We all love to fly our gyroplanes, sadly we have to sometimes give up a day for routine maintenance..

I teach guys to fly and really enjoy it seeing them go from strength to strength, ....many flight schools offer this service, myself I get down and dirty ...I like to teach the first line maintenance and want the gyro owners to understand the aircraft and the importance of regular quality maintenance.

In SA Gyroplane falls under part 62 NTCA and this means under part 44 our pilots can save themselves a fortune by doing basic service and indorcing the aircraft log book accordingly 😉

So stoday we did the mandatory 25 hour blade inspection and reassembly on the older Xenon, we did the oil and filter, cleaned out the tank and inspected the magnetic gearbox plug, simple fundamental  stuff a owner should be able to do.

So off come the engine fairings... magnetic plug out, great to see no metal fillings indicating that the gearbox is performing correctly, we replaced the oil, cleaned the header tank and replaced the oil filter ...care taken to ensure we burp the engine to remove as much of the contaminated oil as possible.

One thorn we had was removing the exhaust as we were unable to remove the filter in the current installation, again all in day work and nothing a pilot/ owner should not be able to do.

Blades off we inspect the mounting holes and blade pockets using the non destructive ink method, mindful of the Xenon that fell two years ago in Poland killing the instructor & student, Rip aviators.

The we reassemble and we string the blades to ensure they are correctly aligned , we machined up new teeter bushes from phosphorus bronze and I centred the hub bar exactly in the centre negating the need or use of shims, yes this is not for the weekend pilot doing maintenance and accept you will need some specialised tools to do this, so the Manufacturer supplies shims to enable ten pilot with less experience and basic tools to achieve the same results.

So a great day doing maintenance and then a rewarding flight with the student in order that he can appreciate his handy work, enjoy the day with us as we lost the pics 👍