I would have to agree that “if you don’t use it, you will eventually lose it”. This applies equally to planes, trains automobiles, and boats…
Anything mechanical left standing for a given period, will eventually rot out from under you.
Specifically to my aircraft if either are left standing for more than four weeks, particularly near salt water, the gremlins will come.
O-rings dry out, corrosion gets into all sorts of unwanted places, especially cannon plugs, and avionics start to play up.
Same goes for extreme cold… Contact cleaner is my best friend out here.
And please, do not get me started on boats. Wasn’t there some sage old advice about rental being best!
E
Isn’t cat litter supplied as granules? They get everywhere. Plus they smell really bad
The traditional cat litter is ground clay/bentonite but the new type is exactly the silica gel you buy in bags. I just bought 30l of it for 20 €. The color dye is a nice extra effect. Be sure to buy one without scent, just the pure gel. Something like this.
It actually doesn’t have any smell, as far as I remember … (20 years ago). I
Silica gel cat litter only appeared a few years ago. It is just the easiest and cheapest source of silica gel today. I don’t have any cats (and will never have one), just found that this is the best source of the stuff.
It actually doesn’t have any smell, as far as I remember … (20 years ago). I
Do you have a hygrometer in your cockpit and keep track of rel. humidity? Would be interesting.
I have a handheld RH meter. On a quick and dirty measurement, the silica gel bag reduces the RH by 10 percentage points, which is a huge reduction when you consider the ambient might be 99% if it’s raining.
I have a little oil radiator in the cockpit, keeping it at 11°C which is enough to keep it over the dew point with a good margin.
That will probably do the same thing, but you need power, which is not an option for me.
You can get silica gel much cheaper now as cat litter. That removes the need to bake it, you can just toss it. It even has a color indicator (blue) to show you whether it is saturated. It looks like the blue stuff that Walter White cooked in Breaking Bad although I haven’t given it a try yet. It’s really great to have a cheap source of the stuff now, only appeared some time ago.
Isn’t cat litter supplied as granules? They get everywhere. Plus they smell really bad – or is that cat food that smells like cat s**t?
I paid about £6/bag.
((Breaking Bad, best TV show I’ve ever watched!))
It looks like the blue stuff that Walter White cooked in Breaking Bad although I haven’t given it a try yet
You are not planning to smoke cat litter, are you? ;-)
Fortunately there is an easy solution. I keep a 0.5kg bag or two of silica gel in the cockpit the whole time, changing them over every time I fly.
Do you have a hygrometer in your cockpit and keep track of rel. humidity? Would be interesting. I have a little oil radiator in the cockpit, keeping it at 11°C which is enough to keep it over the dew point with a good margin.
You can get silica gel much cheaper now as cat litter. That removes the need to bake it, you can just toss it. It even has a color indicator (blue) to show you whether it is saturated. It looks like the blue stuff that Walter White cooked in Breaking Bad although I haven’t given it a try yet. It’s really great to have a cheap source of the stuff now, only appeared some time ago.
What I have been told by old hands in the avionics business is also that when a plane has been sitting around for months, the avionics boxes start to give trouble.
The only cause I can imagine is that humidity accumulates in the cockpit, and doesn’t escape easily.
Fortunately there is an easy solution. I keep a 0.5kg bag or two of silica gel in the cockpit the whole time, changing them over every time I fly. Then they go in the oven at +120C overnight, to recover them. Make sure you get the fabric stitched ones; the cheaper ones cannot be baked.
This “fly often” mantra is unfounded.
I don’t think it’s unfounded. After all it’s been in really all Lycoming and TCM engine maintenance books for a long time, and experience form many pilots has shown that engine components DO GET unprotected after a certain time and start to rust.
Just have a look at what planes that live in Florida look like after 20 years, and then check the same models in Texas and Arizona. While outside corrosion and corrosion inside the engine cannot be fully compared, it would be rather strange if there was NO correlation. For OUR wet climate and the cold winters I am very sure that regular flying makes a big difference.
While this is somewhat anecdotal: Last year after I had bought the SR22 my Piper Warrior did not fly for almost three months. The airplane had been flawless for many months before that, but when I wanted to fly it after those 3 months, not only the battery was empty and there was too little air in the tires – also the brakes lost fluid and two O-Rings of the primer pump were both broken and had to be replaced. It took one day to get the airplane airworthy again after only three months of standing in a dry hangar …
And that was my eperience always … for more than 20 years. And before that my dad made the exactly same experience from when he bought the plane in 1978. It’s been in the family for 36 years now, and it would always have problems from standing. I remember at least 3 times.
As I said, these are unfounded ancedotes, by this experience is hard to overcome. And i don’t see why the engine should NOT suffer when really every other airplane system does.
This “fly often” mantra is unfounded. I don’t know why people keep propagating it when there is no real evidence
There is ample evidence of internal engine corrosion – just ask any TB20/21 GT owner who bought his plane in 2000-2003 
The only Q is how long it takes to get going.
One would expect huge amount of variability, because there is a massive difference between say a temp=+10C / DP=+5C and temp=+10C / DP=+9C in terms of how much liquid water gets created and left behind. I reckon you could leave an engine on the shelf in Arizona for 20 years. On Shoreham Beach? A few weeks, max. At a certain well known location in southern France, a Lyco engine, in original Lyco sealed packaging, will be full of rust after 1-2 years.
@vic I agree with what you write. Oil doesn’t just drip down and leave the surfaces unprotected, it is rather sticky and how much depends on the type. Water does enter the crankcase as part of the blow by (water and CO2 are the main products of combustion) but not in a way it would be under the oil and you could drain it.
I think three things are problematic here:
1) Ambient humidity (which is typically equal or lower than the crankcase) humidity can be enough for corrosion to happen. I have been recording relative humidity in my hangar and in winter, it often exceeds 80%. I keep a small oil radiator in the cabin to protect my avionics. I’m working on a dehydrator for the engine.
2) The oil or its additives are partly hygroscopic, i.e. they attract water.
3) Blow-by contains acids and reacts with the oil/additives to form acids which then greatly accelerate corrosion.
Items 2) and 3) can be addressed by frequent oil changes and to some extent the choice of oil. I had my car oil changed after 20 000km. It looked better than my aircraft oil after 1h of flying. Also even the most modern aircraft oils are 1980s technology and back then we had to do rather frequent changes in the car, too. Keeping the oil in the aircraft for long means keeping a lot of nasty substances around which are corrosive.
This “fly often” mantra is unfounded. I don’t know why people keep propagating it when there is no real evidence. Maybe “fly often so that your engine can be overhauled after a few years” would be more truthful but that’s unrealistic for a private owner. There are enough examples of rarely flown engines with very little corrosion and heavily utilized engines with major corrosion that one can safely say that this popular statement is not true in its simple form. The engine overhauler I had a Lycoming overhauled a few weeks ago confirmed this — after 40 years in business he told me there is no clear pattern on corrosion.
