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Found a cracked spreader bar on a pre-flight

Alex Clark

Registered User
Life Long Alaskan
I drove up the highway the other day to help a new wheel pilot work on his seaplane rating.
His plane had just been put on floats a couple days before and another ( rated) pilot had flown the plane 8 miles over to another lake.
During the preflight ( in the pouring rain) I saw this and put a stop to everything.

Looks like it was one rough landing away from departing...
 

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That looks like it just corroded through. Just finished painting my floats for the 180 today. It is a lot of work to keep floats in shape.
DENNY
 
I drove up the highway the other day to help a new wheel pilot work on his seaplane rating.
His plane had just been put on floats a couple days before and another ( rated) pilot had flown the plane 8 miles over to another lake.
During the preflight ( in the pouring rain) I saw this and put a stop to everything.

Looks like it was one rough landing away from departing...

Ouch! I’d be having a chat with whomever installed those floats. That’s been there a while.

MTV
 
Pretty difficult to adjust that rear tie wire w/o seeing the corrosion and crack. But maybe there was a final landing straw that broke it.

Gary
 
Do floats get an annual inspection?

As I’ve interpreted it from our shop: If the floats are installed on the airplane, they are landing gear and they are part of the aircraft annual. If they are getting installed on an airplane, by rights they must be inspected.

If the floats are not installed they are just equipment and there is no requirement to complete an annual. However, it is recommended for the same reasons that annuals are required for.

Float maintenance can be hard to track. When Wipaire sells new floats, we include a float logbook to track maintenance, but it is a convenience item that helps with float records and generally not required (commercial ops may vary).

If you bring our shop used floats to install, we are going to annual them before we put our name on the install. A float annual isn’t much more work beyond the functional tests you need to do for the install, though, so it’s not a lot of extra work and keeps things in ship shape.

—Amy
 
Can't stress enough running separate log books on items such as floats or skis. If they are maintained under the airframe log and later sold or installed on another aircraft, how do you check maintenance/AD histories?

Web
 
I never had logbooks for my floats or skis. As Amy noted, they SHOULD be inspected at installation. Every year. My annual inspections are typically done in winter, so floats were never on my personal planes during the annual.

Work airplanes also did not have separate logbooks for floats or skis. But, since those planes were subject to 100 hour inspections, they always got looked at during one or more of those inspections.

But, I've never actually seen a float logbook. Probably not a bad idea, but....

MTV
 
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