imc

With winter fast approaching we're coming back up on IMC time...  today we had the first cloudy/rainy day in months.  Sure, there has been plenty of fog this summer but it's so localized to the ground you're through in a few seconds.  This system coming through was a fast moving stable frontal system with low clouds and rain... in other words, perfect for practicing instrument procedures.   I spent the morning with my son so I couldn't actually get going until later in the day when it was starting to breakup, but it was good practice nonetheless.  Tomorrow I'm taking the plane back in to get the oil changed and the remaining squawks resolved (hopefully).  I've got another scheduled trip to Camarillo booked for Friday so I'm hoping it will be cinched up by then, heaven forbid I should need to fly commercial.  ;(

Too much fun

I'm having too much fun flying my plane to update my blog lately.  Oh well.  On Monday I actually had an awesome flight.  Flew down to Camarillo for work and the Wx up here has been just gorgeous, and there was zero fog in the entire bay which is unusual in summer... but about 200 miles out I pulled up the weather for Camarillo on the G600, and they're reporting 200 ft OVC in fog and mist.  Hmmm...  when the heck is socal fogged in and norcal clear?  I got to OHIGH intersection an hour later, and started monitoring ATIS and tower freqs and heard a couple planes go missed.  I figured my options were to circle until it cleared a bit, but if I had to wait I might as well shoot an approach.  I got a popup IFR clearance from LA center which went without a hitch.  It's a sad irony that the GA air traffic is so low now that getting this kind of service from ATC is dead-easy even in the busiest airspace.

In any event, by the time I got to Filmore VOR the ATIS had changed and they were now reporting 400ft overcast and 1 mi vis... good enough for the GPS-Z, cool!  10k to Filmore and I did a better job of getting the slippery plane slowed down because I knew they were going to drop me down quick.  I flew the approach and popped out of the clouds at 400 ft.  I wish I had this one on my NFlightCam but sadly I geeked it.  The coolest thing was I was running a bit late for my business meeting, pulled up on the ramp and parked the plane, hopped out and there is my friend Alejandro beaming "I thought that was you!".  Cool!  I told him I was running late for a meeting and needed a cab, and he tosses me his car keys.  Gotta love it!  I got to my meeting on time, and had fun listening to how my coworkers got up at 4:30 am to leave the house at 5am, to drive 1 hr to the airport, to go an hour through security for the 6:55 flight, to land at 8, to hustle to the rental car and fight LA traffic for 1.5 hours to arrive by 10.  Meanwhile I got up at 7am and had an nice breakfast and coffee, took off at 8:30 and arrived 5 mins from the office and got there minutes after them.  I would have been earlier had I not had to shoot the approach.  Did I mention I love this airplane?  ;)

IFR for VNY

I needed to complete an annual IPC for my insurance and since my plane was down for the engine work during this year's BPPP, I hadn't done it.  I went out and managed to get er done just before the August deadline expired, so I'm all set.  Here is a quick NFlightCam video I took of an IFR flight down to VNY I took on Saturday.

New hangar, running LOP

I'm past 10 hours on the new engines now so today I had a 3.8 hr flight and experimented with LOP ops. The engines are doing great LOP and run smoothly past 50 deg LOP at 8-9k. On my two leg course (Norcal to Socal and back) I was running WOT at 21 inches and 2450 rpm. At 50-75 ROP I settled in at about 191 kts true on 25-26 gph. At 50-70 LOP I was getting 184 kts on 21-22 gph. The fuel flow on my JPI is still jumping around too much, but it seems to fluctuate in a range the roughly corresponds to my stock FF gauge so I'm pretty sure these numbers are close. 


Also spent a couple afternoons moving into my new hangar.  The old one just had too many spiders and truth be told I didn't like being basically inside the 32R runup area.  The wind blew dirt and dust under the hangar door and when the wind wasn't enough, pilots would fill in the gaps by pointing their runups right in my face.  The new hangar has a nice gray painted cement floor, clean walls and is nicely snuggled in row D away from the rat filled fields and well wind sheltered.  Moving is always a pain in the arse but will be worth it I think.