An airplane's little mysteries

Now that I've gotten the Reiff preheater system installed, I went flying yesterday even though the temperature was -12C. I wanted to do some cold weather testing and find out how cold it can get before the pilot of N614EF needs to land and warm up.

I also wanted to see if changing a configuration setting on the Garmin 296 would fix the problem I'm having with my TruTrack Digiflight (single-axis). It doesn't want to follow the Garmin flight plan, even though it's getting solid data. Bottom line: It didn't.

I also wanted to do some TAS checking and found that at 5,000 feet yesterday, I was getting about 150 knots (173 mph) at about 65-70% power.

After I landed, I noticed this...

The rear part of the lower, right-side intersection fairing ripped off. I'm not exactly sure why. Before bonding them to the wheelpants, the intersection fairing was screwed into place after applying epoxy.

I did notice recently that the rear seamline had started to split. I think the gear leg fairing was being pushed into it and so it was acting like a putty knife. I'm not sure that accounts for the ripping off the fairing. I did, as you can see, split the wheel pants along the seam, but the rear part of the intersection fairing was not sitting proud and, thus, exposed to the airstream. Ironically, the left side intersection fairing is sitting in that fashion.

It's -6 (F) this morning, so I'm going to pull everything off and bring it home to a warm house for evaluation.