The Bone is home

It was a long wait but I finally picked up my new plane.  The Twin Bonanza is home at last!

Beauty.  It's hard to put into perspective how big the thing is when you look at a photo, it fills up the entire 50 ft wide hangar.  That nose strut is the same as on a King Air.  It's a tight fit so I'm going to need to be more careful when putting her away.

The ride is sweet.  I'm 6'4" and I can stretch my legs out straight in the pilot seat with no bending whenever I want to.   There is 2 feet of width between me and the copilot passenger.  Passengers can get up and change seats.  I can stand under the outer wing, and it's a LOW wing!  The geared props turn on about a 2/3 reduction so they turn slow and therefore it's fairly quiet for a big rumbling twin.  The engines are smooth as butter and the sound coming from the augmenter tubes give it a deep throaty roar.  I'm still getting used to the avionics and autopilot but slowly getting the groove of the knob twisting on the 530's again.  It will be a few more flights at least before I take her into IFR.

The fuel system is also a bit more complicated than my stone simple Baron.  Now I've got mains and aux tanks to deal with but it's pretty simple once you know how it works.  If you don't understand how it works it's pretty easy to screw it up too.  The D50E is well designed and the return lines return the fuel to whatever tank is selected, which simplifies things somewhat.  Speaking of fuel I'm pleasantly surprised at the burns and the speeds.  I'm about 15-20 kts slower than the Baron on only a few more GPH.  In cruise we were truing out at 160 kts and burning 26 gph after some extra leaning. The pressure carbs do a pretty good job on their own so you don't really need to touch the mixtures, but I found I only lost a few kts to save about 6 gallons an hour.

The plane was in Griffin Georgia and so it was about 16 hrs of flying getting her home.  On the way home the line guy at Santa Monica thought it was a turboprop so I'm going to need to be careful when fueling.  I've resolved to only fill it myself or at least be there whenever it's fueled.