Today we did a short flight from Harare main airport to the adjacent airport in Harare Charles Prince. We noticed some charging issues on the battery on the flight from Lanseria so wanted to know that everything was ok. Turns out that there was a loose connection and the wires shorted out on the alternator and we fried the wires.
Generally while flying if something doesn’t feel right or you are getting strange readings, like we did, it is always better to have it looked at sooner than later. As on the second leg of the flight to Harare we noticed the battery was sitting at 11.6V constantly so actually discharging a bit, and where all the lights were turned on it would drop drastically. On landing in Harare the wire made contact during touch down and we go full charge on the meter indication around 16V!
The next leg of the journey takes me to Solwezi in Zambia and there are no maintenance companies there that I’m aware of so I am really glad the plane got looked at before we continued. Being stranded at an Airfield with no battery, or worse in the air with no radios is not something you want.
The flight from Robert Mugabe to Charles Prince was uneventful as it was 15nm and took around 11 minutes to complete, we had some low cloud covering the whole of Harare, and due to the location of Charles Prince it was quite hard to spot from the air.
Tomorrow things get interesting again with the flight from Harare to Ndola in Zambia and from Ndola to Solwezi. The forcast isn’t looking the greatest so we will see a GO or NO GO call tomorrow when we have more information.
My Flying Adventures 