Orlando

Another light night of sleep, about 5 hours, and I was up before dawn again.  Kevin, Julie, and two others went with me and Morgan down to Orlando in the Cheyenne. Last time I took them down to Orlando in the Cheyenne, the tug broke (in January), there was oil streaming out of the right engine up at altitude, and hydraulic fluid on the flaps when we landed. One thing after the other, but I got it all dealt with before they even got back from their meeting, and we went home safely. 

This time it was warmer, and nothing bad happened on the way down. We were supposed to be there till like 1 or 2 and then go home, but Kevin ended up being in another meeting, and we didn't leave until 5, so we were there all day. He'd offered to get us a car, but I said it wasn't necessary when we were only going to be there 11-2.  Instead we were there from 10:30-5, a bit longer of a day, but I did take the courtesy car and find a little restaurant on a lake nearby that had outdoor seating. It took us 40 minutes round trip to drive there because of the bad Orlando traffic, but we enjoyed it while we were there. I had a freshly caught grilled fish sandwich, we walked out onto the dock, soaked up some sun.  I tried to take a nap in the sleep room back there but couldn't really get it done.

One thing did go wrong though. Coming in to land, something started alarming loudly in my headset, super high pitched, hard to hear the guy talking over it, and it lasted until we taxied in. Also, the displays failed. Shut down, the HSI and DG were spinning and blacking out, the AI was spinning and blacking out, the altitude preselect had the red "no worky" banner across it, and it was cycling off and on and off and on and beeping so loud.  No idea what was going on.  But it's not good. What if that happened while up flying?  So when I got on the ground, I spent some time pulling up ForeFlight's virtual panel, synthetic vision with AHRS, and making sure I knew how it worked. The Cheyenne has no DG back up on my side, and only one small AI. I also looked at the weather, and made a plan with some calculations. It was severe clear, so if I had to, I could fly home VFR, which means I'd have to fly it at 17,500', which would burn 3000 lbs of fuel. Which is a LOT. So I needed to top off the airplane and have all fuel available just in case.

But I didn't count on one thing. When we taxied out to leave, it was fine to start with, then it started going off. And it was so loud I couldn't hear the tower guy clear me to takeoff "via the SID", he had to repeat it a couple of times, which isn't great. I get up in the air following my IFR clearance carefully, and it quit again. I reached up and had a brain burst and switched from Inverter 2 to Inverter 1, or a different power supply for the avionics. It didn't do it again the rest of the flight, but I don't know if it would have or not anyway. Kind of hard to know that since it's so random and rare in the first place. But I do know I can't take it low IFR until somebody figures out what the heck is going on, that's for sure. 

We got home around 9 pm. Another long day, but not bad, minus a little lack of sleep, and a little avionics hassle.

Sunrise off Morgan's side

Still shot of everything goofing up

Views from the restaurant

The green stuff in the water

Our tiny fake little beach. lol

This was the most messed up car I've seen on the road. The pic doesn't do it justice

Sunset Vibes

This is ForeFlight with the fake panel set up and the course on the right. The attitude was gone at the moment but the rest was good. 

Sun going going

Basically gone

Panel stuff