Vectors To Final

This weekend marked our last family trip in a Cirrus, at least for a while. :) That's because we are moving in a few weeks, down to Rock Hill, SC. We took the opportunity to head back down to KUZA for a little time with my family. K, Ev, and I packed up into the turbo and pointed the nose SW. The weekend was great, and both the flight down and back were as enjoyable as ever. As we neared Rock Hill, we were at about 4000' and turned a bit more South to dodge some of the CLT airspace. Being on an IFR flight plan we were listening to the CLT controllers when we heard an urgent traffic alert call for another aircraft. The other aircraft didn't respond immediately so the controller repeated the alert. After a few long seconds the aircraft finally responded that he'd had a close encounter - after he caught his breath he thanked the controller for the warning. It sounded like an eye-opening event. On the way home we sped away from the setting sun and, after breaking th...

After jabbering on and on to a co-worker at the recent Christmas party about how great the Cirrus aircraft are, it came time to put my money where my mouth was - a demo flight was in order. And I was more than happy to do it! Gene, a professor from William & Mary, kindly met me this morning for a little hop around the local area. His daughter was invited to join us but didn't feel up to it. So we hopped into the turbo SR22 with co-owner John in the front right. We dropped him off at RIC to pickup the older Cirrus and Gene swapped out for the front seat. After taxiing the short distance to the runway and waiting on a few commercial jets to do their thing, we took off. We mostly flew my standard pattern around the peninsula, but altered it with a close fly-by of the Langley (where F-22s are based) and Norfolk international. Gene flew the majority of the trip and did a truly top notch job. I told him I found it hard to believe he had only been in a small plane once or twice ...

Today the weather was too nice to resist a quick trip around the patch. Ryan, a new employee at the office, was "forced" to join me on the trip - his first in a general aviation plane. :) I flew around the north side of the KRIC airspace to overfly his house on the other side. We then asked for a landing at Richmond, which we got after a bit of vectoring around. I must have picked a busy time to come in - had I known I might have not bothered with that stop. We spent a decent amount of time on the ground as well - getting a lengthly takeoff clearance and then being given the option to just turn right back around to depart opposite the runway we came in. We taxied into position quickly but had to wait on a few other bigger airplanes landing on another runway before blasting off. On the way back to JGG Ryan took the controls for some straight and level flight. After I showed him a few steep turns he was back in control to enter the landing pattern. We landed on 31 and p...

I had the pleasure of accompanying two friends on a trip down south in the Turbo Cirrus this weekend. We left at 7:30 Sunday morning after filling up the TKS anti-ice fluid tank. Cirrus thoughtfully redesigned that tank for the G3 airplanes – which is nice because the G2 and earlier have a less-than-ideal design. The only way we know to find that the TKS tanks are full is to try to put fluid in and watch it overflow all over the place. The G3 has the filling port on the wing, instead of on the fuselage. I assume you can also look in to see the fluid level. We filed IFR and picked it up from Norfolk Approach in the air. We climbed up to 8000 feet and broke out on top about 200 feet above an overcast cloud layer. It is so much fun to be barely over the clouds like that – it gives you a true sense of speed since you are passing the clouds so close by. Feels like what I imagine low level mountain flying might be like – but way way safer. Skimming the tops of clouds at 180 knots i...

After returning solo from the thanksgiving holidays I got to fly back down to UZA this weekend to pick up my better half and our young son Evan. I was able to take the Turbo down for this trip and loved every second of it. Charlotte was kind enough to give me slightly better vectors than normal, saving me a minute or so of flight time. Being by myself I had some fun making use of the good roll rate of the Cirrus when I was entering the pattern. I kept all the banks under 30 degrees, but brought them in and out fairly sharply - lots of fun, but not something I would do with non-pilots on board. After 1.5 hours of near total straight and level flight banking felt good. I had some lunch with the family and then we were back to the airport for the return trip. I tried to get the airport folks to fill up the oxygen tank but they require a maintenance person do that task. It being Saturday no one was there to do that for me. Here's a video from the return trip which starts at take...

I flew the family down south to visit with my parents for the long weekend. We had a nice easy trip down, with a little headwind adding about 10 minutes to the trip time. I flew back today and had to go IFR due to a few different overcast layers. Here's my shorthand for the clearance I was issued on the ground at KUZA: That basically says to take up a heading of 130 after takeoff and expect to go direct to my destination shortly thereafter. I was cleared to 3000 feet with 7000 feet being issued within 10 mins of departure. The departure control frequency was 120.05 and the squawk code for the transponder was 7151. The :54 and 59 refer to the time that my clearance was valid. The Start -> LT is just to remind me that I started feeding from the left fuel tank and that I plan to switch after burning 12 gallons (the SR22 can have a max difference of 10 gallons between the wing tanks and I was 2 gallons heavier on the starting side). The 6100 was just a note I made so that I c...

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...