2nd failed attempt at getting night current

Last Thursday I went out to the airport, a 30 minute drive, expecting to hop into 3RV and go for a little flight in order to get current to carry passengers at night. However, as we drove out in the courtesy van to go to the airplane, we had trouble finding it. Well, until we looked in the maintenance hangar. Seems it was getting its intercom worked on and nobody bothered to tell the front desk.

With no other planes available, I drove the 30 minutes back home.

Today I went for round 2. I made sure the airplane was out of maintenance and booked it for 6pm. This time I got as far as the end of runway 7, where a engine run-up showed some roughness on the left magnetos. No problem, I’ll just clear them by running at higher RPMs with a lean mixture for a bit.

I tried that technique (which has worked a few times for me before) about 3 or 4 times with no improvement in the performance of the left mag. I would see a 200-250 RPM drop when using just the left mag (no more than 150 RPM drop is what I need to see). On top of that the engine would sound very rough and I think I even heard a couple of backfires, making me guess the fuel wasn’t getting burned completely.

Newport News Ground, Skyhawk 3RV having a little trouble with the mags, request taxi back to the north ramp.

Soon followed the reply to follow a Lear jet back to the ramp.

So on the trip back to the ramp the usual second guessing of myself started. Could I have cleared the problem with one more attempt? Did it really warrant returning to the ramp?

I quickly decided that the choice to park it was a obvious one. It would have been asinine for me to attempt a night flight, in a plane I’ve only flown once before, when there were any problems with the airplane, especially engine trouble. I hope to be an “old” pilot one day, and taking excessive risks isn’t going to get me there.

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