Bye bye 2018

It's the end of another year.  Ooo, 2 posts in the same year - what can that mean?

This is me in August 2018, holding a freshly printed CFI Multi Engine Instructor (MEI) certificate, obtained in this very same Cessna 310R.  Oddly, the whole checkride went much better than the commercial checkride.  Perhaps it was just that I had more multiengine time and felt more confident.  Perhaps it was because I didn't have to do the dreaded single engine instrument approach.  Anyway, I knew as I approached for the final landing that I'd nailed it with nothing even close to exceeding the PTS parameters.

A friend and student of mine "K" came along for the ride, and on the way back I let him fly from the left seat and I gave him a free multi-engine lesson.  Now he wants to buy a Cessna 310.  Don't blame me, I was just the "connection".  It is a heck of a plane.

In other news, the Seattle-based company I was working for laid me off.  It wasn't a surprise, the aviation-related project I'd been working on was cancelled by the customer, and I wasn't prepared to move from Dallas to Seattle as was really needed to make work what they wanted me to do.  I almost instantly got contract work, although I think that's ending soon.

Around the same time, I flew the Bonanza up to Geneva NY to pick up Sally after she had driven from Dallas to NY with Thing 2.  I stopped for one night in Cincinnati to visits "D" who now lives there, but we didn't have time to fly his 172.  The next day I flew to Niagara Falls, and rented a car to drive up to Toronto to visit family.  While there, my uncle showed me a model he'd made of my Bonanza - and here it is, with the real thing at Niagara:

 

Meanwhile I've been doing a lot more instruction, with "M", a high school senior planing a career in aviation, "T", the owner of fence company who wants to buy a Cessna 182, and "D", an exp-pat Brit living in Dallas.  And "A2", another ex-pat Brit, and several others.

So I passed the ATP experience minimums in December 2018.  What next?

A Year Later

An update from the path of life - subtitled "At Least I Blog Once A Year"

May is about to wilt and wither from the Texas heat and become June.  Time to update my few but loyal followers!!  ;)

First, what happened to the Cessna 150?  Who knows?  The insurance company took it, and the registration hasn't been renewed.  My guess is that it was parted out and is no more.

The Bonanza got better, and my wallet got thinner.  I had almost all the old radios taken out, and some are as I write, on eBay being sold so that they can grace another airplane.  I bought a used Garmin GNS 530W to supplement the existing 430W, and replaced the old Garmin transponder with a new GTX 345 to add ADS-B in and out and become 2020 compliant.  While I was in there I had the Garmin 496 moved from it's wobbly mount to a Gizmo panel mount, and coupled to the other GPS.  So now I have weather and traffic on 3 displays if I use my iPAD with Foreflight, which seems to be enough duplication.

I finally finished the Commercial multiengine add-on.  An MEI friend owns a Cessna 310R, and I started to train with him at no cost to me, because I'd helped him out a few years ago while he was getting his initial CFI license.  But life and maintenance intervened, and I went to a small flight school north of Ft Worth which has a Piper Aztec available at a reasonable price.  So in April I took and passed the test in the Aztec, in my opinion flying the worst I had ever flown.  I knew I could do everything, but on the actual test nothing went as well as it should have - nerves, I suppose.

But I passed.  Now I'm flying the 310R again and getting ready to do the MEI add on:

I stretched the legs of the Bonanza on my last trip to Upstate NY.  I flew my wife "Sally" and Thing 1 from Dallas to Walnut Ridge (KARG), a 2.3 hr flight, then another leg of similar length to Dayton Wright Brothers (KMGY) where we spent the night.  The next morning, another 2.5 hr leg took us to Penn Yann NY (KPEO) where I rented a car, and we drove to Thing 2's college in Geneva NY.

By early the next morning I had the Bonanza loaded up with all the "stuff" from her room, including a bicycle and fridge.  Sally and both Things together started off to drive the little red car back to Texas, and I flew the whole way in 2 legs of just under 4 hours each.  Good job my panel upgrade also included a Bluetooth link so I could play music over the headset, and make phone calls.

Weather was moving in over Indiana and Kentucky, so I diverted my IFR flight to Monroe County  (KTZV) in Southern Kentucky, a totally deserted field with cheap fuel and an clean but unmanned FBO.  After taking on nearly 60 gallons, I blasted off again to dodge light rain showers near Memphis (which showed up nicely on my ADS-B WX display), and landed in North Dallas around 4pm after another quick refueling stop in Sherman (KSWI).

Probably I was the only person in the Universe amused by the fact that I had to make use of the portable "Travel John" right as I was flying over Hot Springs at 11,000ft.