Yep, we just rolled in the door at home. There is always something new and exciting to experience when flying across the country. We did indeed sit there, engine running, at the IFR staging area on R27 for about 50min. Jeff said we were the first to roll out of area 51 this morning. Heck, I really just wanted to go exercise the system and see how it worked. The results were almost exactly as advertised. Actually much easier with way less chaos than the VFR departure. It was very quiet out there on the taxiways and runways this morning. We were about number 5 in line. ALL of the other IFR departures were coming from the north side, a couple of jets and light twins. The ground and tower controllers seemed pretty confused to see "that little red and white airplane" playing with the big boys
. As we sat there and watched only one person launch, we caught sight of some lights drop out of the soup on final. Tanya commented "There is the problem". During that 50min, they launched 5 airplanes, including us, and had three arrivals. Launching all of the five departures took a total of about 10-15min. The rest of the time looked like it was waiting for the inbound traffic. It seemed clear to us that they need to stagger the availability of the IFR STMP reservations between departures and arrivals. Anyway, it wasn't all that bad. Heck, we have waited 40+ minutes in the conga line for the VFR departure, and the sun wasn't beating down on us today. Of course, new people want to know what the oil temps were when we finally launched. 210deg, didn't bother me in the least.
Here is another one that was new to me. When you file an IFR flight plan "online" via any of the normal methods, did you know that Flight Service can't see, touch, modify, comment, or have any clue that it exists. I didn't. We had filed the night before, and wanted to make a very small simple adjustment to it. I thought that we would just call up FSS and have them tweak it a bit. Nope, no can do. It goes straight to the ARTCC as is and isn't available to FSS in any way... I found myself completely dumb struck. No biggie.
Of course what would be a XC trip without saying that some kind of onboard radar totally rocks. Since we've become quite familiar with the fact that for some reason the GRT/XM integration only most of the times works when there are a lot of data packets to deal with (like when you really want it to work), we hatched two very different plans based on if we had data in the cockpit or not. We did today, and were able to work With the weather as needed.
We did one stop, then back to 14,500' eating a big fat Subway sandwich for the easy ride home. Tanya flew most of the trip home, dodging some little buildups. Today's performance numbers were 145kts true burning 5.8-6.2gph. from 9.5k' to 14.5k'. That is what ours does all the time. Not a speed racer when conserving fuel, but nice enough to make me pinch myself. Of course it will go a whole lot faster with more fuel burn, but then we would have to come down out of the cool smooth air more often to refill the little 18gal tanks.
Looking forward to OSH next year. Time for a nap.
