LancairTalk

Over the past few months I’ve had the airplane in the shop quite a bit. This hasn’t prevented me from taking several trips- Palm Springs, the Grand Canyon among others, but more trips to Bend than anything else. Part of it has been getting the Evade system all worked out. It didn’t go perfectly the first time (on this rev) but at the moment everything appears to be working. While my airplane was at the factory they were nice enough to touch up a number of other things.

I headed off for the Grand Canyon last week hoping that everything was working 100%. It started out that way, but on the trip I noticed a few things not working perfectly. The engine has been running great, although on my departure from Las Vegas it coughed a couple of times- I suspect it was vapor in the system since it was hot and the vapor suppress button made it go away. The other thing I noticed was that the static wick on the right side flutters quite a bit in the breeze. I touched it on the ground and it felt fine, but I suspect it has broken and I’m just not checking them the right way in my preflight. Also yet again the speed brakes won’t stay out- I’m thinking this is the 3rd time I’ve had issues with that system.

Still, none of those were a problem for a great trip. The flight down to the Grand Canyon (Kingman airport) was on the Eastern side of my normal route to Vegas. The direct path is scattered with MOAs and restricted areas so you either need to go east or west of them. I had been hoping to go up to 19,000 feet which gets me over some of the MOAs, but went lower to avoid the low-pressure for my passengers so the route was a bit longer. Still, it was easy to do it non-stop. Just go up to cruise, check the fuel prediction on landing and dial the engine back a bit until I saw enough margin to deal with potentially worse head-winds later in the flight and the right amount of safety.

After the Grand Canyon we spent 2 days in Vegas and the flight home from Las Vegas took a bit of planning. The Southern half of the route was severe-clear, but starting in Oregon there was a storm system with some possible convection. As I was heading up towards Reno I had my eye on a system hanging out over Portland with some nice red radar returns. Since Seattle was showing broken and overcast layers I had an IFR flight plan filed but was hoping to stay VFR as long as possible to dodge any cells visually. I headed up to 16,500 feet and towards Olympia (OLM) since that is the usual arrival point for IFR flights into the Seattle area. Most of Oregon was dodging various clouds at 16,500 feet and eventually as I was coming up on Portland I had to sneek up a couple hundred feet to get over a few. Since there wasn’t any traffic at my altitude and I had the Ryan and good communication with ATC I figured that was fine.

Just past Portland a nice hole was open in the clouds all the way to the ground so I took advantage and headed down. We were descending at more than 2000′/min for quite a while and I was really wishing my speed brakes would stay out. I had been hoping to level off at 6,500′ or so but wound up going lower to get under the layer. The remaining short bit back to Boeing Field was not too bad- I wasn’t anywhere close to scud running, although there was quite a bit of looking out for various bits of heavy rain and steering around them. It was the usual Seattle stuff where the rain was fairly heavy (ok, more heavy than usual for Seattle) but not too convective- not so many bumps, no lightning or anything. We came around Elliot Bay and into Boeing and pulled up to the hanger right before it started to pour at the airport.