Saturday, September 17, 2016

So Cal SF trip

Amy and I took a trip to San Francisco to visit one of the communities for the company I work for as well as to attend a conference for one of our vendors.  After the conference we flew on down to Santa Maria CA to visit yet another community on Friday, then we flew back home today (Saturday).  The return flight was pretty long at about 6 hours combined between two flights.  The last flight was one of my favorite IFR flights since the weather was smooth, the temperatures were above freezing and there were lots of clouds!

I can't tell you how happy I am with the way the airplane if flying right now.  I can't image having a nicer flying airplane.

Amy and I in one of the towers downtown San Francisco.

A Pano that I took from the top of the tower.  It actually looks very cool if you view it full size.

The coastline near Santa Maria as we approach.

The view outside our hotel room in Santa Maria...can't beat that view!


The return trip home as we got closer to the PNW.  Clouds start to build and the showers start.

Tuesday, September 6, 2016

Visiting my sister's family in North Dakota

This past weekend I took advantage of the long weekend to fly to my sisters place in Dickinson ND.  The trip started out early Friday afternoon with a stop in Coeur d'Alene to pick up my brother.  We then launched for Dickinson and made the majority of the trip VFR with flight following.  About mid Montana the visibility started to drop considerably so I asked for and received an IFR clearance into Dickinson ND.  It was a long 4 hour flight, the longest I have taken so far but with the new injector flow balancing that I have been working on the fuel flow was the lowest I have seen it and we landed with about 10 gallons of fuel left!

Lots of clouds made for some beautiful flying as you will see below.



Look at that, 4.5 gph at 17000' doing 150+ knots.  Somebody needs to clean that screen too....

Yep we are in eastern Montana....nothing but flat land...almost as flat as North Dakota

My niece too this picture of their homestead during a short ride on Saturday.

And we were all very thirsty after all that flying time.  Everybody took a ride, Samone, Chad, Chelsea and Danny.

No trip to Samone's is complete without lots of good food including this yummy oyster stew!

On the way back we filed IFR and this is what we saw for a good hour or more.  The layer was relatively thin but solid




We did a few turns around St. Regis Montana on the return flight so I took a couple of pictures.




Cascades as I start my descent into Seattle on the return home.

Can you believe I've put 363 hours on this airplane and it's not even 2 years old????