Some of you may recall that I outed myself as a nerd a while back, by noting the fact that I grew up using Flight Simulator, and continue to do so as part of my code job. Over the years, I've met quite a number of people through the aviation community, but also as part of the sim community. One of my CFI friends is in the section of that Venn Diagram where the circles overlap, and he had some sim hardware to sell. One of our mutual friends - also in the overlapping segment - was interested in buying it, but all of it was still up in New Jersey. My CFI friend and I flew up to coordinate all of that. Unfortunately, given the weight requirements, and the size of the hardware, our friend had to drive up.
It was an incredibly cold and rather windy morning, which made getting the aircraft ready a chore, to say the least. Luckily, my brother had given me some cycling leg and arm warmers for Christmas, which I wore under a few additional layers of clothing. I was thinking that I would need to be able to strategically pull the warmers off without even messing with the other layers once the heater warmed us up at cruise. I was wrong. I just left them on the whole time.
Since the trip up to Morristown (MMU) would require flying around a whole bunch of busy airspace, we filed and flew IFR. The controllers brought us west of most of the airspace around Dulles (IAD), and then turned us back east toward Philadelphia (PHL), where we followed our route up toward MMU. I know I make that sound simple, and the flying part of it was, but the mental part was not. The cold temperature up at that altitude was tough to handle, even with the heater going full tilt. The heaters in small planes are selectively effective. My upper body was quite warm, but my left foot was pretty close to entirely numb toward the end of the flight. The wind was still pretty strong when we got up to MMU, but it wasn't unmanageable. After we parked, we set off to take care of handing hardware over, and warming ourselves back up.After getting back, we filed our flight plan to get back home and set back off that way. It wasn't too much warmer, but it was just warm enough that the flight back home wasn't as rough. Closer to HEF, the controllers vectored us right over IAD, which was a pretty cool vantage point. A few large aircraft flew under us on approach there. Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures. A few minutes later, we were back on the ground at HEF putting the plane away.
With these 4.4 hours in the books, the complex requirement for the commercial rating is complete. Only 3.4 hours left of the instrument requirement.
Hours:
Pilot in Command Cross Country (PIC XC): 0.0 - 128.8 (of 50)
Actual/Simulated Instrument (Act/Sim): 3.0 - 35.6 (of 40)
Dual Complex: 4.4 - 12.1 (of 10)
Total Time in Aircraft: 4.4 - 203.1 (of 250)
