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Larry Winger's 601XL Project
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Date: 9-21-2014
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Number of Hours: 0.00
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Manual Reference:
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Brief Description: 1 - Attempted first flight
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On Sunday, September 21, in the late afternoon a small group of familiy and friends came to the Chino airport to witness the first flight. All the last minute checks were completed and my hangar mate, Steve Glover, was ready to take her aloft. We repositioned ourselves as close to the active runway as possible, video equipment at the ready, as Steve received clearance and began to roll. The nose wheel was barely off the ground when we heard him transmit the word no one expected: "Abort." It turns out that on his last glance down at the instruments before rotation, he notived that my backup EFIS (the MGL XTreme) had completely frozen at 42 mph. Not knowing if the primary would fail next, he wisely elected to end the flight before it began. That began a many day saga of tracking down the problem. Matt at MGL at first suspected ignition interference with the sensitive wires feeding power or data to the unit. I spent a long day at the hangar separating wires and rerouting them. I ultimately discovered that I had a ground loop, but fixing that didn't resolve the problem. Finally, in frustration I pulled the unit and drove it to MGL's U.S. office at Zamperini Field in Torrance, CA. Matt and his technician checked it over while I got some lunch and it turned out to be nothing more than a corrupted settings file on the SD card. Once that was rebuilt, the problem was solved. That may help to explain the gap between this attempt and the first flight.
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Wishing my test pilot a safe flight
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Posing in my creation
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The debrief
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