Wings

It was sort of a lousy night, well, no sort of about it, I woke up at 2 something in the morning and couldn't get back to sleep until sometime after 6 a.m., had a headache too, and just felt like I'd been dragged through the mud when I finally had to get up.  But the day improved quite a bit after that.  :)

Just after noon Nathan and I took off in the Cheyenne to drop a couple people off in New Jersey.  Some weather blew up on the way, and we got to work around that.  It took a whopping hour and a half to get there.  You have to like that.

Nathan has some new stuff in the Cheyenne, including a FlightStream 210.  It's an ADS-B set up that hooks up the ADS-B with your iPad, and it took awhile for me to figure out how to make it work, but once I got it, it was pretty darned cool.  Your route goes right from the GPS into your iPad, and it automatically loads and changes it for you if you want it to.  So Center gave me a re-route, I plugged it into the GPS, looked down, and my iPad had automatically updated to that route.  That is seriously cool.  We were like kids in a candy store playing with it.  Steve needs to go along and play with this too.  Weather and traffic worked great on there, it was fast and pretty seamless--once you got it figured out.  I think you're supposed to be able to put routes from your iPad into your GPS too, the other way, but I haven't figured that out yet, or found out if they have that part set up yet.  Cool, man.

On the way home, I flew left seat, and it was just the two of us, and we started off at 28,000', then because of several storm lines in our path, we went up to 36,000'.  I like that capability a whole lot.  Talk about taking the stress out of thunderstorm dodging.

I was supposed to fly with a young man when I got back, I assumed around 5:30.  Except New Jersey kept us sitting and running on the ground forever, and then when we climbed up high we hit a nasty head wind, which slowed us down a lot.  I'll take the nasty headwind over going way around a line of storms, however!  So I texted my kid as I got low enough for my phone to work, apologized for being late, and he said "It's 100% okay.  I am hanging out with Rob Holland and Nicolas Ivanoff."  Red Bull pilot and world champion aerobatic guy...yeah, he was doing fine.  ;)

Steve and I went to dinner, and he's continued working on his plethora of things to do for airshow, Oshkosh, computer business, and flight school stuff...me, I just have a lot of flying to do in the next few days, and of course some packing, and hoping that I can fly to pick up Kaylee on Friday, or it'll be a definite problem...

Meanwhile, this morning early, AE and Cusick drove the trailer up to Oshkosh, and have set up camp.  We've officially halfway arrived.

The Cheyenne at 36,000', you can see some of the weather over there on the screen.  This wasn't the ugliest line, but you still wouldn't have wanted to fly through it.

We were just on top of everything at FL360.

 

A distant view of one of the thunderstorm lines.  It went off to the left and grew into a bigger, uglier mess, and off to the right as well.  That gap in between the two is where we went, even though we were above it.

A little closer now, you can see the line more defined and the end of the stormy area.

 

It's funny how you can't see the display over there, the digital display.  But there's the left side anyway.

Cusick posted this, our spot is marked.  :)

 

Our camping trailer sitting in the middle of a field, mostly alone, but not for long!