When you least expect it...

Saturday morning saw me drag my butt out of bed at ridiculous o'clock to drive down to Hamilton for a sim session with Trevor (and the promise of a ride in the back of the Twin Comanche, DOK)...

In typical fashion, the only thing that occurred according to plan was that we drove to Hamilton and back :P

It turned out that the twin was booked most of the day by someone else. So John, Trevor's Instructor, decided we would do a quick session in the Sim and then we would take the nice "new" Archer III, WIT, for a ride so Trevor could familiarise himself with the cockpit instruments as it has the same "glass" instruments as the Twin Comanche.

While we were at it, John decided Trevor would fly us Matamata and they'd play with all the fancy pants equipment like the 3-axis autopilot, dual Garmin 430's and the Aspen Avionics EFD1000, then we'd swap over and I could take him for some circuits and do some stalls and a forced landing etc. on the way back to Hamilton and thus get "checked to line" for Waikato Aero Club purposes.

So my cruisy day of sitting in the sim and the backseat watching proceedings quickly turned into a $200+ mini-checkride :-/

So while Trevor and John finished up in the sim, I went out and pre-flighted WIT.
There are more excellent photo's that Chris has taken over on his blog here and here. Note that these pics were taken before the avionics upgrade. You can see a demo of the Aspen EFD1000 here.

The aircraft is still in pretty good nick... it even has that nice "new car leather" smell... Ooooo Shiny! ;) My only complaints are that there isn't enough room in the back (I couldn't wear my normal headset as I simply didn't have enough headroom!! So I had to resort to my homemade headset that wraps around the back) and because of the auto-pilot, the controls are quite "heavy" as the controls are all run through servo's. Other than that, the machine is a real dream!

The "check-ride" actually went pretty well... although due to an impromptu airshow being conducted at Matamata by a homebuilt scaled-down Fockewolfe FW-190, ZK-FWI our plan for circuits ended up being the stalling and forced landing component of the ride which went pretty well, although I got a little wide on the forced landing due to the longer wing on WIT compared with LMA, so my visual references using the wing-tip to judge spacing was a bit out. To my credit I did pick up on it and corrected it as best I could.

We came back and landed at Matamata to pick up Trevor and then headed back to Hamilton to finish up for the day and head back to Auckland.

So, not quite the day we had planned, but I think it turned out pretty well... and I have finally flown an aircraft that is actually younger than I am! It's a 2004 model with around 420hours TT ;)

Sunday, I came crashing back down to "reality" as I went and did some simulated IFR and forced landing practise in one of Airline Flying Club's C-152's :( Actually, to be fair, they're pretty tidy, and fun, little aircraft... and cheaper too ;)

The IFR was OK and I did a fairly decent job with the Partial Panel work. The forced landings were a little poor, I keep getting fixated on finding a field to land in before actually running through the procedures and checks, the end result being that I get everything mixed up and it just makes things really messy.

I thought I was doing pretty well with the glide approach onto the grass until Trevor suggested I use more flaps than I thought was necessary... the end result being that we came up "a little short", and I got a first-hand lesson on just how much you can steepen an approach using flaps... and why you should never extend downwind when doing glide approaches/forced landings!


These Flights: 0.9 Dual + 1.1 Dual (0.3 IFR)
Total Hours: 216.0 (98.9/92.8 Day, 8.6/15.7 Night, 7.7 IFR)