How to Run-Up an Airplane

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Dave Pressy with St. Charles Flying Service, on behalf of Expert Village. We'll make sure our brakes are set, make sure our cabin doors are closed and locked. We'll verify that those are locked. We'll go ahead and bring the window closed and lock it. So now, we're going to check our flight controls. Make sure that we have freedom of movement on those flight controls. So ailerons left and right, we're going to go ahead and pull up, and then when the aileron is over to the left, want to make sure that aileron is up. And down. Up and down. And also with the elevator. We'll take a look back behind us. That elevator goes up and down. Check those rudder pedals, too, make sure that they have freedom of movement, and that the rudder is moving slightly. Ok, now we're going to do an engine run-up, we're going to check that the engine is working properly. We're going to increase our throttle to about 1700 RPMs on the rpm gauge and tachometer. We have two sets of spark plugs in this airplane, so we're going to check one, and then the other. When we take one, we should have a drop in rpm, about 100 rpm or so. Put it back on both systems, make sure that it recovers. We'll go straight over to the right, make sure we have a similar drop. Put it back on both, make sure it comes back to about 1700 RPMs. While we're there, we're also going to bring on the carb heat. This puts warm air into the carburetor, in case we get any kind of icing conditions. We're going to make sure we have a slight drop in rpm when we do that. While we're there, we want to make sure we have a suction gauge that it's in the green arc. Make sure our fuel quantities are reading full. Our oil temperature and oil pressure are within the green, to make sure those are where they're supposed to be. And our ammeter, which is an idea of how much our battery is charging, want to go ahead and to go ahead make sure that's on, and then we're going to snap that off, take the alternator offline to make sure we get a drop in our amps and also a warning light. That if we lose our alternator in flight, and we're just running off the battery, we'll know that. Put this back on. Then we're going to bring the power, or reduce the power, all the way to an idle setting, to make sure the engine still runs in idle. We'll bring it back up to about 1000 RPM. And then our preflight run-up is complete."