Say Hello to Ariel

And here she is, parked in her hangar.

I've decided to name her "Ariel". No, she's not named after Disney's version of The Little Mermaid. Rather, she is named after the title character of the book "Ariel" by author Steven Boyett.

The book tells the story of a world where magic has returned, and advanced technology no longer works. As another consequence of The Change, as it's called, mythical and magical creatures have also returned, including unicorns. Ariel is a unicorn who befriends the main character, and they have various adventures together.

My airplane has a decal of a unicorn on either side of the tail, which was put there by the person who owned the plane before the person I bought it from. I'm certainly going to leave the decals there because this plane is, metaphorically, somewhat of a unicorn, considering its unique qualities. And that is what gave the inspiration for her name. It also hasn't escaped my notice that "Ariel" sounds like "aerial" and that just makes it even more fitting a name.

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My engine is so pretty

I went out to the shop today to take a few pictures of my engine and plane before the engine is remounted. The baffling and some other stuff has already been attached to the engine. The engine mount is not back yet. Since the nose gear is attached to the engine mount, the plane is currently sitting on the main gear, and a couple of supports just behind the firewall, and under the tail. Here are a few of the photos I took. The engine looks lovely, to me at any rate, especially since I know those are new cylinders.

Flying when you must

The previous post was titled "Flying when you can." Today the weather was so nice that there was no question about whether or not I'd go up. Today is Saturday, and if you have weather this nice on the weekend, at this time of year, you can't not go flying if it's at all possible. I'll probably go tomorrow, too. I hope so. With the work that was done during and after the annual inspection, my plane is finally fully functional. As far as I know, everything on it works. The intercom is even behaving itself, with a distinct lack of loud static during the last couple of flights. The shop didn't say if they did anything specific to fix it but either they did when I last asked them to take a look at it, or it's somehow sorted itself out. Hopefully it will work just fine, at least until I decide to replace the audio panel with one that has the intercom built in. As noted above, the weather today was absolutely gorgeous. I flew north out of Harvey Field up past...

Night flying

One of the things I've wanted to do since I got current is to go up at night with an instructor for a refresher flight. While I can't do that in my airplane, I can still do it on one of the flight school's planes so I made a reservation for this evening to spend some time with an instructor in a 172. While the weather looked a bit iffy, it was good enough to go flying. I met my instructor at the appointed time, 7:00pm local time. The first thing we did was go out and perform the preflight inspection on the plane while there was sufficient daylight. After that, we spent about half an hour or so in his office going over the things to be aware of when flying at night. Once that was done, we walked out to the plane, got in, started it up, and headed out. We headed north for a while as we discussed the unique aspects of piloting and navigating at night. For example, using the horizon as an attitude reference, and recognizing the presence of poor weather conditions. The weather i...

A Man and His Airplane

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