The wait continues

Nothing new to report on the status of Ariel. She's still sitting in the shop hangar at Harvey Field waiting to be put back together. In the meantime, I've been trying to keep from getting too rusty.

About a week and a half ago, I rented a 172 for a couple of hours and just flew around the area. After landing, I did two more takeoffs and landings. It didn't surprise me that my skill at landing an airplane had atrophied the most, but I also improved again by the third one. The skill fades quickly, but also comes back quickly with renewed practice.

I've also been doing a bit of "flying" in Microsoft Flight Simulator. I currently use a Thrustmaster Hotas and a pair of Thrustmaster rudder pedals. For those unfamiliar with the term, "hotas" stands for "hands on throttle and stick". It's a combination of a throttle lever and a joystick, both of which have a bunch of buttons that can be mapped to additional actions like toggling the parking brake or the landing gear. It works well enough for practicing procedures, but the controls are nothing like the yoke and throttle quadrant in my airplane.

I'm considering purchasing a yoke and throttle quadrant. The current favorite among flight simmers appears to be the offering from Honeycomb. However, I'm actually leaning toward the VelocityOne from Turtle Beach. While the Honeycomb throttle quadrant has two of each lever and can therefore better simulate working the engines of a twin engine aircraft, the Turtle Beach has both lever-style and push-pull style controls. So if I want to have controls like in my plane, I can use the levers and, if I want to better simulate flying a Cessna 152, 172, etc. I can use the push-pull controls.

I was really hoping to have my plane back in the air by the end of August. Now I'm not at all sure I'll have it back by the end of September, or even October. I know that the shop is slammed, and has been for a while. There's a shortage of mechanics pretty much everywhere, and they have to give priority to the flight school airplanes. The rental business appears to be doing well so those planes need to go in for oil changes and 100-hour inspections frequently. Fingers crossed I'll be able to get it back in the air and get the engine broken in before the weather prevents me from flying regularly.

Comments

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

Search This Blog