On Sep 15, 12:44*pm, "Ol Shy & Bashful" wrote:
I'm deligthted to see I'm managing to get some arguments and
discussion going. And if you notice, No Profanity?
I challenge my students to learn to taxi without brakes. and I come
down hard if they beat up the airplane with unecessary braking instead
of staying ahead of the airplane. (sometimes even with profanity! Can
you imagine that?)
How about you? If you had to pay for the brakes, tires, and
maintenance, would YOU beat up the airplane?
Ol S&B

A lot of students and/or renters aren't thinking about brake
burnout. They've grown up driving cars that had pretty good brakes, so
they treat the airplane's brakes the same. They often don't know what
the "L" in "PRNDL" is for, or the "3-2-1" in "PRND321." They never use
those settings when going down hills, or if they have a standard, they
use the brakes on it, too, instead of gearing down. So brakes become
the fix for most instances of speed control.
So they taxi around with too much power and use the brakes to fix
that. Or land long and fast and use the brakes to fix that, too,
except that the wings are still lifting and there's little weight and
traction on the tires, so the tires suffer as well as the brakes. And
sooner or later the surface conditions are less than good and the
brakes can't fix the problem anymore and some damage ensues.
When I was instructing I was always asking the student to pull
that throttle back, please, and stop riding the brakes. Brakes that
are held on during taxi get very hot and their metallic compounds
start to weld to the disc and raise little burrs that cut the
daylights out of the pads. Those $160 discs wear out much faster, even
aside from the burrs. Tires that have to resist the thrust constantly
scrub a little and wear out quickly. And with the thrust line at the
prop hub and the drag at the surface, a rotational couple is created
that pulls the nose down so that the propeller, which is turning too
fast and moving much more air than necessary, sucks up all the little
rocks and other hard bits that eat the propeller before its time. Such
sloppy piloting costs a lot, see, and it only makes the aircraft owner
raise his rates to cover the maintenance expenses. A private owner
that's had to pay for this sort of thing becomes acutely aware of his
bad habits.

Dan