Thursday afternoon Henrik and I had a nice plan: we wanted to fly to the island of Sejerø and have a sunset dinner on its northernmost cliff. The pre-flight check didn’t indicate any issues of my Aeroprakt, and I started the engine. Immediately, both Henrik and I could hear something was wrong. Quick look at the instruments revealed the 2nd cylinder wasn’t firing:
I restarted, everything seemed to work fine, but the engine’s sound wasn’t 100% perfect. After the warm-up we began taxiing slowly to the runway, reading the instruments’ data, when the 2nd cylinder shut down again. Something was clearly wrong, but what? We turned back to the hangar. Some of the hard-core self-taught flight engineers were at the flying club, and we thought we’d seek their advice.
As soon as Henrik and I parked, Anders approached us with the question “what is the problem?” After listening to our story, he said: “Just yesterday I saw a video on youtube describing the same situation, and there was a solution!”
Anders took the left carburettor out. One of the floats was sunken!
Luckily, Anders was not only able to identify the problem, he also had the spare floats! As soon as we replaced one – the other one sank to the very bottom. We replaced it as well. Started the engine – it ran perfectly! What a relief! We were so grateful to Anders!
It was a bit too late to go for Sejerø, so Henrik and I headed for plan B: Kongsted, a gliding club half an hour flight south of Holbæk.
Surely, our appreciation of flying was much higher after the engine failure incident!
Gisselfeld Castle on our way, surrounded by cobalt-blue lakes:
Henrik had told me about the airfield in Kongsted and the luxury 2-store club house they were building there; we wanted to check out the building site.
It was going to be very nice when finished. Just look at this kitchen:
We were offered a cup of coffee, but didn’t really have the time for it. We new the weather conditions were going to deteriorate, a mist and low clouds from the northwest were approaching quickly, and the sun was going down.
We took off. The misty sunset was so lovely:
The video Anders shared with us later that day: https://youtu.be/3xbfwwuVBXE. It is rather long to my taste, but if you watch from the 6th minute till 8th, it would be enough: that section covers the very unique and unusual problem we encountered.