Kicking my heels here at Mount Pleasant while the lawyers do their thing. So it transpires that an enterprising member of the ground crew hires out a couple of off road buggies, so of course I just had to.
Bought the crosscart several months ago for the princely sum of £1.80 and nearly destroyed my motion rig with it. With settings very much toned down, it has become a lot of fun and if anyone owns the crosscart, then the Falklands is for you, with 100s of miles of dirt roads and empty beaches /sand dunes. Only fly in the ointment is if you come to a bridge, turn around, the crosscart will crash, it cannot cross bridges.
And of course Mount Tumbledown where I paid my respects to the fallen heroes of both nationalities. Of course, the cross is not present, wish I knew how to use blender, I would place it there. Figure it should be about five feet to the left of my front wheel. Edit. Nope found a pic, it should be right at the front edge, I made a clumsy attempt to put it in…
Transporting $20,000 worth of beer to Leesburg Intl.
KAYS → KEEL
(As an aside - It appears ATC can handle a full IFR flight including approaches quite well when the destination is a controlled airport like KEEL. But when the destination is an uncontrolled airport, ATC just tells you to cancel your IFR plan when you get close without assigning you an approach WTF ?! )
Learning the basics of using a VOR, the CDI, and HSI instruments to navigate as part of my R/L PPL training.
Also the basics of the Garmin 530 and 430 coms and nav radio functionality.
Also played around with GPS nav in the Garmins plus the autopilot.
Much easier to learn these tools in the sim than while trying to hand fly a real plane in the air (and pay for the head scratching time).
With the Garmin G5 IFR addon from flightsim.to, I was able to closely mimic the panels in the trainers I fly in R/L.
Continuing south in the Cessna Caravan in Florida.
Transporting caviar from Leesburg Intl to Venice Municipal.
KEEL → KVNC
I made an expensive mistake. I bought 479 units of caviar at KEEL for $1128 the unit, knowing that KVNC was willing to pay $1209 for it. What I failed to notice was that they were only in the market for 397 units at that price.
So I bought 479 units of caviar for $540,312 and could only sell 397 units for a return of $479,973
So I’m down about $61k. The remaining 82 units of caviar perishes in 22 hours and the closest buyer is KNGU which is 670 nm back up north loool.
Not sure I want to go back up north and interrupt my journey south. Oh well that was an expensive lesson in supply and demand.
It was a really nice weather to fly and I enjoyed it a lot. BATC did vector me over the mountains instead of the sea, which I found strange, but in the end it was a safe approach and landing, so no complaints from me.
A quick tour inside,….took me 15 mins for a good look around, there is so much to see - doors open; hatches open ; portholes open; ladders to climb/ descend to access the different levels …. a few screenshots
As an aside, ATC is driving me nuts. They’re now mixing up STARs and approaches and trying to send me all over the place. They cleared me on the correct approach via its transition and told me to descend to the IAF altitude of 2000 feet. All that was correct and things were fine. But then ATC wanted me to go to join the STAR initial transition which was about 40 nm behind me! I’m wasting energy trying to second guess what ATC is going to do rather than enjoying the flight.
Check ride complete. After an hours flight, I managed to pull off a greaser of a landing, pure luck rather than skill and the check airman informed me that since we were both still alive, that was good enough for him.
nd back on the ramp, pacing up and down whilst the examiner fills out the paperwork in the aircraft. Next week, it is time to start the trip home.
Got the autopilot fixed, it was a faulty Aux Hydraulic switch for the purpose of this scenario, you get it with A2A stuff. You have a choice: Brand new, used or auction aircraft. Auction being very much a you get what you pay for.
Since this aircraft belonged to an oil exploration company and as such should have been faultlessly maintained, I chose “used” so total time on the airframe on this particular aircraft is 3618 hrs, port engine has 615 hrs and stbd engine has just 4.8hrs, so is pretty much new.
Waiting for the ink to dry on the forms and I am rated on the Piper Aerostar.
. I’m still fighting for “smoothness landing” > 50%.
