Engine troubles

Well, that was unexpected. I was all prepared to go up for some circuits before being let loose for some more solo fun, but the engine didn’t want to play ball. First flight of the day it always takes a few goes to get the vintage G-BZEB running, but this time all I got was a click from the starter relay; no engagement of the starter, no movement from the prop. Battery was fine as flaps et al were working as intended, and I was the last one to fly it the previous day so I knew the alternator was fine and that it had been put to bed properly.

A friendly engineer popped out and stripped off the engine cowling, poked at some stuff and declared the starter dead. No flying for me today, and my first cancellation for mechanical issues. The instructor offered his time to go over anything I wasn’t sure about from a theory perspective so I jumped at the chance to get some hands-on nav planning experience, and he walked me through the process of planning a flight from Blackbushe to Oxford.

The engineer popped in part-way through our flight planning to say it was all fixed - turns out the starter relay was failing to properly actuate, meaning not enough current was getting through to the starter to engage it - but there was only 30 minutes of the session left, and anyway by this point I was too invested in this mythical flight to Oxford.

We only managed to plan a single leg so I asked him to give me a route to take away and plan myself, and he’s given me the first nav route we’ll be flying once I’m done with the solo consolidation. Obviously the flight plan won’t be remotely useful once we get there with varying conditions, NOTAMs etc. but it being an actual route I’ll fly at some point is an extra motivator to (work out how to) do it properly.

I’ve also booked myself on the 3-hour nav ground school that the flight school are running in a couple of weeks. I’m hoping by that point it’s a refresher of newly learned skills rather than brand new, but regardless for a few quid it’ll be worth it just to have 3 hours in the zone without the cacophony of family life in the background.