My Cross-Country Adventure

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04 Dec 06: First Contact

I got my first look at my potential aircraft yesterday. Her current owner came and met me at my hotel and dropped off a boxful of reading material (a big fat maintenance manual among other things). We then took the train down to Princeton to retrieve her from the avionics shop where she was getting a couple things taken care of. I likened the experience to a blind date. Of course, I wanted the plane to be perfect, and of course it wasn't - there was some chipped paint here and there, but it didn't appear to be anything more than cosmetic, and in fact seemed remarkably good for being a 28 year old paint job. I did find a strobe light out - hopefully just the bulb and nothing more. The owner had warned me about some of the other squawks (i.e. minor problems with the aircraft), but those sounded worse than they appeared to me in person. Perhaps my standards are low coming from a rental background, but if this Tiger showed up in my club tomorrow, I'd certainly be flying her.

What worried me most about the initial visit was that me and the plane just wouldn't mix somehow. There are some club planes I avoid flying for no good reason other than something just feels "wrong", and I didn't want to have to try to explain backing out for such an intangible reason. As far as that goes, things turned out fine.

We flew back uneventfully - as busy as the airspace is around JFK, the controllers cleared us through VFR, directly over JFK at 5500 feet. While I did do some maneuvers, for the most part the owner did the flying. There were a couple of reasons for this, not the least of which is that flying from the right seat is probably the flying equivalent of driving in Britain. It gave me time to go through a checklist of all the avionics items on the aircraft, from the moving map GPS all the way down to jacking in some in-flight music. I also took a little time to play tourist:

Click image for larger view
New York Bay, Manhattan, and
Verrazano-Narrows Bridge 		Over JFK Airport

The pre-purchase inspection was to have been today, and had it occurred, I would have been done with all the decision making processes by now. However, a small storm blew by the coast overnight, and threatened enough rain and snow that we chose to delay until tomorrow. I got another look at the aircraft on the ground today, but spent most of it paging through what's easily a thousand pages of maintainence manuals. I've got a lot to learn...

Oh yeah, I'm filled with a combination of nervousness, anxiety, and excitement too.

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