Vectors To Final

It's been a long time since I updated my blog, but we've been quite busy. We recently moved to Austin and have been settled here for about a month. Getting out here was interesting as it was the first time we've moved such a distance.  We ended up splitting it across a three day period, after having moved out of the old house (a feat in and of itself). Our family of 4 piled into the SUV, hooked up a trailer, and headed west. We stopped after ~6 hours of driving each day to sleep in a hotel. It worked out pretty well, but we were really happy to have that behind us once we were finally in the new house.  To get the Cirrus out here I enlisted the help of one of my instructors. He spent a morning getting it out to KGTU in Georgetown and I met him there to give him a lift to the commercial airport. I managed to find a community hangar to put the plane in so that it could stay out of the weather.

Just had a long weekend down in FL with the family, capped with great flights to and from.  Here's a brief moment on the way home:

We went on the trip of a lifetime out to Santa Fe to fly the L-39. Day 1 was ground school, day 2 was flight time! We did stalls, loops, max speed (~400 kts) and plenty of landings.

I'm not too far from 900 hours of total flight time, and the last few months of flying have been great. I shot a couple of fairly low approaches in IFR, made a few long cross countries, flew myself to Maine for the first trip I've made to the northeast, flown in an Eclipse jet, R44 helicopter, and a Bonanza, and even had my first seaplane lesson. I was recently recommended to take this online course to learn more about aircraft piston engines, and I really enjoyed it. In my non-flying free time I've been gaining experience in R/C aviation by building  foam board fixed wing aircraft  and flying a camera around under a  Phantom 2  quadcopter. During a recent visit up to Maine I got to combine some full scale flying with some R/C camera work.  Check out this video to see the result:

Having recently crossed the 800 total hour mark, I thought I'd write a bit about my last few months of flying.  I've done a fair number of trips back and forth to Texas, not the least of which was my last one. When the day came that I was scheduled to head home, there was a major cold front that had just rolled in the night before.  After careful preflight planning (that I re-did at least three times to double check myself) I decided I could not only make it home with plenty of safety margin, but could climb up to 15,000', don the oxygen cannula, and get all the way home in one hop at 240kts.  It worked out really well, and I landed with nearly 2 hours of fuel still in the tanks. The FIKI (Flight into Known Ice) capability of the airplane helped during the departure as it gave that much more of a safety edge as I climbed out through about 6000' of thick, cold clouds.  In general, I've expanded my weather envelope a bit recently - I feel better able to evalu...

I had the plane in the shop recently.  The goals were three-fold: Update the G1000 software, install the ESP feature, and install an ADS-B Out transponder. The first two went OK, unfortunately, the latter not so much. But let's start with the Garmin update.  I was running version 08 previously, and this upgrade brought it up to version 15.  There's various bug fixes etc in that update, but here's some of the more noticeable changes, all of which I think are nice little improvements. Terrain profile - you can now view a side-view representation of the terrain in front of you just under the Map.  Handy for mountain operations.  I noticed it only shows terrain within a few thousand feet of you, so it's boring at good cruise altitudes, but that makes sense from a design point of view, no reason to show terrain when its not a concern. ETE on PFD - the PFD used to showing bearing to next waypoint, which had little value for me and couldn't be changed.  T...

After changing from the Avidyne system to the Cirrus Perspective (G1000) system, I had to relearn an important part of owning an airplane: how to update all the data the systems use. There's even more data in the Perspective, including AOPA directory data and more charts. In this walkthrough, I make use of the Jeppesen app for Apple OS X: JDM .  It has worked well for me, though I did need to call Jeppesen when I first set this up to get my subscriptions fixed up.  They gave great customer support when I did. The process starts (optionally) by hooking up a ground power unit (GPU).  In the case of the Cirrus, you can certainly do this without it, but I tend to hook it up just to be sure.  The systems draw about 8-10amps while updating, but you won't generally have the power on for long.  One tip I've read: power up the GPU before plugging it into the plane, at least for the one I bought.  That saves the plane from seeing any power spikes that might hav...