Fly Day

Kaylee sent me a text saying she would like to go practice tennis with her friends today at 1.  It was pretty funny, because I told her I'd be later than that, but I ended up only being 10 minutes late.  We then sat out by the tennis courts for 20 minutes before she texted her friends and said "Where are you guys?"  They said "We're not playing tennis until tomorrow!"  She'd looked at her phone after midnight and saw it was Wednesday, so assumed the morning was Thursday.  Whoops!  So she goes back tomorrow to actually play for real.

My day was about flying, from sunrise to well past dark.  A fellow scheduled me at 8 a.m., which meant I was up at 6:20.  He had trouble waking up and didn't get out there until 8:20.  it was 8:45 a.m. before he was done preflighting and we were fired up and ready to take off for the first time.  I could have used that 45 minutes in sleep, thank you, but I did get to watch a pretty sunrise, and I did get to assist Ty with the Westfield Champ, so it worked out.  The guy I was flying with is probably ready to solo if the winds cooperate tomorrow.  We'll see.  Next up I was in the RG doing someone's first Instrument lesson.  So we did hood work, radial work, VOR tracking, climbs, descents etc. holding a specific airspeed, and so forth.  Landed from that and went to lunch, which I left early to take Kaylee to a tennis match she didn't end up playing.  ;)

I went back to Kokomo and had a guy run me to Aurora, where I picked up the 340 and brought it home.  It had two cylinders replaced and my flight was the break-in and test flight.  I had two pages of instructions to follow on the procedures, and I had to read through them several times, printed out a copy and took it with me.  Part of it was that you're supposed to do all your radio and avionics work prior to starting up, then start up, run up while you taxi, and take off asap, no ground delays.  I'm at a tower controlled field, so to comply with that, when I was #2 to take off, I asked ground if I could stop at an intersection, and requested to go first at the intersection, which they permitted.   I wasn't supposed to use full power for takeoff for anything but a real emergency, so that was one of the slower takeoffs I've done in there.  Circled around and gained altitude over the field while making sure everything looked good before I started heading home while doing the process it wanted, which included things like adjusting the prop every five minutes.  Even the descent was very specific...set up a 300 fpm rate descent, lean it out to hold the same EGTs as it was showing during the cruise phase which was an exact setting, etc.  It was interesting, but I kept reading it and double checking, because you don't really want to goof up the first flight there.

The last flight of the day was a night flight, where we did the usual fly around for a few minutes and enjoy the view, and then start in on the required takeoffs and landings, which I like to spice up with various failures of landing lights, panel lights, flaps, and one at the end that has the runway lights as low as they'll go and all the above at once.  In other words, as complete of an electrical failure as I can.  I leave the nav lights and beacon on, since, you know, legal and safe and such.  But the rest go. That's always a lot more fun for me than it is for everybody else, who are mostly disturbed but kinda like it too, secretly, especially after they realize they can do it okay.  :)

I got home around 9:30 pm, precisely 14 hours after I first left the house this morning.

Yawn.

This was on my TV today, on the news.  I don't know why.

Sunrise dead ahead 

The Champ at Sunrise.

The colors are starting to pop pretty well in central Indiana.