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.
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