Left the airport vicinity
When the sun came up this morning, it was obviously going to be a perfect flying day. I decided to fly in the morning rather than risk the weather later on.
I got down to the hangar, put the cowl back on, and got her ready to go. It was a very cold morning. The canopy started to fog up a little when I got inside.
Run-up went great this time. Tower indicated a 737 was going to do first flight in a few minutes, so I lined up for departure and took off. I forgot to turn on the transponder, but luckily I set up the feed from the GPS last night, so it automatically flipped on. Cool!!
I flew Southeast from Renton climbing up to 4500′ once I passed Lake Youngs. I kept the power at 25″/2500 rpm in order to facilitate breaking in the engine. I cruised south a ways to almost Enumclaw. At some point I said to myself, “Relax, everything’s working great.” I took a camera up and snapped a few shots: Mount Rainier, the Olympics with Seattle off to the right, and Tiger Mountain.
I turned north and went between Squawk and Tiger mountains. I tried out the autopilot for a while. Works great, although I don’t think it’s receiving the feed from the GPS yet. I probably have to fix a few settings.
My plan was to go up the Snohomish River valley, but it was completely covered in fog. I started heading toward North Bend, but it got a little bit rough with the turbulent wind off the mountain tops.
I dinked around a bit and then headed in over Lake Sammamish. I definitely like the SE approach to Renton better. Newcastle is fairly high up.
I still had too much energy on final. And it seemed like the idle was set too high. She eventually drifted down and I turned off by mid-field. It’s nice to have 5000′ to work with.
I also started working on graphing some of the output from the AFS engine monitor. Check it out here.