I was descending, IMC, on a STAR last night, headed to Henderson (Vegas), when I got a CAS indicating LH FWD BAGGAGE OPEN (had already flown 1+45 at this point). Non-event in my book, keep flying……..
Then things got weird. I got a “SPEED” warning on my speed tape and noted a 10-18 knot difference between the left and right airspeed indications. The CAS Christmas tree started…..Ventral rudder failure followed by a YD Fail and AP Fail. I silence the warning and started hand-flying…gotta love single-pilot operations!
Then ventral message disappeared, then returned along with the other failures plus a few….back and forth…all OK, failures….etc. Winds (240/25G35) and turbulence are killing me. I advise “no-contact“ for the visual 17R due to blowing snow/IMC, I get vectors for the RNAV, circle to land 17R.
In the circling maneuver, I’m seeing the following: AP Fail, YD Fail, Ventral Rudder Fail, FMS disagree, ROAAS unavailable, the SPEED warning and LH baggage message (may have been others as I haven’t experienced this many outside of the sim).
I’m at a loss here to figure out exactly what was going on.….any “helpful“ input is appreciated.
Someone just posted this on another forum yesterday, sounds very similar to your issue:
As we fly around in glass cockpit aircraft, all I can say is “know your systems”.
This guy flew a brand new single engine jet with glass cockpit over the North Atlantic, in the winter, DID I MENTION SINGLE ENGINE?
“Over 7 days we flew for 32.7hrs covering 9569nm and landed in 12 countries. Temperatures on the ground ranged from -35C(-37F) in the Arctic to 38C(100F) in the Sahara desert.”
“We had more than our fair share of failures over the Arctic where we lost airspeed reading, altitude, VSI, autopilot, had FADEC warnings, databased corruptions and a whole lot more. It was scary deep dive into handling inflight emergencies in a very unforgiving environment but I am better off for the experience.”
“Static port blockage (the worst one):
We are guessing that when they washed the aircraft prior to collection a meaningful amount of water got into the static port 2 tubes. There are multiple sumps but they didn't capture it. All was fine until we hit the polar temps where the outside air (about -65C at the time) caused this to freeze and block the port. A slight change in pressure caused the two readings to differ creating a miscompare failure that disconnected the autopilot. The system then erroneously selected the faulty port as the correct data, this caused an overread on the speed and the ESP pitched the aircraft nose up to try correct it, it would have stalled the aircraft trying to correct it. Tragically the backup unit is also connected to static port 2 so that was also reading incorrectly. My instructor deactivated the ESP unit and put the plane back into a regular attitude and we started descending. You can see this all happening in the attached photo, where airspeed has gone off the top, VSI is showing 0 and altitude is pegged at 31k even though we had descended to about 14,000' at this point. What really saved us is that it was VFR at the time and we had ipads which we could verify our GPS altitude and speed against, will never fly again without one. It was then clear that something was wrong with ADC2, we switched the sensors over to ADC1, pulled the breakers for ADC2 and all our readings were then correct. The autopilot and CAPS wont work without two reading hence those CAS messages. We had to then hand fly our way all the way to Iceland in IMC with only 1 port working. We got it into a warm hanger and the problems cleared out but we visited Cirrus in the Netherlands to clear out all the tubes to make sure. The health of these ports is far more important than I ever considered.
Solution: GET A STATIC PORT COVER!”
“Engine problems:
These were related to the extreme temperatures. They were scary at the time but were actually not such a big deal. We were a bit more careful to manage engine temperatures for the rest of the trip. Engine data was sent to Williams and they were comfortable.
Solution: If it's that cold outside the engine needs a bit more attention.”
“Other problems:
- corrupt data was caused by someone sticking a SD card with databases into the PFD, don't do that.
- flaps failure caused by cold temps
- aircon unit seized up due to cold temps”