Going South, and the oil analysis results

The weather was fantastic today, so naturally I had to take the plane up.

I had no particular destination in mind for this flight. My main goal is still to run the engine and put time on it before we check the oil again. However, I decided that today I would head south, as my flying so far has been mostly north of Harvey Field.

Flying south is a bit more complicated because you're flying under the Sea-Tac Class B airspace, and there are also some airports with Class D airspace such as Renton, Olympia, and Tacoma Narrows. I flew pretty much straight south, making sure to stay out of the Class B. Once I was south of the Class B I started looking on the chart for an airport to land at. I wanted to be able to log this flight as cross-country time.

I found Chehalis-Centralia airport on the chart and decided to head there for a landing. The flight was without incident. I tuned in the CTAF frequency, but several airports in the region use the same frequency, particular Auburn Municipal which is was pretty busy today so there was a lot of radio chatter. I wasn't hearing anything for Chehalis. I double and triple-checked the CTAF frequency in FlyQ. I also didn't see any traffic being reported at or around Chehalis via ADS-B on my iPad mini so I figured that it was just a quiet day at that airport, an assumption that later proved correct.

I flew westward over the airport at a relatively high altitude since pattern entry is on the west side for both runway 16 and 34. I tuned in the AWOS to get the wind direction but it was reported as "variable". Since other airports in the area were taking off and landing to the north, I went ahead and set up to enter a lefttraffic pattern for runway 34.

The landing was not great but decent. I'm slowly getting better but still have work to do. I figure that learning to make better landings will be a life-long pursuit. I didn't do a touch-and-go, but went ahead and exited the runway, then taxied back to take off again. Once I did that, I headed north. My intention was to fly up the west side of south Puget Sound.

I thought about landing at Sanderson Field near Shelton but decided to keep going. I checked the chart for airports along the way and found Jefferson County International Airport, which is near Port Townsend. Jeffco, as it is often referred to by local pilots, uses the same CTAF frequency as Harvey Field, so I hear radio traffic from that airport all the time. But I'd never been there, so I decided to make another landing there before heading back to Harvey.

As with landing at Chehalis, I entered a left traffic pattern, this time for runway 27. As with Chehalis, the landing was decent, though I let the plane get a bit too low and slow on the approach so I had to add some power on short final. I exited the runway, taxied back to the end of the runway, and took off again. A sign posted next to the taxiway stated that, for noise abatement, there should be no departure turns below 1000' altitude, so I flew straight out until I climbed that high. I then headed south west to avoid a restricted area, then headed west. Once I was over the mainland, I headed south, avoiding Paine Field's Class D airspace, and descended for a landing at Harvey Field. This third landing was pretty good, better than the first two.

All told, the flight was three hours. I very much enjoyed flying to airports I'd never landed at before, and got some good experience at dealing with somewhat more complicated airspace than I'm used to. The engine ran great, the plane flew great, everything was great.

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This past Wednesday, the results of the oil analysis arrived via email from Blackstone Labs. It was pretty much what I expected. They noted that the oil only had about five hours on it, and the results reflected that, except that there was more iron than would be expected for oil of that age. Given that metal that appeared to be steel was found in the filter, this is not surprising, and confirms that the metal really was steel and not something else. Hopefully it was mostly residual, and no new metal is being produced into the oil. I'll have to wait and see what the next filter inspection turns up.