It is maintenance season. It is December so most of the club fleet is in maintenance. Planes that have to be available next season for training and club flying have priority. When I was helping with maintenance of those planes, I got lucky. There was some room for my Libelle in the club workshop during the month December. As you can see in the photo above it’s very cozy in our workshop: everywhere you look there are planes, plane parts and tools. Including my beauty!

My goal was to start the maintenance of my Standard Libelle 201B. But since I already took out my dashboard (Dashboard: build in SimNav part 1) and found a total spaghetti of cables, I started with tidying up.

After removing the seat and some panels the hull, and all things running under the seat are left. I started with disconnecting the cables. Most of the wiring harness could be considered as a loss. It was designed for use with the Zander ZS1 computer and for an already lacking Emergency Locator Transmitter (ELT).

I did not have to remove all the cables: with a bit of effort I could save the original radio cable.

After removing most things, it was time to start laying out the antenna cable for the new transponder (black bundle in the middle).

At the left and right sides of the bottom of the hull you can see white cable bundles. Those are connected to two switches. One of these switches is for detecting the airbrakes open position. The other one is for detecting the landing gear position. The idea is that you will hear a sound when you open the airbrakes when the landing gear is still retracted. Since you open your airbrakes before landing it should remind you of putting your wheel down if you forgot. The switches were connected to the Zander ZS1 flight computer. In this article you can read that this flight computer is being replaced. So I have to come up with another solution. I think I will install a simple buzzer since there is no complicated logic there. If you have experience with this issue, and have suggestions, feel free to leave a comment below ;).