Well left St Barths yesterday, an interesting trip.
One has to do the training every six months, not be back for a year, so more fun next time.
Had a weird sense that there was doing to be a problem on the flight back to Barbados, about 400nm over the sea.
Airplane was on a slight sideways slope. Did a check of the fuel drain to the engine on each tank, right hand nothing - that delayed departure until figured out it was the slope, cured by realigning the airplane to the slope.
So off to Guadeloupe to refuel, about 1hr 20mins - about 2hr 45mins from Barbados direct. Gets dark here a little after six, pm landing paid and refuelled - now a one mile round trip hike to file the flight plan, time not looking too good. So thought call ground, decided to use my new ICOM, spoke to ground, they too the details and was away within 10 minutes.
7,500ft all looking good, dodged a new towering CN clouds.
Final hand off to Adams radar about 65 miles out. Got to about 33nm, island in sight, thought I could hear a very faint beeping sound, called Adams to let them know I was descending and nothing - thought, radio failure, just out of annual, switched boxes, switched to speaker and nothing, noticed the NAV flag popped up on the VOR tuned to Adams. Put 7600 on the transponder. As I had spoken with I had the handheld in reach, not easy to use in a noisy cockpit, spoke with them, got cleared to land from about 15 miles out.
Was thinking, it may be the audio box - we had an issue in St Barths with the radio and thought that may be it, so though it's that thing again, that box needs swapping out; niggles that come when one's airplane sits for three months.
Landed no issues.
Went to the tower, I park right next to it. The guys there said that the landing time given on the flight plan was ten minutes earlier, when not only only no comms but the transponder disappeared - they were getting ready to get the coast guard out when I called on the handheld. Started thinking something here is odd.
The charge needle was at zero - it shows charge to the battery, long flight, not at all odd, fully charged. I had the airplane lit up like a Chrustmas tree, strobes, landing light, couple of GPS's, autopilots, two comms, one of two navs, DME - so sucking power, the nixi tubes on the radios were illuminated.
Now the very, very faint beeping I mentioned earlier - I think it was the annunciator - there is an illuminated panel, it is tucked up under the coaming I sit very high, did not duck down to look at it. Thinking it was an alternator failure, likely the belt, only occurred to me once I got home - will be going over to check it this afternoon.
All very mysterious, the adventure of flying, could have been swimming - no matter what next time I have lost comms I will be switching off all but one box.
Isn't flying fun
