Saturday, November 21, 2015

Its been a while

Wow, it's been a long while since I posted anything to this blog so I thought I was about time.  I just got back from a awesome flight to Mulino Oregon with my friend Harry.  Jeff had planned the flight but on his way to the airport he got a call that prevented him from flying.  I hope things are well for him.

The weather has really sucked lately for flying.  As you all know I've been working on my IFR certification for about 6 months now.  Well I finally got the weather I needed to get my checkride completed and I am now fully certified to fly in the clouds!  Thats a big deal for me living here in the Pacific NW.  Well that was just the beginning of an excellent week!

Today started out with a nice flight to Mulino.  The weather was "clear and a million" which means great flying weather.  Harry and I left Puyallup at about 10:30am and made a slow leisurely trip down to Mulino while we waited for Chad and Michael to catch up.  Chad ended up aborting early due to some oil temperature issues he was having but Michael caught up with us at the Mexican restaurant near the airport.  After a good meal and the required perusal of each other's aircraft we launched for the return trip to Puyallup.  Since the trip down was slow we decided to push it up a bit for the return trip.  We climbed up to 5500' and then put it to the firewall.  It unfortunately only took about 20 minutes for my oil temperature to creep up to where I had to go lean of peak to reduce temps.  I'm going to have to find something to reduce those oil temps....  However we did make the return trip at about 160 knots which is about 10 knots faster than I usually cruise.  My autopilot was doing some odd things at one point because I swear the airplane went up-side-down for a few seconds....

Anyway...I haven't worked on the 10 lately.  I have been walling in the small bay of the garage so I can work in there and not have to heat the entire garage each day.  The wall is up but I still need to put the insulation board on.  Hopefully I will be able to get back to work on the 10 soon.