I’ve been planning a round the world tour, from England to New Zealand but hadn’t commenced it yet as I’ve been waiting for a decent light twin with steam gauges to arrive into the marketplace.
When Carenado announced their PA34 Seneca, I was pretty happy about this, and purchased it the day it was released. Before committing to my 12,000 mile long light plan, I am doing some route proving with the aircraft to make sure it performs as I need it too, as well at getting to know the autopilot operation and run some fuel consumption trials.
Today’s test flight was from Shoreham (EGKA), from where I will be starting my tour, up to Manchester Barton (EGCB) via the MID, HON and WHI beacons.
The recently published ORBX Shoreham scenery brings back lots of memory’s of real world visits to the airfield where I was given my first intro flight in a C152 many years ago. The detailing of the modelling is terrific and I had plenty of time to enjoy the surroundings via a long taxi around the perimeter of the airfield along taxiway Kilo to depart off runway 20.
Departure time was 0900 local, with real world weather steaming. I was fortunate enough to find enough ‘blue holes’ to initially climb up to 8000 feet which put me on top of the low level cumulus with a 14 knot tailwind.
The cloud thickened up requiring a further climb to 11,000 feet as I continued north until I became sandwiched in a VMC layer between the lower cloud tops and a higher icy base. A brief break in the lower layer revealed the city of Birmingham, but clagged in again requiring a ILS cloud break for 05L at Manchester Ringway.
Once I got my bearings, I leveled at 1500 feet, disabled autopilot and broke off towards the city centre to position for a 5 mile final for grass runway 20 left at Barton.
All in all a very pleasant flight- I’m looking forward to Carenado patching the Seneca to make it compatible with the GTN 750!