Paul Fortino (our Chief Maintenance Officer) reports that members are getting better at calling maintenance officers to report issues with the planes. Remember the Squawk Sheets have been removed from the time sheet book, and the new "squawk" blackboards in each hangar are for alerting other members about your observations. But you still need to call a maintenance officer about anything that needs fixing.

For those of you that fly the Warrior, you may have noticed over the years that the autopilot has been getting unreliable. Sometimes it would work well, sometimes it would be off by 10 or 20 degrees, and recently it finally failed completely. Well, having a hard failure finally allowed for the determination of what was wrong. It was a weak diode in the circuit that finally failed all the way. Now that the diode has been replaced, Paul reports the autopilot is working fine. So go ahead and use it.

Also on the Warrior, there was an occasional problem in the audio system that was caused by bad wires in the microphone (the "emergency" mic you only use if the one on your headset goes bad). Paul replaced it with another (old) mic and fixed the problem.

For a long time we have been using unscented Pledge to clean the windscreens. We cannot use regular Pledge or most other cleaning products because of the damage they would do to the plastic windscreen, or because of the corrosive effect the overspray might have on the aluminum airframe. But this particular Pledge formulation is getting too hard for find. So when we run out of unscented Pledge, we will be switching to Claire Plastic Cleaner. We already have some of it in the hangars. So when you see a spray bottle of this new stuff on the tables, don't worry, it's OK to use it on the windscreens.

And while we are talking about cleaning, let's talk bugs. Summer is here and along with summer comes those lovely splattered bodies of various bugs that you find on all the leading edges and the windscreen after a flight. And by the time you get back to the hangars, those tiny corpses on the leading edges are pretty dried on. Often a quick wipe with a wet sponge does not remove them. Dale Thorsby (who keeps our hangars well supplied with buckets, water, and sponges) recommends going once around the plane with a wet sponge just to wet down the bugs, and then after a short delay for the water to soak in, come back around again and wipe them off for real. Or just stand there rubbing until each bug is gone - your choice. I think I'll try the two-pass method the next time I fly.