Last 3 Flights

I'm a little backlogged on the posts so I thought I'd increase efficiency and kill 3 birds with one post.

My first flight in this group involved a short hop with John in the Turbo SR22 to Newport News. We met fellow owner Mike in order to use his laptop to update all the databases in the plane. Mike handed me 2 USB thumb drives to update the MFD navdata and CMax charts. I took them out to the airplane and followed the MFD boot-up process to do the update. Mike took the Garmin data cards and updated them as well.

After that was done, which took a surprisingly long time (mostly copying the data to the nav cards) John and I departed to shoot a GPS approach into the brand new KXSA airport. I choose the runway that was not favored by the winds when picking my approach so we worked with the other pilots in the area to keep out of their way. Everyone was very accommodating and, with the sun setting, the airport was cleared out by the time we got there. I went missed and then did a modified circle-to-land maneuver to land on the new runway.

As we approached the runway the terrain alerting system started telling us "PULL UP, PULL UP" - it didn't know about the new airport and was sure we were crashing. I hit the inhibit button to quiet it and then re-activated it after takeoff.

The next flight was to get John some more night landings in, but it was called off when we found the right mag running rough. We tried to clear it by running it lean at 2000 RPM for a bit (which I recently read is a "bad thing" in the Continental engine care guide) but we couldn't clear it. We returned to park and just recently I found out that our trusty local mechanic is replacing the magneto - so it wasn't the spark plugs at fault.

Early this morning I hopped in the turbo and blasted off just before sunrise. I flew 2 hours down to GA to pick up K's parents. I brought them back to Williamsburg for some visiting time with the new grandbaby. The weather was perfect - light winds and cold temps. I had to fight a headwind on the way down south but in return I was given a little tailwind for the northerly trip (210 MPH ground speed). Beats a 8-hour drive any day, especially when the time is spent in an SR22! :)

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