rain damage?
This week we flew up to the AERO show in Friedrichshafen (Germany) from Barcelona (Spain). A real cross countr(ies), along France and Switzerland...
I completed the SB on time and protected throroughly the instrument pannel cover, sealing it acoording to the instructions.
In the south of France we were flying under a heavy rain for about 15 minutes, and a couple of drops of water entered the cockpit though the passenger side.
Few nm later the layout of the screens in the Dynon started dancing, changing from one layout to the next every other second (as if I was pressing the key constantly).
After a couple of minutes of "exciting" trip, the layout stop and I could go to my usual display set.
Following came a new surprise, when a controller asked to recycle my transponder, and there was no way to set the number "5" in the code. Trip continued in VFR code (7000 in Europe) uneventfully, till we land in EDNY.
After landing, I secured the plane in the ground and used the Vans grey cover. What this RV12 enjoyed then, were 36 consecutive hours of rain outside of a hangar. (I had a couple of bad nights of sleep).
Saturday the skies cleared and we decided to fly back home.
Earlier in this thread Jack Netherlands (Hotscam) talked about all sorts of failures after a heavy rain, that dissapeared after the avionics dryed out.
Well, there was no joy here... My key "5" of the transponder code was still a challenge. What was worse was that the FPL couldn?t be set to "Navigate", as if the option
was not available in the Software! (I followed the trip setting a D-> every other airport till we landed home).
After landing I realised that all three issues (
Navigate,
Layout and code
5) do use the same button in the Dynon, so I convinced myself of a water damage in that button.
...but it appears, that is the same button that we used to set the
FPL, the
Xponder, the
Code setting, etc... and these work perfectly! So it looks like if the rain
just damaged few bytes of programing code...
I?ll continue my drying work, and as soon as the new version 12.x is launched I?ll update to see what comes out of it...
In the meantime, any clues out there?
Godo