tried first switching tanks, than tried the low boost pump and when that did not worked he used the high boost and it was cranking up again (I explained him to always have low boost pump on before switching tanks).

Well the good news is that he will not be able to fly this plane for a while, the bad news is that he is still thinking to get it ready and than start flying it. Which than comes back to the question.....what would you do?

-- Ronald (112 hours and counting)