I won’t lie to you and pretend this was the first time I flew my airplane, our good friend Dave Bertram gave me that honor awhile back… but I wasn’t a “real” pilot back then and… ahem… the airplane didn’t have many hours on it, if you know what I mean, so I was really careful with it. Today was another thing entirely. I have my license, and there’s some danger of me flying this thing solo soon, so I took a different kind of interest in our flight this evening.

For February the weather doesn’t get much nicer, sunny with mild temperatures and low surface winds. We had a dinner party to get to, so we didn’t have a bunch of time to fly, but we wanted to get out and enjoy the day a bit. Elizabeth took off and headed east and then gave me the controls. Generally she shares pretty well, but I could tell she wasn’t really digging giving me the airplane. 😉 None the less I got to play around, heading first out to Cesar’s Creek Lake, and after doing a lazy circle around it headed in the direction of Dayton Wright Brother’s Airport. We were high enough to not be a factor for their pattern, so I overflew the field and turned toward home. We were only up for 20 minutes or so, but was extremely cool to have my airplane under my control basically for the first time. I was a little surprised how heavy she is in roll, you need to really lean into her to get her to turn. Likewise she’s very, very light in pitch. Just a little pressure on the stick and you can be climbing or diving at 300 fpm, so I needed to watch that like a hawk. But she is a delight to fly, and all too soon I gave it back to Beth to enter the pattern and land.

This was also the first flight with our wing-mounted GoPro Hero2 cameras (the new version 3 came out weeks after I picked ours up). I’m working to post the video, but I’ll apologize now, I didn’t set the angle on the cockpit camera correctly, so that will look weird. But the exterior images are pretty cool.