On Friday evening, I talked to the mechanic at HWY. He was only just then pulling my airplane in to work on. He told me of a few extra things he wanted to check in addition to repairing the coupling. We agreed that I should plan to leave it for an extra week to ensure that he had time to heal anything that he found.
Based on that, I drove the econobox to Manassas on Saturday morning. I didn’t bring my flight bag or anything else aviation related. Late this (Saturday) afternoon, just a few hours after I got to Manassas, Dude called me.
I’m done with your plane. Got the coupling taken care of. Ran a camera up the exhaust, and everything looked good, no loose baffles. The timing on one of the mags was off three degrees, so I adjusted that. I pulled, cleaned, and regapped the plugs (just done less than five hours ago at the last oil change, so that was unnecessary, but he covered all the bases). Adjusted the carburetor, mixture was way rich. Ran it up, everything good, maximum static RPM was 2290.
I want it back home. The weather on Monday morning is forecast to be ideal for flying, with just the usual ten to fifteen knot winds common this time of year. But no flight bag. So, no ipad. And I don’t own a set of paper charts. No Sentry for in-flight weather, traffic, and GPS location on the ipad that is also three hundred miles away. No backup radio. Nothing but what is in the panel.
What is in the panel is more than sufficient for VFR day flight. Program the GPS for HWY-FAK-OXFRD-TTA and immediately upon crossing OXFRD, activate the RNAV 21 approach from OZOPE. That routing avoids the Farmville and Barfoot MOAs and RDU’s Class Charlie. Follow the CDI cross-referenced with the magenta line on the GPS map screen, and there’s no getting lost and no need to speak to a soul except on CTAF.
Legally, though, I need charts. And it’s a post-maintenance flight. The wise move would be to have all my gear. So, phooey.
Grumpy 