Anniversary date over the mountains

K and I had our 11th anniversary this weekend so we celebrated with a flight over the Appalachian mountains. The goal was the see the Fall colors and just have some fun.

For this flight I tried out a new iPad knee strap - the MyClip Thigh. It worked really well - I used the iPad in both landscape and portrait orientations and the clip worked perfectly. I like how minimalist it is - doesn't get in your way at all and is easy to transport to the plane and home again. It is designed for an iPad without a case, so it won't work with the Apple case, but would likely work with less-bulky cases and certainly with a simple screen protector setup (as in my case).

Here's the MyClip helping us use ForeFlight Mobile to navigate to Mountain Air airport:

On the way to the mountains I tried something I have never done before: an in-flight magneto check. I learned details about this from an article by Mike Busch - a source of great knowledge when it comes to piston aircraft.

We leveled off at our cruise altitude of 8,500' and leaned the mixture back to around 45 degrees leak of peak. Then you let the EGTs (Exhaust Gas Temps) stabilize. Then you run on just one mag for a 25-30 seconds to see how the EGTs do. You are looking to see them all rise up (though they may rise in different amounts) and re-stabilize after 20 seconds or so. You are also looking to see if the engine runs OK on one mag in flight.

For our test both mags did just fine, though the left mag alone caused a couple of small, random backfires. All the EGTs reacted as expected and the engine was reasonably smooth when running on just one of either of the mag systems.

Here's a view of the colors we were hunting:

These are some of the many tree farms we saw, no doubt getting ready for Christmas:

And these are the slopes of Sugar Mountain, snow-less at the moment: