N. Carolina and Cincinnati

Awake at 5:45 am, out the door by 6:45, to be there at 7:45.  Then the folks I was meeting ran late, so we didn't end up taking off until 8:30. I could've slept in. :/  I took a group of 6 people plus me down to Asheville, NC. Weather was good, trip was uneventful. It was beautiful down there, surrounded by mountains. I wanted to take photos, but I had too many people on board that I don't normally have, who don't know me that well, so it would be unprofessional to whip out my phone in front of them.  You'll have to take my word for it that it was pretty.  :)

While we were down there, they let me know that we may need to drop two additional people off back in Cincinnati to catch an airline flight home.  So I didn't get gas down there, to give myself a little more weight room on board.  Sure enough, took a very full Conquest load to Cincinnati, with two GE folks on board. They had an uneventful, quick, and easy flight of about an hour, so that was good for them. On my end, it was a little more eventful.

Warning: aviation stuff you don't care about.  

Coming into Cincinnati, they told me to do the "JAKIE 6" arrival, and then they gave me the dreaded words "Descend Via, landing to the south". Well, there are three runways landing south, 18L, 18C and 18R. Depending on which runway I land on, I have a totally different set of waypoints, altitudes and speeds to go to. So I asked, to clarify, and they said they didn't know yet.  I go to pull up what I can in my GPS, only to find I have a "JAKIE 5" arrival. I pull up my iPad, and a new arrival has been created, the JAKIE 6, and it has completely different waypoints than the JAKIE 5 I have in my GPS. So I figure I'll just plug in the waypoints individually. Nope. On this new arrival, the new waypoints are all newly created too.  The airplane's GPS database is a couple weeks out of date, and in that time frame they came up with a whole new arrival filled with new waypoints.  Fortunately it was VFR.  So I plug all that into my mini iPad mounted on the yoke, which is up to date. I then have the words of the arrival on my cellphone in front of me.  There are a lot of them. I'm having to read and read and read, what altitude am I supposed to be here, what speed, what heading, what track, and I'm having to cheat and do it by following the pink line on the iPad and use my heading bug to stay on track, because I don't have an actual navigation system I can set up to do it.  Then, while I'm talking to Cincinnati International, Class B airline busy airport, and doing all this manually, my AUTOPILOT takes a dump and does a hard turn to the right. Now I'm HAND FLYING and trying to read the next waypoint and talk on the radio and get the next heading and the next altitude and stuff.  I did get it re-engaged, which helps, but this was a legit handful of a leg. I was unfamiliar with the arrival, trying to read it line by line and remember a bunch of numbers and letters all at once, while flying and talking, and in the end, I was glad I was having a "sharp" day and not a dull one! 

After I dropped the two off, I took the others back with me, and it was a 30 minute flight back to Frankfort. Dropped all the happy passengers off, and drove home in time to do the end of the day stuff and get ready for tomorrow's stuff too.