N291DR 2.7 Flying around with my friend Sam

Today I took my friend Sam from work to fly around. He's an engineer and a big-time hobby auto mechanic person who can revive any vehicle. He took my completely dead Prius, brought it back to life, and donated it to a person in his community. He's a stupendous dude.

The oil in 1DR needed to be changed. So we went up for 2 laps around the pattern to warm things up. On takeoff, I was almost shocked by how "long" it took to take off -- I'm used to flying solo and popping off like a cork! My landings were not great: The wind was calm, and I was not used to the plane being heavy, and I was wearing a mask so I think it fooled my peripheral vision that the runway was closer. Anyway, I need to get better at my landings under different circumstances.

We changed the oil, replaced a faulty oil-drain nipple and safety wired it in.

We took off into haze, but we were able to stay away from the main glob of haze in the Coyote Valley and maintain good ground contact and a view of places to land.

We flew to Frasier Lake and did a landing for the heck of it.

We then flew to the Moss Landing plant, with Sam flying the plane and learning to handle the adverse yaw. We did a 360 around Moss Landing then went North, did 1 low pass at the Monterey Bay Academy and landed there. We had lunch.

We took off and flew along the coast to Pescadero, then cut in Easbound till we were over the quarry near Hwy 280. We orbited till we got Norcal on the phone and they cleared us through KSJC, and then we overflew the Apple spaceship and then the KSJC runway at 1500'. We had an uneventful landing and fueling at KRHV.

I used Airball to explain the relative wind to Sam, and gave him a little Airball model so he could "puppet" it while we flew and I demonstrated how I could stall the plane with the nose in a cruise attitude.

Total of 5 landings today.

N291DR 1.8 Airball flight to E16

Quick flight to E16 to try out the new Airball installation. It works; see:

  https://photos.app.goo.gl/gsUjFMFxE694hA8N7

But the display's WiFi was flakey. Got 5 landings in today.

N291DR 3.6 Attempt (!) to fly KRHV KCMA

The mission today was to visit my friend at KCMA. The Wx was quite calm, but there were some possible low clouds in between. I briefed and set out.

South of Hollister, I encountered a broken layer over the hills, and the valleys completely socked in. In particular, the IFR over the valleys meant that a lot of the intermediate airports along the way were not accessible.

I chose to fly under the broken clouds for as long as seemed safe, always keeping a valley with ranches and open fields underneath me. I kept at it for a while, but it became clear that the terrain was rising and the clouds weren't, and they seemed to stretch out for a long distance ahead. I decided to abort.

Of course, this meant a long journey back whence I came, since (again...) all the intermediate airports were socked in. This was tedious but uneventful. I chose to go to Salinas because it was a tiny bit closer than Hollister and I wanted to be done. I fueled up there, then puttered back to KRHV.

Some of my friends tell me I could probably have pressed on, given that I had lots of options. Maybe I should have? The thing is, though, shortly after the point where I turned back, I would be "bingo fuel": I would not have enough fuel to safely get back to Salinas or Holister. So what if my next waypoint, New Cuyama, was fogged in, or inaccessible? I would have had to take an out-landing in a cow pasture on one of the valleys. Which is completely something I could do and things would most likely be fine -- there would be a small risk to the plane from hitting a rock or cowpie, but nearly none to myself. But, I'd have some explaining to do. And maybe there'd be one more rancher angry about all these annoying airplanes.

Total landings -- two. One in Salinas and one in Reid-Hillview.