Vectors To Final

I just got back from a whirlwind tour of FL in the Cirrus. Airplane did great and it was a nice challenge doing a lot of IFR flying in busy, unfamiliar airspace. It was helpful that I feel so at home in the airplane, as that gave me more mental cycles for briefing approaches and talking with controllers - the mic switch got a nice workout. Flying home was quite relaxing once I got out of central FL. Much less busy up north. The winds were really rocking at home (14 gusting to 26) so my approach to land was exciting. I turned base for runway 20 and could feel a massive sinking feeling. I started putting on hefty amounts of power just as the terrain alerting system said "sink rate - sink rate". I wasn't looking at the instruments at the time, just looking out the window. But after researching when those alerts are triggered, I must have had a ~1500 ft/min descent going at the time. That was one serious tailwind. But I quickly flew out of it and wrestled the airp...

I had the privilege of giving a "first flight" to my niece Addison yesterday. I picked up her and her Dad from Atlanta and brought them back to Rock Hill to visit for a few days. The weather was perfect and KLZU was a nice airport to fly into. She seemed to really enjoy it, and did a great job using the headset - quite impressive for a 3 year old! She brought along some "pixie dust" she said was needed for the airplane to fly. Before we boarded she put a little on the wing and kept the rest in a pouch hanging from her neck. It must have really worked because the airplane seemed quite happy to fly! This was also my first flight with the Zulu 2 headset . I liked it enough that it will be definitely be replacing my Bose headset from now on.

Made a flight to pick up my wife down in FL today. She managed to catch my landing on the short strip at Cedar Key:

With the airplane out of the shop I took it out for a test flight. She was performing strong and did well, so that's good news. I also experimented with my NFlightCam on this flight. I managed to not mount it rigidly enough, so there's more shake than there should be. I also forgot the adapter cables to patch into the intercom, so that will have to wait for next time (when I have a large memory card too). Here's the takeoff from today:

They found the engine ran really rough on just the right magneto and that EGT#1 went blank. They took it apart a bit to test the leads and the plugs but found no issues. Put it back together again and it ran great. So the thinking is that taking it apart knocked a bit of lead or other contaminent out that was causing the issue. We also found that we have fine wire spark plugs and plan to replace them with Tempest massives, due to this . The Platinum Aviation blog has some great spark plug info here too.

I flew the plane on the 11th and halfway through the flight we started getting what I assume were backfires, about 1/sec. They were very minor "stumbles" with a pop sound. This was after flying LOP at that same altitude for about 10m. Occasionally there would be a slight stumble with no pop sound. Power settings changes and changing to a richer mixture did not seem to help. After getting around 2000' AGL no more issues occurred for the rest of the flight to landing. Tested the fuel tanks for water again after landing, found no issues. Flew it again on the 23rd and had no troubles until nearly leveling off at 4,500'. The mag check on the ground showed no issues but as I hit 4,400' I felt the first stumble and as I leveled off and started to go LOP the backfires started up pretty abundantly. I didn't actually make it all the way to LOP before it started and so I decided to try ROP. Left it there momentarily as I started to turn back to KUZA to land. I swapped fu...

I ordered a wooden SR22 model a few months ago, and received it this week. I'm quite happy with it - seems nicely proportioned and pretty sturdy (as long as I can keep it away from the little ones). I plan to get a wall mount for it since I don't have a good bit of available desk space.