Still waiting...

So I'm still waiting for 5WB's new engine. It's been sitting in the hangar for nearly a month now. Half disassymbled. The cowls are off, I believe at least one cylinder is off and everything is covered up. Pretty sad actually. We should be getting the new engine any day now. I was thinking about going down and talking with Gary personally. Getting info straight from the horses mouth so to speak. Anyway....

Preflight Inspections, worth their weight in gold...

Today I went out to the airport to fly for the first time in over 6 weeks. Might as well been a life time. That's what it felt like. Anyway, when I got up this morning, the weather looked decent. Low clouds and fog where the order of the day west even though looking out my window here at the house was clear and sunny. It was forcast to burn off pretty quick and was supposed to be light west winds. 

After the weather started to come up I headed out to the airport. Arrived at about 11am an started my preflight. It wasn't to long and I noticed a slight issue. On the bottom of the right horizontal stabilizer there was a panel missing.  

Not really a huge deal but still nothing you would want to fly with. I'm pretty sure that it is the result of the annual inspection. Either it was not installed after the inspection, or wasn't installed correctly and lost sometimes after the inspection. The biggest thing I was unhappy with was that the airplane was flown 4 times since annual. 

I went down to Gary's hangar. Gary is the guy that did the annual. I asked him if we had left a panel with him? Amazingly enough, he did have a panel. He said that he had found it out on the taxiway. I'm unsure if he really did or was just protecting himself if he didn't reinstall it. Either way, we had people miss it on preflight and fly without it. Anyway, I reinstalled the panel after inspecting all the components behind that panel. And all was well. 

The rest of the flight went pretty good. The winds were forcast out of the west at 8-10 knots as of last night. Well they ended up WSW 15kts gust to 21kts. Good for crosswind landing practice but right at my personal limits for crosswinds. Good for confidence building. 

I flew to 0F2, Bowie Municiple. On the way I did some air work. I did slow flight both with flaps and without. I did power on and power off stalls. Proved once again that you really have to try to get this airplane to stall. I did one engine out practice. It worked out well. I did two very pretty landings at Bowie. Made even better since I was way high on both and still managed to get it down nicely on that relativly small runway. I did have 1 go around. It was my first in real world flying. The approach was good. I got a little to slow and had a pretty high sink rate too close to the ground. I'm sure I could have safely landed but no need in pushing it. Plus it was a perfect go around. Probably about 1 second from the time I though about the go around until I had made a decision and applied power. I was probably about 20 feet when I stopped the decent and began to climp out. 

The flight back was pretty nice. A dry line hanging out west of Decature made for a bumpy ride for a few minutes. Landing back at Denton was smooth. Drifted a little with the winds, but other than that, nice landing. 

Here is a link to the rest of the pics. http://www.flickr.com/photos/iflyjet/sets/72157626401764204/

Skylane Five Five Whiskey Bravo

Today mother nature was a bit more accommodating than she had been the past couple of times I'd tried to fly. I got out to the airport a bit early. I had time to pre-flight and stop by the FBO to grab a AFD and something to drink well before John the instructor got there. 

We did about an hour or so of ground training. I can't say I learned a lot, but I had a lot that was reinforced so that was good.  All of our ground work went smoothly. We got started up, taxied out, contacted ground, did our runup and was ready to go. 

We were cleared for take off and we were off. Felt really good to get back into the air. The first thing I notice after getting a little distance from the ground was that I'd planned on climbing out at 110mph but with even a shallow climb I was indicating about 70mph. This was strange but everything looked ok so we continued.  As we climbed picking our way through the clouds we were full throttle and should have been climbing at 100-110mph but were indicating closer to 65mph. 

Everything looked pretty normal while we were doing some slow flight maneuvers and stalls. I did notice it took a TON of right rudder to keep it pointing straight but that seemed to fix itself. Could have been just weird winds. We flew out to Gainesville, KGLE, for some landings. The instructor decided to do the first landing to kind of show me what to look for. That's when things go weird. On pretty much the entire approach and landing we were riding the stall horn even though we were indicating 80mph. The plane was mushing really bad so we knew we were slow. The instructor said it just felt wrong. I was up next and he was right. On my landing we got real wobbly.  That's normally a sign of being slow and just above a stall for a long period of time. I was indicating 85mph while this was going on. After landing we checked a couple of things. We decided we'd fly the approach at 110mph to see if that would seem fast or not. On climb out our airspeed went from 60 or 70 down to zero then after a few seconds it went up to 90mph where it should have been. 

After a couple of trial an error landings we found that if we kept about 95mph that would actually be about 70mph and allow us to land fairly normally. Even with all that figured out, the gusty winds made landing a bit tricky so not a lot of learning was happening on this day. 

So with all that we headed back for Denton. Was a fairly uneventful return and landing. I was able to find my way back to the hanger without getting lost, BONUS!  Got refueled and put back into the hanger all nice and neat. It was a fun flight. And even though we had some issues I did learn a lot. And most importantly I got some confidence that I'd been lacking.