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This entry is just for me. Please forgive my self-indulgence.
I've now rented a hangar to put the airplane in when I finally get it
back from the mechanic's.
It'll look better with the airplane in it, I'm sure. :-)
When I get a chance, I'll take down a broom and trash can and get the debris out of the floor.
Another to-do item--the hangar actually exceeds the wing span of the airplane by several feet. I'll put lines in the floor toward one side so that I can roll the airplane in and there will be more room on the side of the door, which will make it easier to load.
The new plane has two GPS navigation units. I don't think I would have made that choice in configuring it, but it will be fine for the moment.
GPS units used for IFR flight must have current navigational and waypoint and airport information to be legal. The unit itself lives in the panel in the airplane, but the navigation data lives on a flash-memory card that sits in a socket in the front of the unit that's removable.
The information is updated every 28 days, so you need to remove the card from each unit and program it with the updated information. Most people have two of each card, and swap them out every time the information is updated. The seller of my airplane had two cards for each GPS as well, and a programming unit that will interface with either type.
There's a company called Jeppesen that packages the information into a
form that the GPSs can understand. I downloaded their software and
bought one update for each of the two GPS units in the airplane:
The older of the GPS units is an Apollo GX-60. It was designed by a
company called "II Morrow" which has since been absorbed by Garmin.
This one is an old-school unit; its screen is monochrome and it has an
older-style interface. Its memory card is a PCMCIA memory card.
PCMCIA is a expansion bus that used to be used by laptops a lot.
Here's the Jeppesen programmer writing data to the GX-60 card:
The other GPS is a Garmin 430W, a relatively modern GPS unit (6 years
old or so). It has a multi-color screen and a relatively modern
interface. The data card for the Garmin units is a proprietary card
that's only available from them.
As in the previous post, I drove down to South Carolina to look at the plane and go flying with the seller on Sunday November 4th. I liked what I saw, so we arranged to have the plane inspected later the following week.
So on Tuesday evening November 6, I drove most of the way down to Rome, Georgia. I drove the rest of the way on Wednesday morning. The seller flew the plane there later that morning. I had my machanic do initial look-see during the middle of the day. He didn't spot anything immediate, so I gave seller a deposit, we signed the contract, and then I drove the seller to Augusta Geogia and met his wife to drop him off. I then drove most of the way back to Rome. I didn't make it all the way, but I pushed through (this is late Wednesday night now) so that I was north of Atlanta.
I was glad I had. Thursday morning, Driving north from Atlanta, the
traffic going into Atlana was pretty fierce; I was glad I was going
the other way:
Along that same strech of highway, here's a single shot I got of a
Smart Car entering onto the interstate in front of me. The way it
moved down the highway and outdistanced me made me much more confident
about the Smart's abilities as an interstate car. This was the
closest I ever got to it.
Thursday morning, I spent time in the shop taking inspectional panels
off of the plane. This is the first time I've helped with the prep
work for an annual--a first in my young life:
Inspection panels off on the left wing to expose the aileron controls:
I have lots of photos of the various bits of (now my) airplane. I'll
parcel them out among other posts. Here's one more, though. I find
it terribly amusing that the Lycoming engine/propeller combination
means that the drive pulley for the generator belt is behind the
propellor. That means that to put on a new belt, you have to take the
propellor off the crankshaft.
The engine is to the left here, the propellor and spinner to the
right. As in all Lycoming engines, the starter ring gear is here at
the front of the engine. The generator pulley is near the bottom of
the photo.
On October 31, a plane that I'd seen in listed in August for a reasonable price, and then listed again in early October at a lower price, got listed again at an absurdly low price. It was exactly the kind of airplane that I'd been sort of vaguely looking for, with all the features that I required, with almost all of the secondary things hathat I sort of wanted, at a price that I couldn't ignore any more.
That evening as soon as I was off of work, I called the owner and talked to him about coming down and seeing it. He said that two other people had also called about it (which was later confirmed). I decided I really ought to go down right away and look at it as a result, so we set up that I would drive down that Sunday and meet him to look at the airplane and fly it that Sunday afternoon. This post shows some pictures from that trip.
The drive from where I live in Kentucky to owner's (now seller's) place in South Carolina was 411 miles, according to mapquest, just about 7 hours. I drove down starting early Sunday morning and met him at 2pm. I was there probably 4 hours or a little more, and then headed back that evening. I grabbed a hotel that night and then drove the rest of the way back Monday morning (I had specific on-call duty at work on Monday afternoon).
Here's plushie
@wilw at the Clinch Mountain
overlook in Tennessee, on the way south.
Just south of Clinch mountain, I drove by the city of Morristown.
Here's the turn-off of 25E into the town of Morristown where I turned
every time I went to the Morristown airport when I was taking flyin
lessons in 2006 and 2007.
While I'm a mid-westerner at heart, I have to admit Appalachia and the
south have some pretty driving vistas too.
The next post will be about the next trip that I took down to Georgia to have the plane inspected.
Things are moving forward fine with the plane. I'm now in the well-known positon among pilots of calling my mechanic every few days and asking when the plan is likely to be done.
It's actually going fine. The parts for the big post-inspection item is at the shop, and the other little things are on order. So the plane will be put back together, better than it was, and annualed, soon-ish-ish.
I have a flight instructor who I know, is a Mooney expert, and a known quanity on deck to do my transition training. More of what I need is to get back up to speed from a few years of frankly not flying very much. I flew 5 hours of Mooney time in July, mostly takeoffs and landings, so I suspect it will be less Mooney-specific stuff and more just getting out and flying a lot. And it will be in my airplane, which I understand from an intellectual point of view but totally hasn't sunk in yet.
If it gets done when I think it will, I have a plan for getting it before Christmas. If it doesn't, then I'll just deal with it when we get back home in January.
Nothing is a problem--it's just a matter of patience. It's far more important for it to be done right than soon.