As there are lots of experience and knowledge on here, I thought I would pose a question to any who have experienced a Cessna or any other aircraft we so happily fly around the sky, Calmly enjoying the flight, scenery, and landing, who have pulled on the flaps and had all of a sudden make this terrible noise and bang as 1 comes unhooked from the flap lever and the other one stays attached!!
Just wondering if anyone else has experienced the thrill??
I think this is where the unusual attitude practice payed off big time!!
I had a 185 do that once, and also had the pulley on my M6 pull off the tubing above the baggage area and let all the flaps go!
Both happened end of season while on Ski's when it was cold??
Both quite exciting, Thats how you get to buy new gear legs for a Maule!
It was getting kind of calm so thought would throw something in the door and see how many bullet holes it gets!!
GT

The roll can be unexpected and sudden, luckily my only experience was in a simulator. That airplane has an automatic shutoff in the event of an asymmetric condition, even with the flaps only a couple of degrees different it was almost uncontrollable.

Oh yeah...

Special VFR into Kotzebue, right base rwy 35 (not left, as I was sneaking in from the southeast and didn't want to get out over the ice in the whiteout conditions) real close to the tundra trying to maintain ground contact in the fog. Rolling hard onto final and smacked full down flaps.

Just as the flaps reached the stop... Bang!!!!! Louder than shit, the follow-through cable had snapped instantly retracting one flap, and that airplane reversed the roll and headed the other way really violently. I didn't even think, but slapped the flap lever to up, and luckily they did as I came in and touched no-flap for my landing.

Never happened to me before, and not since. Don't know what it would have done if I had just let it sit there and unfold.

Gump

I've heard of a few fatalities because of assymetric flap due to cables in Cessnas breaking. Don't know if they are biased towards electric or manual flap systems, but both have a lot of common parts.

Although there is certainly enough of a burden to inspect things in airplanes already, perhaps there really should be some sort of scheduled inspection of the cables (inspection outside the airplane) every 20 years or 5000 hours?

The more experienced IA's here may know far more than I, but it seems to me that a control cable needs to be significantly damaged, corroded, or overly worn before it will actually break in flight. Which means that a good inspection would show this before it was ready to kill somebody.

Uh, I would point out that it is the responsibility of each mechanic inspecting an airplane for it's return to service to inspect the flap mechanism and verify that it should at least have some hope of making it through the next 100 hours. Do we need an AD? Not if the mechanic actually does his/her job. It's already required, why require it again?

I have on a number of occasions had mechanics tell me that one or another cable in an airplane I was flying is "getting a little worn", and might not really get through the next 100 hours, and in each and every one of those cases, I've never hesitated an instant: "Replace at will".

Nothing else makes any sense, and if you have a good mechanic, they'll be looking at those cables, even though they can be hard to inspect.

That said, stuff happens also.

I've had flaps go to zero in a Cub, but never in a Cessna.

MTV

There are criteria for cables and what degree of wear is allowable, they will nearly always fail where they bend around a pulley and will fail on the outside of the bend so placing a nice pink finger along the cable and sliding it along the outside of the curve area will result in a nice little cut or puncture as the broken strand penetrates the skin. This will get your attention and remind you to replace the cable. The boobs among you can slide a cotton ball along the cable and broken strands will show easily.

I would have to look again to be sure but it seems to me that the flap cable on the Stinson is cross rigged so that a broken cable will release both flaps at the same time. A really good idea if I remember right.