More Flying

Starting Another Winter.... December 2011 A huge drought of updating the website here, primarily as I do short updates to Facebook on occasion so I'm lagging here. I've been doing some local flying with the weather typically overcast and gloomy. The upside is that there's been some openings to the south allowing me to escape into the sun for a little! these photos were taken the first December with a phone camera, but seemed to have come out OK...
Another Winter.... January 2011 So far, it's been fairly rainy here the in the PNW this winter, which started in November and continues. Normally, we get the big stuff in late November through January, so hopefully this will end soon, but then it's into the normal low crud through the 4th of July. Below are some pics taken in late January with a convergence zone settin up to the north of Snoqualime Valley, but fairly clear down towards Mt. Rainier. All pics were taken with my new Windows Phone 7, which seems to do a fairly good job for a smart phone.
Snoqualimie Falls on 1/22/11. This is a lot of water going over the falls today!	North end of Lake Sammamish looking east.	Looking north up the Snowualimie Valley from the Duvall area. Convergence zone is setting in around Monroe.	South on the Snoqual Valley towards Carnation. Lots of flooding and low cruddy scud.	The view towards the falls and some open sky.
The big mountain, almost free of clouds today.			Snow-covered Cascades from the Issaquah area.
Some Summer Activities Summer has been really busy wtih work, but still managed to do the usual fly-ins, including Arlington and Oshkosh. Arlington photos can be found here and the Oshkosh photos can be found here. Arlington turned out to be about normal with some nice weather eventualy working it's way in later in the week. Normally, we start getting summer weather around the Puget Sound area sometime right after the 4th of July. Oshkosh on the other hand was a whole different story, with torrential rains leading into the event, then having to deal with the after effects for the first several days of the show while things dried out. That said, it's still a lot of fun with the trip out and back being a highlight. This year, I managed to make it back in one day, departing around 0715 CDT and arriving back at Auburn aroun 1815 PDT after 11.2 hours in the airplane that day. There was also some fun formation flying that's been happening and combined with a a Coutour HD sports camera, makes some fund videos. Here's a short video from our NW Formation Clinic at Chehalis and another from a local 4-ship practice session. Way too much fun! Below are some still screen captures from the local formation practice session using the Contour camera.
It's Maintenance Time! June is the yearly condition inspection so I've been pecking away at that as time allows. I'm really trying to keep the airplane flyable and so far it's working. One of the tasks this year was to finish up the Slick Mag Service Bulletin on the cam and brush. I did the right last year, and since the left wasn't giving me problems, I let it go until this year. Below is what I found on that inspection. With 200 hours on the mag, the brush had caused a good dimple in the coil tab, so guess what? Yep, a new coil! And looking at the distributor gear arm, it was worn, so I ended up with a new distributor block assembly. Between those two parts, I was about $250 away from just getting a new mag. Sheeze...these parts are expensive. I'm also trying to fix a magnatometer problem as it's wanderign quite a bit, and it seems that it's probably been that way for a while. Otherwise, the inspection is going well.
The coil tab forced a new coil..Ouch! Getting the wedges out was a real PITA for sure.	Note the new style block at right. Supposedly that keeps the carbon build-up down. Also see the gear arm wear.

May 2010	Spring Flying Spring seems to be just an extension of winter here in the PNW with low clouds, rain and generally MVFR flying weather. I was able to get out down to the West Coast Formation Clinic in Madera, CA the first of May, which is written up on this blog entry from our EAA Chapter 1440. http://eaa1440.blogspot.com/2010/05/weekend-of-formation-flying-jim-p.html. The annual condition inspection is starting with oil change, compression check, mag timing, plug cleaning, and the firewall forward tasks. I've been running LOP on the long trips and found that for any given plug, there was a max of about three or four small lead balls, easily removed with a dental pick, and the insulators were all a nice light tan, easily cleaned. No oil, or other build up on any of the plugs so it appears things are working well, even with old fashioned Slick mags. Compression was 78/80 on all jugs so the engine seems to be healthy. I'm certainly looking forward to better weather this summer.
	The weather started off fairly nasty in the Puget Sound Area, but cleared the surther south we got.	Radome near Weed, CA, around the Shasta area. Still lots of snow!	Our flight on the way to the evening BBQ,turning on initial.	Enroute to dinner, flight of 14 RVs heading to Sierra Skypark.

 

April 2010	Winter in Seattle Every once in a while we get some nice weather during the winter here in Seattle. We've been fortunate not to have gotten all the rain we normally get, with conditions being fairly flyable for most of the winter. Whoo-hoo! We even got to attend the EAA Chapter 105 Fly-In Breakfast near Portland in February which was a nice way to spend a Saturday AM (but it' s an early start!).
	Well not really aviation related, but we did have a nice week in Cabo including some zip-lining and rappelling.	. January '10, nice flight out to Friday Harbor prior to the Olympic TFR.	Sleepy Friday Harbor on a nice Saturday AM.	Another nice view of the islands looking south at the north end of Whidbey Island	Taken from John Adam's RV-7 by his son Aaron after breakfast at Pt. Townsend in March.

24 Dec 2009	A Little Christmas Eve RV Ride Carolina was out with the boy and I had finished up Christmas present wrapping. The initial forecast was for 100' ceilings at Arlington due to fog, through noon, but it cleared early. With that, I couldn't pass up such a nice day to go fly. We get a lot of grey weather through the winter, but every once in a while, the clouds disappear, a high pressure system sits on us, and we get some really great days with no wind, and good visibility, and today was one of those days!  I departed Arlington, headed south doing a couple aileron rolls along the way, and generally checked out the snowy Cascades. Ground fog along the rivers made for some nice scenery for sure!
	Departing Arlington and looking north towards Mt. Baker	Mt. Baker	Looking south towards our other volcano	Speda Lake in the western Cascades	More mountains!
	Over Hwy 2, with Monroe in the fog.	Over Snoqualmie Valley, with Bellevue and Seattle in the distance	Snoqualmie Falls	Near Duvall, at the upper end of the fog line	Another nice view!
27 Sept 2009	Breakfast at Darrington The weather is about to turn for the worse here in the Northwest so we wanted to take advantage of the remaining decent weather. The forecast called for broken over cast by noon, but early AM wasn't looking too good for a trip to Darrington in the western Cascade Mountains, about 20 miles east of Arlington, WA. As luck would have it, but about 10:00 AM, we had 1400 overcast in the southern Puget Sound area, and better up north. Dave Parson and I headed north and found a nice big hole in the overcast near Monroe, so we were able to climb on-top at 5,000. This was a great little flight to a really scenic little airport. Darrington Muni is about 2500 x 40 and is in decent shape but with an interesting approach. Normal procedure is to land to the west on 28, but make sure you miss the mountain, over the river, miss the church on short final and be on-speed! Fun stuff for sure! The restaurant is through the gate near transient parking, down the path with the dog, past the Do-It Hardware store, and across the main road. Hey, any trip that involves a dog and a hardware store can't be all bad! Overall, this is a fun little destination for the Puget Sound.
	Heading up the valley towards Darrington	Broken overcast over Cascades	More clouds	Looking towards Paine Field	Towards the south, a little more cloud cover
	Dave Parson's RV-7 lands	Land towards the west!	On the ground with Dave and Mike Culver's Luscombe	Dave made it in	Outbound back out the valley.
20 Sept 2009	McMinnville, OR It was time for our 11th Anniversary weekend and my turn to plan. Normally, we trade off planning the anniversary weekend and we keep it a secret as long as possible. We like to do the wine-tasting thing and have been to various wine regions in CA, WA, and Australia, so I wanted to add the Willamette Valley, OR to the list. Willamette is home to at least 100 wineries and they tend to specialize in various Pinots blends. I've never been a big Pinot fan, but thought I'd give it a try. We departed about 2:00 PM Friday afternoon into perfect weather and headed south the 133 miles from Auburn to McMinnville. In stead of a 4 our car ride, the RV got us there in an hour, engine start to stop, with an Enterprise Rental waiting there at the FBO. It's a little more expensive then just driving the Accord down and back, but it basically saved us 5 or 6 hours of driving. Very cool. This was also Carolina's first trip in the RV. We ended up staying a a little B&B in Lafayette called Kelty Estates and with the wineries the host pointed out, there was no tasting fee if we said we were staying at Kelty. Works for me. The B&B overall was OK, but the Saturday AM breakfast was really outstanding! Most of the wineries are fairly small and scattered amongst about 5 smaller towns in the northern Willamette Valley, so we had about 5 chosen for the afternoon. Most were OK, but my favorite was Carlos and Julian's, kind of a back-yard operation with some interesting artwork for sale. Most wineries has one that I likes, but C&J's seemed to have a better overall selection. I think we ended up buying about 6 bottles on the trip and found that the RV handled the extra baggage just fine. On Sunday while waiting for the crud to burn off, we did manage to squeeze in a quick visit to the Evergreen Air and Space Museum, which I hadn't been to since around 2002 or so. It's changed a lot! First, there's a 747 parked in the front yard, and there's the new space museum and IMAX theater that have been added. I suspect that I'm going to have to make it back down for a longer visit in the future. We launched out for home about noon, and were back on the ground in an hour with a little headwind. Overall, a great weekend leveraging the fun of travel by RV!
	Departing Auburn with Mt. Rainer in the distance.	Over the Columbia River with Mt. Hood in the distance.	Carolina enjoying the ride.	Portland coming up.	Dobbs Winery, our first stop.
	The Four Graces Winery.	Carolina checking out the Jenney	Inside the Spruce Goose, looking aft.	The Spruce Goose is really huge!	Atlas in the Space Museum.