Month: November 2026

My son is a high school football coach in Northern Virginia. Last night was the final game of their season and if they won the game, they would be the district champions. I had already been to two games this season despite the fact that it is a 2.5-hour drive to NOVA. This time I decided to fly my airplane up to the game. Danny Anderson and I made the trip. The

The first choice I needed to make was which airfield to fly into. Leesburg, Manassas and Dulles were on my short list. After looking at cost and logistics, Dulles was the clear winner. It was closer to the game site, and we could use the Metro to get there. Atlantic Aviation’s pricing was very good (it costs less to park my airplane overnight than it would have cost me to park my car in the average DC parking lot).

The weather looked pretty crappy for the flight up, but by midday on Friday it was improving a lot and ended up being a very nice VFR trip. The wind even cooperated and we were essentially on a 40 mile straight into the 01L runway. After landing we had close to three miles of taxiing to get to the FBO.

Shout out to Atlantic Aviation. Super professional and easy to work with. Didn’t even push back when I complained about the below average selection of halloween candy they had at the check in desk. Also very nice for them to drive us over to the metro.

The game was GREAT. Drew’s team notched a solid come-from-behind win and won the district championship (5th time in the last 35 years). Danny and I went out to celebrate the win with Drew and the other coaches. Probably the first time I stayed out until 1:30am in several decades.

The weather for the trip back was miserable at our destination. Great ceilings, but low visibility with fog and mist. We decided to delay our departure until about 6am when the weather forecast was for excellent conditions at both KIAD and KFCI. It worked out great and the flight back was very easy. A two hour post flight nap was also very nice…

It may seem a bit intimidating to fly into a very big class bravo airport like Dulles, but it really isn’t too bad. The controllers are very, very good at what they do and everything operates smoothly.

Would definitely do it again.

The airplane has the EFII System 32 electronic ignition and electronic fuel injection. There are several positives of using a system like this and one serious negative. The system makes for easier starting and better fuel economy. The downside is that the system is electrically dependent, which means the electrical system has to be very robust, and redundant (compared to a traditional system with a mechanical fuel pump and magnetos).

Anyway. I recently had an issue with the engine surging at high speeds. With help from the manufacturer I was able to find the issue (an unreliable) throttle position sensor. During the course of my investigation I began a discussion with two other pilots that have the EFII system (Sam R and Dwight M). They both were excellent resources.

They looked at my engine data and noted that my fuel pressure tended to drop off a bit at high manifold pressures. We discussed the issue and decided that the fuel pressure regulator was the likely cause. Sam suggested that I replace the FPR from EFII with a better one made by Borla. The cost was about $250, but his own testing suggested that the Borla did a much better job of maintaining fuel pressure.

The hardest part of the job was manufacturing the bracket to mount the Borla FPR on the firewall since its layout was different from the original Aeromotive regulator. With some help from Tom at TSFlightlines I got that part figured out and installed the new FPR. It worked perfectly and the log data showed a very clear improvement over the older regulator.

This is the old pressure regulator.

This is the new pressure regulator. Note that I added a 45 degree adaptor to take some of the tension off the host between the regulator and the #5 injector.

I still need to disassemble the old regulator to check for damage since we think the reason it was not maintaining pressure well is because the steel ball in the regulator had spalled the aluminum seat.