Vectors To Final

Recently I went out to the airport bright and early to enjoy the brisk morning air and great climb rates. I made a 25 min trip up to KVUJ and back to get a little practice working with a towered airport. This trip taught me that I like the active traffic monitoring of the SkyWatch system (such as in the Cirrus) better than the ground-communication based traffic system (TIS) in the C172 G1000. I got what turned out to be a false traffic alert telling me that someone was right on top of me at my same altitude. I scrambled my head around trying to find it for a few very tense seconds before I heard the traffic alert stop. Looking back at the screen it appeared to be telling me that the traffic data I had just freaked out about was old data. Not good. Here's a bit of video from the flight:

I recently had the pleasure of taking a demo flight in a new friend's JetPROP airplane. A JetPROP is a Malibu/Mirage converted to use a Pratt & Whitney PT6A turbine engine and a Hartzell 4-blade reversible propeller. It is apparently the better way to go for a turboprop Piper vs. buying the Meridian (the JetPROP has more horsepower, better climb performance, lower fuel flows, and near-equal cruise speeds). I took some video of the flight which I have embedded below. Unfortunately youTube blurred the videos a good bit, but it will have to do for now. :) BTW, if you'd like to see a professional video of a very similar aircraft, the Piper Meridian, check out FlightVideoProductions (they have a few other cool videos for sale as well - think I will get the Col 400 one). Part 1: Part 2:

Tonight was my first solo with the G1000 avionics. It was also the perfect time to get night current again with the sun setting so early and the weather so nice (though a bit chilly). I went out to the airplane after dark, so preflight involved using a flashlight. Of note, my main flashlight's (a Surefire) batteries, which I had checked at home before leaving for the airport, went dead the instant I tried to use them at the airport. Thankfully I had a backup flashlight and another set of batteries. I wrestled with the brightness setting on the G1000 a bit - the auto mode was simply way too dark. It would have been fine up at altitude away from the airport lights, but down on the ground the screen was nearly unreadable until I manually set a higher brightness. I have the opposite problem with the Garmin 430 radio/gps units in the Cirrus - the auto-brightness on those seems to do absolutely nothing leaving the screen way too bright at night. For this flight I made 2 trips around...