Instruction in CH2000 Alarus

It was originally a kit plane and was never really meant for the abuse that student pilots throw at it. After a few hundred hours they start to fall apart. Make sure your mechanics properly gap the spark plugs, because whoever installs them in the factory didn't gap any of ours. The electric system is not quite powerfull enough, so be very carefull not to use the battery any more than absolutely necessary before engine start, or you won't have enough juice left to start it. You may not anyway because they are extreemely difficult to start sometimes. Do not prime, it will flood the engine. They are really loud in the cockpit so make sure you have a good headset. The floor vibrates a lot, so make sure you have some good shoes. Its a little nose heavy, so be carefull not to let the nosewheel slam down on landing, hold it off like a soft-field. Also on takeoff, resist the temptation to over-rotate. It won't liftoff right at Vr, so just give it a little back pressure, and it'll lift off cleanly when it's ready. The nose heaviness also makes it a little unstable, but once you get used to it, its not too bad. It glides like a brick. One good thing about it though is its stall characteristics. Even full-power, power on stalls are very gentle. It just gently pitches down. Dosn't usually drop a wing unless your are badly uncoordinated. Also, for short flights its quite comfortable. After a couple hours the seats start to feel like concrete blocks, but for short flights, they are pretty plush.
 
Well put flyguy. I've been instructing in the CH2000 off and on for two years. It's a piece of sheit. It's almost like having the speed of a C-152 and the sink rate of an arrow. You can't see the flaps so other than the up, half, and down markings in the cockpit,you never really know. They can be really hard to start, especially in the winter. Funny thing is that the starter CB is also the fuel guage CB. So if you try starting it and the CB pops about the time the engine catches, it will show zero on the fuel guages. Also the rudder is pretty strong. So do not use full rudder on foward slip no flap landings. It even states that in the POH. The heat/vent system is not so great either. The heat especially. Could be just the ones I have flown here but the instructor side gets little to no heat. Don't leave the doors open on taxi or runup unless you are holding them. They are prone to coming off. But they will take a hard landing. The gear has some really high G limit on them. And like flyguy said, it's fun for a short hop, but long flights are not comfortable. Enjoy your time in it. :nana2:
 
Both of the posts above are spot-on. The thing is ridiculously unstable. Your students won't be able to take their hands off the controls more than 2 seconds........but they'll sure learn the concept of right rudder. Don't even think about instrument training in it (which is a shame, cause the standard avionics are great)! You'll find your students, when learning to takeoff, will probably set the stall horn off upon finally lifting off.........it just doesn't want to come off the runway, but then when it finally does, it shoots upward. The trim is uber sensitive. It's loud as can be inside. Although, I will say, unlike the first poster, we had very few maintenance problems with ours, and at one time we had a "fleet" of 4 of them, flying quite a bit. Starting them can be a huge pain when it's cold. Only thing I've found that reliably works, is pumping the throttle while starting........not the best idea, but it's the only thing I found that works, and of all the students we had doing that, we never had a carb fire from it. Also, you can prime it, but give it a good 6-7 shots on the primer, and you better get it started that first time you try, or you're gonna sit for 10-20 mins while the fuel drains on the ground.

Now, all that said, once you learn to fly it, it has some fun points.......short-field landings can be really steep and short. Simulated engine failures are fun, as the thing is coming down, pick a field right below you or near!

On a sidenote, we fly into Raleigh all the time, judging from your location that's where you'll be instructing. I think I know the plane you're talking about, seen it on the ramp there quite a few times.
 
Hehehe.....another post on the Charlie Hotel Two Tango! A colleague of mine has a nice two-page list of things to say about the Alarus, that will be posted in due time. What I can say that I like about the Alarus is the room when compared to the 152. I also like the fact that most people in ATC have no idea what an Alarus is. :) I've heard helicopter and Citabria among others.
 
Hey,
Well thanks for the comments. This particular alarus has a garmin 430 and an EHSI, which I thought was a bit overkill for a small trainer, but whatever.

By the way, this one is located 25 NE of RDU at KLHZ
 
Thanks to the Alarus, I've added quite a bit of time to my logbook. Doesn't mean I like the dirty bird. I'll validate all of the previous comments, good and bad. Here's a few more:

Did anybody mention how hot it is inside these things? Some people say it's because the heater valve won't close, others say it's the engine heat coming through the firewall. Either way, it SUCKS in the summer time. Oh, and when you finally need the heater (when it's below 30 or so outside) it's completely useless. Bring a coat and hope the additional clothing doesn't put you over max weight.

This airplane has some major electrical system flaws. I'm not a whiz with electricity, but I don't think an airplane with 200 hours on it should require a new alternator. Our fleet is probably about a year old now and I'll bet none of the planes have their original alternator. Oh, and ever had the entire avionics stack die on you as you're keying the mic? No breakers popped or anything... but everything on the avionics bus died. No explanation. I cycled the breaker and it worked fine after that. Breakers routinely pop on various accessories, especially if you're flying at night (heavy electrical load).

The turn coordinator is useless. Maybe it's a cheap instrument or the way it's installed... I dunno. But after a few hundred hours, the bearings start to fail and the instrument indicates a perpetual turn as it sits on the ramp. Eventually the gyro siezes. I'm not talking about one example. This is routine.

I'm sure some other folks want to say a few words, so I'll stop there. Why hog all the fun?
 
WAFlyBoy said:
Bring a coat and hope the additional clothing doesn't put you over max weight.

I'm not a whiz with electricity, but I don't think an airplane with 200 hours on it should require a new alternator. Our fleet is probably about a year old now and I'll bet none of the planes have their original alternator.

The turn coordinator is useless. Maybe it's a cheap instrument or the way it's installed... I dunno. But after a few hundred hours, the bearings start to fail and the instrument indicates a perpetual turn as it sits on the ramp. Eventually the gyro siezes. I'm not talking about one example. This is routine.

I'm sure some other folks want to say a few words, so I'll stop there. Why hog all the fun?
Click to expand...

Haha! All true stuff there folks.

And WestIndian425, the due time has elapsed and I can't let another person be potentially uninformed about this plane.
 
I started compiling this list months ago for the sole reason of ensuring that no other person or organization purchases this aircraft for any reason other than extracting the Garmin 430 and scrapping the experimental kit-plane that remains.

Before the list of problems, I will mention two things that are fun in this airplane.

1) The brakes are absolutely fantastic. If you touch down and have the flaps up I’m not sure any amount of force on the brake pedals will lock the wheels. I have not been able to skid the tires with the flaps up and it is not difficult to stop the plane 200 feet from the touchdown point, wind calm.

2) The second thing is doing a full flaps landing with power at idle. At 90 knots, which is well inside the white arc, a fifteen degree descent path is possible. Five glideslopes! Two instructors I know took one up to 11,000 feet. They crossed the final approach fix on our ILS at that altitude and set full flaps, power idle, 90 knots. The touchdown zone is 4.6 miles later and the tires hit it with no problem. Eleven thousand feet over the outer marker and you can get the thing stopped in the first 2,000 feet of the runway.


Enough.

Let’s do it.

Starting The best way seems to be to not prime it if the engine was run within the past 24 hours. Back when the temperature was cooler where I am, they would often need a battery cart to start and that would still be difficult. There is a “Slick Start” kit that can be installed but, as delivered, the starting of this aircraft is unacceptably difficult and unless it’s really hot outside the slick start thing doesn’t help much anyway. Unusual belching, screaming, and coughing sounds come from these airplanes during startup attempts. At first it is funny to hear from the outside but when you realize you’re now stuck at whatever airport you’re at, it’s totally ridiculous. A few people I flew with had a notion that the battery being in the rear of the airplane is the culprit to many of this thing’s starting problems and I think there is definitely some truth to that.

Fuel As the fuel approaches the cap, it gushes out of the bottom of the wing. Not like a fuel vent that lets some drops out, but rather a steady stream of fuel landing in a puddle all over the ramp. I suspected that we always guess the amount is more than it really is, and that turned out to be true, but we did measure the amount once and it is often one half gallon of fuel in our of our airplanes that is particularly bad. Add both wings together and that is a gallon of gas. Practically a self-imposed $4 fee to top off! How nice. I can’t think of any other airplane that immediately dumps 4% of its usable fuel onto the ramp.

Fuel, Part Two After takeoff having been recently topped off, one can look back towards the trailing edge of the wing and see a steady stream of fuel shooting out from beneath the fuel cap and off the back of the wing. I have seen this in action for several minutes during the climb out and although we have no way to measure this second fuel issue, it appears to be nearly as strong a flow as the ground dump problem and a reasonable estimate as to the amount leaked out this way might be up to a gallon.

Heat When spring turned to summer the airplanes started to get warmer inside. We thought something might be keeping the heater stuck on and we talked to a mechanic about it. Unfortunately we’re out of luck because it’s not the heat that is stuck on. The airplane lacks suitable insulation between the engine and the cockpit and the heat billows out from above and behind the rudder pedals. Keep your feet on the pedals and have them melt, or pull them back towards the seat to keep cool. The temperature in the cockpit on a cool evening can be above 90°F because of this, making instruction difficult as both the instructor and the student are distracted by the intense heat blowing on their legs. When it gets cold there is no heat. You might as well leave the heater off so the knob doesn’t fall out in your hand. Which brings me to the next item.

Carb Heat Knob The factory installed carb heat knob falls out after about a hundred hours. Your mechanics will have to replace it at that time. If it’s not one that falls out, they slowly vibrate themselves out to the ON position. The students initially may think that they must straddle their right hand over the carb heat and throttle during the climb. They’re right.

Gauges The needles in the engine, fuel, and electrical systems of this airplane are nothing short of ridiculous. It’s one thing to say it’s a single engine trainer and don’t trust the fuel gauges too much but I’m talking about starting up the airplane with a full tank and having one stuck on zero and the other stuck in the middle and having to ground the plane when it has 50 hours out of the factory. The ammeter often indicates a continuous charge, or discharge, or basically whatever it feels like indicating.

Fuel Pressure Gauge The fuel pressure gauge normally indicates one hundredth of an inch above redline and does not move no matter what you do with the engine or the auxiliary fuel pump. Other times, it goes to redline on the high side but moves if you tap it. The consensus is that this instrument is not actually connected to anything in the fuel system.

Altimeter An altimeter got stuck on a low altitude and then broke free seven hundred feet lower. This is dangerous for an airplane fresh out of the factory, IFR certified.

Suction The suction gauge often indicates zero, but may rise to the normal range with an increase in RPM. The attitude indicator is never to be trusted for IFR even if it is stable during the taxi check.

COM 2 Often times does not work properly. The usual problem is that when COM 2 is being monitored, transmissions on COM 1 are barely readable.

NAV 2 Often times does not work properly, such as being 8 degrees off from NAV 1. On a delivery flight NAV 2 failed 45 minutes after departing the factory. VOR needles are usually barely able to meet the required errors for IFR use. Some theorize that the current flowing between the engine area and the battery past all of the NAV antennas interferes. I’d believe that some navigational errors are attributed to this, in addition to the CDI cards being calibrated incorrectly as delivered, to the point of them not being useful for any IFR navigation and requiring a trip to the avionics shop. To summarize, you have to take it to an avionics shop for repair at the end of the delivery flight.

Alternator The alternator fails often and that is ridiculous. Need I say more?

Landing lights They literally burn out without being turned on. It’s a good thing there are two of them but frankly they need at least another two. Nobody knows if it’s the position of them or what but they don’t last long at all.

Position Lights There is nothing holding the white tail position light to the airplane. It’s just there.

Key Installation After a while some of the OFF / L / R / BOTH / START key pieces start to rotate out of their normal position and flip all the way around. We’re talking planes with 300 hours on them.

Vibration This is more of a comfort thing. The floor vibrates. A lot. Wear shoes with a thick sole or carry an old towel to throw down and absorb some of the vibration. Some airplanes vibrate so much that the needles are actually vibrating as you fly an ILS. Don’t assume you can an ILS at more than 2500RPM if ATC asks for some speed on final – the needles go bonkers sometimes under higher power settings. Think you can read the wet compass easily at night in one of the more intensely vibrating airplanes? It is believed by some that the vibration contributes to the incredible failure rate of new avionics.

Noise It is very loud in the cockpit. If it is hot and you want to get a lot of air into the cockpit, the noise increases dramatically if you open the scoop window vents. 116 horsepower should not be this loud! Besides engine noise and wind sound during cruise, the ventilation system often creates very high pitched squealing noises. Sometimes you can jam a pen between the door frame and the door to open it a bit (they never close completely anyway) and that makes the squealing stop.

Transponder This has indicated FL600 on radar. Not necessarily an Alarus problem but why not throw it on the list anyway since it’s in the airplane.

Turning Tendency Many of them have an extremely strong rolling tendency to the right or left, right out of the factory. The craft is not symmetrically constructed and you should not have to burn 90% of the right wing tank first in hopes that you can help trim the thing out.

Fire On a cool evening without having the engine flooded or the starter overheated from excessive cranking, fire emerged from near the exhaust pipe and burned for one minute. Flames were dripping out of the engine and had it not been dark I would not have seen the orange glow on the ground. Brand new plane!

Electrical System Numerous total electrical failures occurred, some at night.

Flap Position Indicator It is often wrong, so the best way to put the flaps down is in increments of seconds.

Door Handles They’re flimsy metal and they get bent very easily. Sometimes one person has to get the other out of the airplane by walking around to their side and unlatching it from the outside. When it gets that bad, of course, it’s time to ground the plane and get a new latch put on or have the mechanics bend it back to a reasonable position.

Electrical Tape Each airplane comes with a piece of black electrical tape on the cowl, almost aligned with the longitudinal axis. If that is what it is for, it’s wrong and is a distraction to a student trying to master crosswind landings. If it’s for something else, it’s inadequate since it peels off over the course of many flight hours. What is this tape for?

Turn Coordinator They don’t last too long. Some start the grinding noises indicative of impending failure at around 200 hours out of the factory.

Doors The doors are as cheap as the rest of the airplane. They get bent out of position and leak horrendously. Some are real bad when they make a high pitch whistle through the entire flight. Not a good thing to hear on eight hours of cross country.

Oil Temperature The whole engine overheats terribly, even on cool nights in the 50F range. The best thing to do is to set 2100RPM and fly at L/D max for a few minutes. It settles down into the middle of the green at some point and then you’ve got maybe two to four thousand additional feet to climb before the needle creeps up to the point where you ought to level off and let it cool again. It’s really not good to be asking SoCal for a holding pattern on a cool day so you can get up to the MEA and continue flying.

Fuel Tab One annoyance is that it blocks the view of the fuel in the tank, but after moving it out of the way the level of fuel can be seen. The real problem is when the cheap little thing falls off the cap and sinks to the bottom of the fuel tank. That’s a great use of the mechanic’s time.



I have 500 hours in this type; 50% of that is at night. I no longer trust it enough to do the night IMC flying that myself and others were doing with it but that phase is over for our students anyway.

Don't buy it. And if you have a choice, don't fly it.
 
I flew 367 this afternoon with no problem other than it needed to be jumped (as usual). But when I stopped back at MER to get my next student, again we needed a jump, and after beeing hooked up to the battery cart we turned on the master and...nothing.

One good thing about it that I forgot to mention is it handles really well on the ground. It taxiis like a car!

Also, another poster mentioned that it does not make a good instrument trainer, but I think its a pretty good instrument trainer. If you have all of the instruments working that is. Half of our fleet is without turn coordinators.
 
Ah...my esteemed colleages have come out with guns blazing!! Maybe we should start a new fraternity. Requirements:
1. Can't start the airplane/or becoming a master at hand-propping.
2. Stuck at another airport and need rescuing.
3. Alternator breaker popping while shooting an approach.
4. Com failure while shooting an approach.
5. Watching the automatic fuel dump at work.
6. Learning how to fuel the plane with the engine on for fear of not being able to start it again. (Hadn't done that one)
7. Shooting an apporach with the needles centered and watch the runway way off to the right or left when you approach minimums. (Best to just use the GPS, but we don't want to have the students become too dependent on it)
8. Be a part of the only institution what would fly the CH2T that NorCal/Oakland Center knows that if there are two under coverage, it's company traffic, since no one else flies the thing.

Oh, and Nick forgot to mention the depreciation value of the airplane. It's amazing! But hey, it is very inexpensive to buy brand new. :)

Oh, have you checked out the POH? It ought to be in an IVY League library for being so masterfully written!
 
i hate this godforsaken airplane.

i have never in my entire life heard any airplane make the noises that this one does when you attempt to start it.

the airplane will be worth the cost of the garmin 430 in two years.
 
frascaflyer said:
i hate this godforsaken airplane.

i have never in my entire life heard any airplane make the noises that this one does when you attempt to start it.

the airplane will be worth the cost of the garmin 430 in two years.
Click to expand...

HAHAHA. He chimes in!!

And Adam, are you out there reading this between Baron flights?! De-lurk and voice your Alarus opinion if you are.

To the non-Alarus flying people on this board: if I can find a way to host the sound files of the Alarus startup sounds I've recorded I will post them. Absolute hilarity!
 
Nick said:
To the non-Alarus flying people on this board: if I can find a way to host the sound files of the Alarus startup sounds I've recorded I will post them. Absolute hilarity!
Click to expand...

I was listening to somebody trying to start 282 this afternoon, and I thought to myself: "Jesus, that sounds exactly like a pit bull yacking up a long-haired cat."

Adam: Hope you're enjoyin' life back in the midwest, man.
 
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