I didn't sleep well, wondering how today was going to go and thinking of things that may go wrong that I may need to fix, wondering if I'd get out on time, wondering about the weather, wondering about the avionics and autopilot coming up or not. I woke up at like 5 am, laid there for 30 minutes, then just got up and got ready. I wasn't hungry but I forced myself to eat a little downstairs, and it's a good thing as that's really the only food I had until 7 pm. Hotels really really oversalt their scrambled eggs. And I like salt! Anyway. I got my Lyft ride to the FBO, and I had called and asked to have my plane out and topped by 8 am. I was an hour early, I got there at 7 am since I couldn't sleep, but they were so swamped that they didn't get me topped off and billed out until 8:30. Now I'm running behind. They had parked the plane clear on the other end of the ramp, behind a row of t-hangars, by itself in the middle of nowhere (and charged $100/night for the spot), so it took me a few minutes to walk out there and find it. But in the end it was actually handy to be out of the way, because I didn't have a line guy standing in front of me waiting for me to move, I wasn't in the way of any traffic. I had a *lot* of waypoints to enter into the 430 one at a time, all the way from NY to FL on airways, and a departure, and an arrival. Over 30 of them, one at a time. That took me a hot minute. But when I turned on the avionics, I couldn't even look at them for a second, I was hoping so hard they would come up and I wouldn't have to do this by hand. When I glanced over and they were up, I lost about 15 pounds right then. Flying out of the Newark, La Guardia, JFK airspace is never super simple, but it felt like it to me now that I had a working autopilot. ;)
I flew right over the top of Baltimore, flew right over the top of Washington DC. Kind of cool. Took me about 4 hours of flight time to get to Venice, FL. Landed just about 20 minutes behind Morgan, who came down in the Meridian to pick me up. We transferred all the stuff out of the Conquest into the Meridian, got some more gas, and started wandering our way back home. We had storms to work around. We had to stop for gas in Georgia, and the next round home we had a Lot of storms, we wandered around a lot avoiding buildups, and we were at 28,000', as high as the Meridian can go. There were multiple lines, some breaks, but we made it fine, nothing too ugly, just a lot of it.
Landed at Kokomo, she dropped me off and took the plane back to Marion, I took all the stuff from out of the Conquest out of the Meridian and put it in the Cheyenne so Ethan could take it tomorrow, and then Steve and I went out to eat, my first food since an English Muffin and a spoonful of scrambled salted eggs this morning.
Home to send receipts, billing, logbook, airplane log, and then prepare for tomorrow's trip. Up at 5:45 am, wheels up at Kokomo at 7:30, over to Delphi to pick up Ethan and family, head to Gunnison, Colorado, drop them off, go over to Colorado Springs, CO to buy CAA fuel, and then home. Meet up with the formation clinic guys out at Kokomo, as they're here this weekend. Onward. Don't feel like uploading pictures for today...another day.
These are all the waypoints I had to plug in one at a time into the 430
Me flying over the top of Washington DC
My path taking the Conquest down to the avionics shop
Flying over NY
NYC
I think this is the best one
No comments:
Post a Comment