Category: Flying

As I wrote a week and a half ago the last time I flew the Lance the engine died on the taxiway and I flooded it and drained the battery trying to restart it. Nobody has flown it since and I wasn’t even sure if the engine would start.

Since I’m the club’s maintenance coordinator for that plane, the problem is really mine to deal with. So today I went out to the airport in the cold rain and hooked the battery up to a battery charger for 3 hours or so. Afterwards I verified that the engine started just fine, ran smoothly at full rich and leaned, and there was plenty of crank left in the battery.

There’s nothing that makes you feel more like an aircraft owner than standing in the pouring rain undoing screws with freezing fingers.

My biennial flight review was fun and pretty much uneventful until my engine quit. Fortunately it happened after we’d finished and I was pulling off the runway to taxi back to the tie down line.
Continue reading “Exciting finish to my BFR”

As we were leaving Rochester air space, I heard N2259Q on the frequency. That’s the second time I’ve heard good old 59Q in recent weeks. If you look back at my previous post where I said how many hours I have in which planes, you’ll see I have nearly 25 hours in 59Q. It was the second or third PA28-181 Archer I checked out in, but at one time it was my favourite club plane because it wasn’t so heavy on the controls as N2902S. I wrote the “for sale” page for when the club sold it. Although nobody believed that anything other than an ad in Trade-a-Plane would sell it, the eventual buyer did see he saw the web page I made first. I also flew it out to Dunkirk or Hamburg for its pre-purchase inspection, and took the prospective buyer on a turn around the pattern in it.

I wonder if it still has that faded old red and white paint job? I wonder if it’s still missing the end-caps on the landing gear struts? I hope the buyer is enjoying it. He was joking on the frequency with the controller because he was heading out to a fly-in breakfast and there was somebody else from the same airport in another plane going to the same breakfast, so they were asking about each other’s ground speeds. So it sounds like she found a good home.

Getting ready for my upcoming BFR, I was entering some flights from my PDA’s AvLogbook program to my paper logbook when I suddenly ran out of pages, and had to run out and buy a new logbook.

Looking at that old beat up logbook and the shiny new one, it’s not hard to feel the pride of all that aviation history. I maybe haven’t flown as much or gotten as many ratings as some aviation bloggers, but I feel proud of what I’ve done and the fun and hard work that old logbook represents.

First flight: 27 June 1995
Last flight: 24 Feb 2007
Total hours: 445.6
Ratings and endorsements: Private Pilot, Airplane Single Engine Land, Instrument Airplane, High Performance, Complex.
Airplanes Flown (in the approximate order I checked out in them):

N38290	PA28-161	169.8 hours
N29020	PA28-181	16.0 hours
N21065	PA28-181	6.7 hours
N2259Q	PA28-181	24.8 hours
N9105X	PA28-181	59.2 hours
PCATD	PCATD	5.2 hours
N8429Z	PA28-181	36.2 hours
N8323Y	PA28-236	65.3 hours
N43977	PA32R-300	62.4 hours