Florida to Seattle: It's Getting Close
Posted Thursday, May 26, 2022
The departure date for this grand biplane flight is coming up quickly, and I'm now in the mode of Doing All the Things to get ready for it. All the long lead-time stuff has been ordered, and has arrived (mostly the flight helmets). I've got the box which is slowly but surely accumulating all the stuff I think I'm going to take, and which I won't need in the mean time. All the big things (the flight out to Florida, the Airbnb, the rental car) were arranged and paid for long ago.
One of the problems I noticed when I was out to see the plane in March was that it didn't have a checklist. I still use my checklist every time I fly the Champ, so I figured I'd take a stab at making a checklist.
This is an interesting exercise, because it forces me to think through various scenarios: what needs to be checked on the plane before I go flying? What is the engine start procedure like? What do I need to know in an emergency? So I get the practice of running through all the steps, and writing down, in a sensible order, each step. I don't know if I've got it right, but I've got enough that it's something to start with, and update when I discover I didn't get something quite right. It's also a good opportunity to play with Scribus, a free page layout program that I started using recently.
The result, as of now:
I'm sure it'll change, but thought perhaps you'd be interested to see what I put on a checklist. It's a brief reminder list rather than a manual, so it's necessarily brief. This is the right size to print on a sheet of Letter paper and fold in half, making for a nice size.
I'm also starting to eye the weather. At least here in the Pacific Northwest, the weather has been unusually cold and wet, with lots of very cloudy days, and lots of precipitation, in a time we would normally see more sunny and warm days in the lead-up to summer. I'm not complaining, it's doing good things for our drought risk later in the year, but it's a little worrying to think I might get to northern California and discover that I can't really cross the Siskyous due to low clouds.
I just checked the weather in Lakeland, and the forecast is for solid rainy and upper 80s, which is a weird combination, but at least the actual chance of precipitation isn't too high.
Another thing I've been doing is contacting the various people who will be involved, particularly the previous owner (who is very graciously letting me use his hangar until I can pick it up), and the instructor who's going to train me in the plane once I'm there.
The instructor is very important, for two reasons. The first one is that I've never been pilot in command of a Marquart Charger. I really want to get training to do that. The other reason is that my insurance isn't valid until I've had two hours of training in the plane. I doubt I'll be satisfied with just two hours of training, but I'm hopeful that we can finish up in one day of 4-5 hours. If that's the case, I'll be able to depart a day earlier than expected.
Equally as exciting as getting to put a lot of hours on my new plane is the chance to visit a bunch of people I don't see very often, or have never met face to face. I get to visit family, and friends old and new, and how cool is that? I don't usually get down to California, particularly with covid.
This has been a bit of a random entry, but that's pretty much the state of me right now. I keep ping-ponging between different things (I have, as I wrote this entry, sent emails, checked weather, checked maps, looked up airport information, and stared into space). At least I got the checklist started, and with any luck will be able to finalize it before the trip.
Copyright © 2022 by Ian Johnston.