A little diversion

I just returned from a one night trip to AR and had a minor bit of excitement on the way out there.  

My plan was simple - the weather was nice and the trip distance was easily within my margin for a single/direct flight with no fuel stop (especially since I managed to get a 2-3 kt tailwind).    However, an hour or so into the flight one of the engine sensors (one that measures the turbine inlet temperature) started behaving a bit "off".  It was showing a value bouncing between 1600 degrees F up to 1750.  At times it would bounce up to 1800+ at which point the avionics system would *bong* to alert me to the problem.  

I monitored the other readouts and all looked good, but I lowered the power to see if that helped.  It didn't make a difference, and the readout would instantly correct itself from time to time, yet kept bouncing around.  Feeling confident it was just a readout issue, I decided to press on and simply monitor the issues closely.  

However, it got to the point where it would continuously *bong* at me, and it's not something you can just ignore (which is a good thing).  I decided I couldn't fly another 2 hours with this going on, so started planning out how I'd fix it.

I had brought along the latest issue of the Cirrus Owners and Pilots Association magazine, and it dawned on me that it would have a list of Cirrus Certified repair shops around the country.  I was over Tennessee so I found two options fairly close to my route.   

I told ATC I wanted to amend my destination to KMQY.  They said "sure, what's the purpose?" and I let them know I had a bad readout that was causing alarms, and so needed to be addressed.  They quickly set me up for the ILS approach (it was cloudy around there at the time) and I was on the ground in maybe 10-15m.  


Leaving MQY
With some extraordinary help from the folks at Corporate Flight Management, I was able to get airborne again in 3hrs.  They immediately got to work on the problem for me, and found a frayed wire leading to that sensor.  Once they fixed that up and ran the engine to test it, I was all set to go. Can't say enough good things about how they treated me.

I was able to make it to my destination only slightly late, and the readout was fixed up and working reliably again. 

I came back home this morning and had a perfect flight.  I took off, leveled off a 9,000' and did little more than swap fuel tanks, monitor the engine, and watch out for ice on the wings (found some wet clouds out there) for 3.5 hours.  Well, that and take in the sights while looking around for other airplanes.  

Another great flight, and some extra experience building to boot.
Returning home at 9,000'

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