She flies again!

It's been a long and sometimes difficult road to get to this point but today I flew Ariel for the first time since last March.

It is difficult to describe the emotions I felt after I stopped in front of the hangar and shut her down after the flight. I about broke down crying. I've waited for this for so long, and had to deal with so many frustrating setbacks that it sometimes felt like I'd never fly her again.

Following the instructions from Preston, I flew her for half an hour at 3000' feet over the airport in case something went wrong. I ran the engine at 75% power (maybe a bit more, but that's okay) for as much of the flight as I could. The engine started right up, and I thought it sounded better than it had before. It seemed smoother, somehow. When I took off, I had one notch of flaps in, and she flew off the runway on her own without me having to pull back on the yoke. It was as if she was eager to get back into the sky.

The flight was completely uneventful, as we always hope the first flight after major maintenance will be. I flew for the half hour, then performed a powered descent to pattern altitude to keep the RPMs up as much as possible. I made a pretty good landing, then taxied back to the hanger, shut down, and put her away.

Preston will take her back to the shop and open up the cowl to see if everything is still good. They'll check for leaks, and make sure nothing worked its way loose. Once that's done, I'll fly it the same way I did today for 20 to 25 hours. I'll be monitoring oil use, and the idea is that break in should be done once the rate at which the engine consumes oil stabilizes. It's running mineral oil for break in. Once break in is complete, we'll switch to normal aviation engine oil.

I originally intended to fly it yesterday. I had my flight review yesterday and I planned to fly my plane after I was done flying the rental plane with the instructor. However, after that flight, I realized I was too tired for me to be comfortable flying anymore so I did it today instead. I'm really glad I made that decision. Assuming a flight yesterday would have gone as well as it did today, I probably would have been okay to fly. But you can never know how a flight is going to go and if something had gone wrong, that fatigue could have slowed my reaction time and affected my decision-making ability. I wasn't going to take that chance.

I probably won't be able to fly again until after the 15th of December. I'm going out of town for a week starting this coming Thursday. After that, though, I'm taking pretty much the rest of the month off of work. Weather permitting, I should be able to get some good flying time in.

Here are some photos I took. I know my wings are really dirty. The shop will wash her after they're done checking her out after this flight.