Another Xair no-fly day

I didn’t want to have another early morning at Malbec after having had one yesterday and then worked for several hours in the hot sun, so by the time I got there today and unhooked the battery charger the temperature was already pushing 30 degrees C, as had been forecast. The first flight of any aircraft immediately following maintenance, especially if it involved the engine, is in effect a test flight and you therefore want conditions to be as good as possible.

So the conditions this morning were yet again far too unstable to get 24ZN into the air and instead I settled for more taxying up and down the runway before parking it under the tall trees at the top of the runway in the hope that conditions would be more favourable in the early evening. I wasn’t holding out too much hope, however, as the forecast for today was for another extremely hot day with the heat continuing on well into the evening.

And so it turned out. When I arrived at Malbec at 8.00 pm the temperature was still around 35 degrees C so I decided that prudence was the best policy and to abandon any idea of flying this evening. As two more very hot days are forecast for tomorrow and Monday it looks as though the earliest I’ll be able to fly 24ZN will be Tuesday so it meant that both it and my Savannah would have to be put back into the barn, with the Xair needing to have its covers put back on as well.

It’s extraordinary. When I wanted to fly 24ZN over to France from the UK in the autumn of 2019 I was prevented from doing so due to bad weather in the form of cold, wet weather and high winds. Now it’s here the weather is again preventing me from flying it, but this time in the form of scorching hot days that would be thermic to the point of being dangerous for such a light aircraft. You couldn’t make it up.

I did have one piece of good fortune today, however. Take a look at the following photo and on the right of the panel there’s a switch labelled ‘intercom’. Underneath it there’s a little green light.

it turns out that whoever wired in the intercom didn’t connect it through the master switch as they should have done. I either left it on earlier or, more likely, knocked the switch on when I was cleaning 24ZN’s panel and it’s been on ever since giving a slow but steady drain of the battery. So that’s why the battery went flat yesterday.

Now that I’ve switched it off, hopefully I’ll have no further battery problems. Certainly, there was no problem starting the engine after the aircraft had been sitting for several weeks, months even, so something must have caused the dead battery yesterday and I’m pretty sure this was it.