Posted Sunday, June 5, 2022
For the moment, at least, my aspiration to fly my airplane from Florida to Seattle has been dashed. The instructor I'd lined up nixed it, and ultimately I can't fault his logic.
When this last weekend was cancelled due to the tropical storm that flooded Miami, we rescheduled for next weekend. Then the forecast for next weekend was for high enough winds that neither of us wanted to fly in it. As he thought about it, the instructor realized that there was no practical way to train me in Florida: what I didn't realize is that Florida weather becomes much less amenable to flying starting in June. I was so concentrated on the banks of clouds I'd have to fight in Seattle that it never occurred to me that summer would not be good flying weather in Florida.
So, the trip is cancelled.
It's not the end, of course. I'm looking at other ways of solving the problem, but they definitely put me on my back foot for the moment. It's pretty distressing to learn that this plan I've had going for months, all the delayed gratification of buying an awesome new plane and not being able to fly it, is just going to keep stretching into an unforeseeable future.
One of the things I must figure out, probably the most pivotal factor in this multivariate equation I'm juggling, is what my insurance company requires. I know what they say they require, but now I need to figure out how flexible they are with that. They claim to need me to take 2 hours of transition training with an instructor who has a fairly achievable number of hours in general, and in taildraggers in particular, but the hard one is they want 25 hours in type; I need to find an instructor who has 25 hours or more in a Marquart Charger. Even among biplane afficionadoes, the Marquart Charger is a relatively unknown model. There are perhaps 100 flying in the whole world. It's a requirement which probably makes sense on some actuarial table, but shows little understanding of the real world.
So my next job is to figure out what I can substitute for this very specific requirement. If I do some transition training in a Pitts biplane, is that good enough? It should be. If I find an instructor who meets all their numbers, but in a Starduster Too (which is functionally the same thing as a Charger in most important ways), is that good enough? If I find a ferry pilot who's willing to take me along, can that count as transition training?
The requirements of aviation insurance are weird.
The new plan is to find someone to ferry the plane out of Florida, probably to the southwest. There, I'd meet up with the plane and find training in a climate that's not going through a monsoon season (and is hopefully not just on fire for the whole summer).
I can't say I'm happy about this outcome. But I'm also not crushed, and the idea of skipping 95° F and 95% humidity is not making me sad.
The trip may be cancelled, but the story isn't over. It just changes shape a bit.
Copyright © 2022 by Ian Johnston.