| 2007/06/22 Flight to Tiger (N58) by Fernley in Nevada | |
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2007-06-22 23:32
by Merlin
in Flying, Nflying
Since I had a track day close to Reno, I made plans to fly to the track instead of driving there (thanks to Samer from Tailored Relocation Services for trucking my car there).
The flight to Tiger was uneventful. I climbed a bit high above Tahoe due to winds past 25knots, which means more than 50knots over the mountain ridge, and possible downdrafts on the other side. Anyway, we were high enough not to have to worry about any of this, and got over 200knots (240mph) of ground speed on the way down. Landing was a bit tough due to a pretty mighty crosswind, but we got down ok. Once on a ground, though, I had a hard time finding tiedowns, so I ended up shutting the plane down, and it's only later that the cab driver drove us around the airfield and we found one set of tiedowns. The funny part comes in then; I was not able to restart the plane due to vapour lock, so we ended up using the cab to toe it to the tiedown spot :)
On the way back, I was first a bit apprehensive due to the 20knot+ crosswindws that we had been getting the previous day, but in the end, we got lucky: the next day had almost no winds in the valley that the airport was in (at altitude, it was a different matter though). Just to make things interesting, the plane's battery died when I tried to crank it. Luckily, I was able to get the semi private airport's owner's son over, and he very nicely helded us out with a nascar high amperage charger. It wasn't meant for airplane use, so it didn't have the ground power receptacle, but after taking a couple of panesl apart in the plane, I was able to hook it up directly to the battery. Turns out that it didn't charge the battery at all, but it had enough amperge to allow for the plane to start and for us to get out of there (thanks Jeremy). Once in the air, I went towards Reno to pick up some altitude before crossing the pointy bits: I was worrying about the headwinds, probably in combination with some downdrafts that gave us a resulting 90knots of ground speed in level flight instead of the normal 150knots. I was happy to have a powerful plane at that time. Despite the winds, in a few places, we picked up some nice updrafts of 2000ft per minute. This came in pretty handy because climbing was otherwise pretty excruciatingly slow. And here's a link to see many other pictures of the flight, including Tahoe from the sky |
