I went on a trip to the Mooney Airplane and Pilot's Association conference in October. In addition to attending the conference, meeting lots of new people, and soaking in a lot of great information about generaal aviation and Mooneys, I had offered to put on a seminar about electronic flight bags. I recruited people who were goin to be at the convention to present, and I had a camera showing what was on their tablet sitting on the podium as they talked.
I had expected that most people in the room would be wary of the idea of electronic charts, and so I structured the talks to try to sell the idea of EFBs rather than a specific application. It turned out that far more people wanted to know which one to get--I was astonished.
Here are a couple of the presetations that I got mediocre shots of
with my phone camera:
Thanks to everyone who did a presentation!
So I took a (business) trip in January flying my club's Cessna 182...and I got stranded nad had to play the I-hope-the-mechanic-can-fix-it waiting game. The club reimbursed me for the repairs, but it ended up being a long weekend nonetheless.
On the flight up, it amused me greatly that my heading for the flight
was 315 degrees; I had echoes of The Hunt For Red October goin
through my head.
Flightstar at Willard Aiport
treated me very very well--they had a red carpet on the ground when I
landed:
The weather got snowy while I was there, so I had them put my plane
inside (for an extra charge). Here it is, in good company. The plane
I flew is the closer one.
I had been there during the week riding the bus. When I went to take
off Saturday morning, I had a bad magneto check. So I ended up
staying over. Since it was basically going to be a three-day weekend
(MLK day), I rented a car to make it easier to get around. I once
again ended up not getting the car that I thought I wanted. I ended
up driving a Chevy Cruze. A nice little car, not as quiet as the
Malibou. Here's the dashboard at startup for the lights test:
And once it's running:
The center console had an aux jack for a radio and a USB jack (for
power--don't know if that would connect to the radio too):
The mag got replaced, then a weather delay, but Wednesday morning I
was finally on my way. It seems like most of the time when I'm
flying, I end up with a head wind, so I fly around 6 or 7 thousand fee
to maximize forward airpseed to fight the wind. On this trip I had
something like a 20 knot TAILwind, so I flew higher to take advantage
of it. I don't think I've ever cruised at 9000 feet before.
Here I am, with Louisville passing off to the left. Notice the
manifold pressure gauge on the right is only indicating 21 1/2 inches
of pressure (it's about 30 on the ground) because the air's getting
thin. That's with the throttle
wide open. At lower altitudes, you try to cruise at the top of the
green arc at 23 inches.
6 more hours of cross-country time, and 6 more hours of high-performance time. Despite the annoyances, a nice trip. Many playoffs watched.