Just flew in from the coast, and boy are my arms tired!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Seriously. I delivered a small plane from the Northeast to its new owner in Texas this weekend. The controls were slightly out of rig, and it wanted to bank right the whole way home. With no autopilot it meant holding a slight left pressure on the yoke to keep things level. Every time you let go to fiddle with charts or radios it would start turning to the right. I joked to my companions that being from “up nawth”, it wasn’t thrilled about moving to Texas and was trying to go back home.:stuck_out_tongue:

Mundane I know, but it was a fun weekend. For the pilots, it was a really well-kept old Cherokee 180, with 2 VORs and an ADF. (I brought a handheld GPS to “help” with the navigation tasks). Due to almost constant headwinds, it took 14 hours in the air to get back to the DFW area. At one point over Indiana, our groundspeed was only 60 knots (TAS was 118 knots). I actually got to watch traffic on the highway below outrunning me. :rolleyes:

If anyone’s still reading, here’s a pic of the old panel, and one of the Mississippi River as we crossed into Kentucky.

Keeping my fingers crossed; the owner’s asked if I can deliver one from the PNW that he’s negotiating for. Haven’t been to Seattle in years and could use a little fresh seafood.

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Very cool. Too bad about the controls being out of rig, that’s ok on a short flight but it gets old really fast on a long one. Did it have a fixed trim tab on one of the ailerons? A quick tweak of that on the ground might have made it nicer to fly. I’ve done very little flying in low wing Piper aircraft, but I’ve always quite liked how they feel.

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Not a pilot, though I love flying and have been up in others’ GA aircraft, but the rental truck I drove to Texas in from California had the worst front end of any vehicle I’ve ever driven. It shimmied with ± 4 inches of feedback through the steering wheel at highway speeds, or as close to those as it could get. You literally had to keep sawing your hands back and forth on the wheel to keep it tracking straight, which we did. For ~1700 miles.

At one point in the journey, I had to drive our regular car, which we were towing behind us. I must have s-turned that car for the first two-three miles down the highway until I got out of the habit. No idea what the drivers behind me must have thought…

So, I feel your pain. That had to have been miserable, even thought the worst day flying is better than just about any other day out there.