Two Pilots & an LSW: Bend, Oregon

So many days have passed since this, and I've done so many things, it's hard to put it together, but I'll try.

Steve and I were both supposed to wake up at 4 am and get ready, to be out the door by 4:45 am, to be at Frankfort by 5:45 am, to be wheels up by 6 am. I woke up at 3:30 am. That's even worse! With only 1/2 hour to go, you can't go back to sleep, or you'll be all groggy and icky. But getting up at 3:30 am is just awful. So I laid there for a few minutes, then just got up anyway. Steve ended up doing the same thing. So our day started at 3:30 am.

We got out to the airport, and there was a big helicopter in front of our airplane in the hangar! I almost panicked, because how do we move that thing?! And we don't have a lot of margin for timing here. If we don't get over to Oregon by 10 am, we miss what we're going over there for. Fortunately we were at the airport really early, and Ethan was early too. We figured out the tool to put the wheels down on the helicopter and then pushed it outside and out of the way. Halleluiah. We got off the ground 3 minutes before 6 am, so we did pretty well there.

The first leg, Ethan flew. It was 5 hours out to Boise, Idaho. Steve and Tell sat in the back and slept, and Ethan flew, while I sat right seat. We land in Boise, get fuel, and he wants me to take over from there. He slept in the back with Tell, while Steve and I sat up front and I flew. We landed in Bend, Oregon at 9:30 am. Perfect.

A guy comes over to pick us up in a van, and from there on out we were treated as VIPs. We were handed neck lanyards with our names on them and driven over to the Epic facilities on field. There was a presentation for about 30 of us that went over the airplane, its details, facts, figures, the training program, the safety program, the maintenance program, the performance details, all of it. Which even I found interesting actually. They handed Ethan and Steve a nice leather book and a pen to write notes in, assuming those two were the pilots they should be impressing. ;) They then broke us up into groups. We were in Group A, which meant we did everything first.

First up we went into the simulator. Now that thing was impressive. It's huge, an actual airplane cockpit, with a huge wrap-around screen. It was dizzying and disorienting sitting in the back. I sat in the copilot's seat for awhile, and that felt more normal. It's funny, they asked for volunteers to sit right seat, and nobody did it, because none of us wanted to be put on the spot flying this sim for the first time and looking stupid. But when I finally went up there, at the harassment of Steve and Ethan both (Steve's like "you're the one out of all of us to have the best chance of not looking stupid!"), he did all the flying anyway and I was just supposed to sit there and watch. That was okay by me. It really was a good sim.

We went from there to lunch, while they brought Group B into the sim. Lunch was delicious, actually. Fancy sandwiches and salads and pasta salads, gluten free options, vegan options, home made looking desserts, it was quite good. And we were Ready for that. By then it was 3 pm our time and we hadn't eaten all day, because a 6+ hour flight out didn't leave you a lot of room to be ingesting food or liquids either one.

From there we got a factory tour, where they are building the Epics. The guy leading the tour? The CEO of the whole company. And he was not just a CEO in name. The man knew every detail about every station and every part. He had a lot of passion for the whole thing. He knew what they designed, how they did it, why, the regulations they needed to meet, the testing standards of the FAA, he knew minute details about every aspect of every part of that factory. It was *super* impressive. He was excited and engaged to show people his baby, and you could see how proud he was of it. And he should be. It really was impressive. You could eat off that floor. The factory was spotless, extremely modern, organized, with a lot of proprietary info. You weren't allowed to take photos in there. The wiring harness. Amazing. The attention to detail, the number of times they test things, and the ways they test them. Seriously. Super impressive.

When we left there, it was time for a test flight. Ethan sat left seat and did the flying with the Epic instructor, while Steve, Tell and I sat in the back. There is a TON of room back there. I can sit in one seat and stretch my legs all the way out and I don't even touch the person across from me. The windows had the ability to tint or untint, which was cool. It climbed out like a homesick angel. And based on the landing, it's super easy to fly and land. Wide, stable gear, trailing link gear, just makes you look good.

So all in all, we all left impressed with the airplane. Their training is super stringent too. Multiple days, sim and airplane both, stick and rudder first, then tailoring it to the pilot. Sometimes for professional pilots with what they called "Varsity IFR", and other times owner pilots that they called something like "Basic IFR". They said they've never lost an Epic to an accident or incident to date, and they want to keep it that way, so they make you go through their training program until their people are satisfied with you, and if need be they will send a "mentor pilot" to fly with you until you ARE good enough to be let go. I think that's funny, and sort of great. I'm perfectly happy to be well trained, actually. A heck of a lot better than my Meridian "training", or my Conquest "training". I had to figure those out on my own with trial and error.

It was at lunch there, eating a sandwich, that I ended up eating part of my tooth. The rest of the day I couldn't eat, and the next day either, until I got into the dentist. On the flight home that night, I ate big juicy grapes, and I'd put them on that side, and the knife edge that was my tooth corner would pop/shred the grapes. It was entertaining and bad at the same time. But those grapes were the only thing I could eat.

We left there at 2:51 pm their time, and we weren't expecting to leave until 4 pm. I did the flying, Steve up front with me. We went non-stop, and I had a TON of weather off the side, for hundreds of miles, a non-stop lightning show. Literally there wasn't a time when lightning wasn't firing off over there. It was beautiful, and something to stay away from. We landed back at Frankfort, as everything around us was going down into fog, at 11:15 pm. Put the airplane away, drove home around 12:30 am, got to bed around 1 am, and then was awake again very early the next morning for the next flight. But all in all it was an interesting and informative trip, and definitely something different to do for a day. It ended up being 11.9 hours sitting in the seat, in one day, starting with a 3:30 am wake-up and ending with a post 1 am bed time. Long day...