Unbelievable…

I’m beginning to despair of ever getting MYRO permitted. I posted on the BMAA forum that the Permit system is so user-unfriendly and full of pitfalls that nobody tells you about until you fall into them that there must be a better way 😐

It seems that there’s a ‘rule’ that Rosie forgot about that says a Check Pilot who was the previous owner of an aircraft is not allowed to conduct a Check Flight on the aircraft – it must be done by a Check Pilot who is independent. So Rosie’s Check Flight has been deemed invalid and after all my hard work trying to work as closely as I could with the BMAA office and my Inspector so things were done right first time, my Permit paperwork was duly returned to me after sitting in the BMAA office for a week – yet another week lost. It’s now been the best part of two months since MYRO was finished for Permit and unbelievably it still isn’t 😯

I’m very miffed about this – it seems that the final choice on this should be mine, not Deddington’s. OK, they can make me aware of the fact, but surely it should be up to me as a grown-up adult if I’m prepared to accept the situation and risk buying a ‘dud’ from a total charlatan? And are they suggesting that a Check Pilot appointed by them would be prepared to falsify a Check Flight whether they previously owned the aircraft or not? If so, I find that astonishing!

I phoned Chris Draper (BMAA Council member and fixed wing Check Pilot) and I’ve arranged with permission from the BMAA Tech Office to conduct another solo ferry flight over to Stoke for him to do another Check Flight. I’d been thinking about my fuel pressure which is still low, in fact low enough for Rosie to have remarked on it, so I thought I’d nip down to the field this afternoon and see if servicing the second, lower Mikuni fuel pump solved the problem. The work went well and I was looking forward to starting up to see what the results would be, but I couldn’t have been more disappointed . Now not only was the fuel pressure low, it was also unpredictable – higher at lower revs and liable to drop when you increased revs up to flying power!

I just can’t believe the problems I’m having with this – nobody else seems to have ever experienced the difficulties that I’m having. As Ginge Sunley over at Saxon Microlights said, in the whole of his experience, Mikunis are bomb proof – you just fit em and forget em. The last link in the chain is the pipe connecting the Mikunis to the crankcase – all I can now do is replace that and hope that it’s leaking vacuum a bit because of age. I dashed away from the field in the hope of getting to an auto accessory shop before they closed but I was just too late. So now I’ll have to pick some up at 8.30am tomorrow morning and fit it before, hopefully, getting away to Stoke. It’ll probably make me a bit late so I’ll have to try phoning Chris first thing. Mind you, if the fuel pressure is still too low, the Check Flight will be off anyway and I’ll have what is becoming a rather intractible problem still to solve 😕