Go sweepstakes racer, go!
June 23, 2008 by Ian J. Twombly, Associate Editor
A speed demon it is not. I flew 208GG from the home base at Frederick, Maryland, to Osage Beach, Missouri, last Thursday to display the airplane at the cherokee owners fly-in.
Well, I tried to at least. After battling headwinds the entire way, I had to stop short in St. Louis to wait out some nasty weather.
The long trip was a great opportunity to fly the bird IFR with the new panel. Wow. What a panel. Between the Garmin 430s, the Aspen EFD, the Avidyne Ex500 with weather and traffic, and the S-Tec Fifty Five X autopilot, the 8 hours seemed to melt away.
I’ll have more details about numbers and impressions in this week’s post on the sweepstakes homepage, but here are some photos in the meantime. From top to bottom it goes: nifty weather, confirmation of painful speeds (before you think 107 isn’t too bad, look again. It’s in MPH), and flooding just north of St. Louis.
Tags: Ian Twombly
June 25th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
Hey, at least you had it cool. We flew from FDK to St. Louis the Sunday after the Fly-in and never saw a temp below 25* C once we got past WV. We had about 20k of headwind. That was a long, hot day.
January 26th, 2010 at 3:34 am
How long do you spend a day coming up with stuff like this?