AOPA Pilot Magazine - November 2019 - 94

P&E

SAVVY MAINTENANCE

and all its row neighbors. I phoned the airport office to verify this, and the nice woman
I spoke to confirmed that if my aircraft was in
its hangar on the first day of the construction
period, it would be incarcerated for 18 days
with no possibility of parole. My only other
option was to remove the aircraft from the
hangar before the construction started and
find someplace to tie it down outdoors.
I had two important flights scheduled during that 18-day period. One was to
deliver an FAA safety seminar in San Diego,
and the other was to attend a memorial service for a dear friend who had passed away
recently. Allowing my airplane to be trapped
in the hangar for 18 days was not an option.
THE MOVE

94 | 

I cased the airport for a tiedown spot. It had
to be close to an access gate that the proximity card issued to me as a hangar tenant
would open, and also close to somewhere I
could park my car inside the airport's secure
perimeter fence. I located one that I considered satisfactory, pulled the airplane out of

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the hangar, taxied it to my chosen tiedown,
and secured it with chains.
At this point I realized that I needed
to lock the airplane, something I normally never do because it's parked inside
my locked hangar. My Cessna 310 has five
(count 'em) locks: cabin door, cabin baggage
door, two wing locker doors, and the nose
baggage compartment door.
The lock-up exercise went well until I got
to the nose baggage compartment and discovered that the lock wouldn't lock. Cursory
inspection suggested that the locking hook
was bent out of alignment. Under normal circumstances, I would have grabbed a pair of
pliers from my toolbox and a work light and
attempted to resolve the problem on the spot.
But of course, the toolbox and work light
were a half-mile away in my hangar. Sigh. I
left the nose compartment unlocked.
In a few days, I was going to be flying the
airplane down to San Diego. What happens if
somebody else parks in "my" tiedown spot while
I'm gone? I wondered. I decided to order some
collapsible orange traffic cones from Amazon

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and block off my spot anytime my airplane
wasn't in it. I'm not sure that'll work, but it's
the best idea I could come up with.
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING HANGARED

These two things got me thinking about all
the reasons having a hangar is important.
I've frequently heard aircraft owners argue
that a hangar is too expensive: "It's cheaper
for me to repaint my airplane every five
years than to hangar it." That may well be
true, but it misses the point. Preservation of
the airplane's exterior cosmetics is far down
on my list of reasons for hangaring it.
At the top of my list is preventing corrosion. To protect a metal airplane and its
metal engine from corrosion, you need to
keep them dry. Corrosion simply doesn't
occur in the absence of moisture. I'm not just
talking about keeping them out of the rain.
Where I'm based, we only get rain about four
months out of the year, and not much at that.
If I leave my car in my driveway overnight, the next morning it is usually covered
with a heavy deposit of dew. If I park my car

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AOPA Pilot Magazine - November 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of AOPA Pilot Magazine - November 2019
