Starbucks and Chic Fil A secured…time to drive to Jacksonville to check out the 337 and to get me checked out in the it.
Next stop… Jacksonville.
The job….
Ferry a Cessna 337 from Jacksonville, FL to Buenos Aires, Argentina.
It is something that I have never done before, but want to expand my pilot experiences and said I would do when the offer was made to have me do the flight. A good pilot is always learning right? Time for this old dog to learn some new tricks.
The first step, go check out the plane in Jacksonville and make sure it is in good working order and going to safely be able to complete this massive flight of a predicted nearly 6000 miles.
So off I go. Leaving Grand Rapids tonight to fly to Orlando where I will stay the night. Tomorrow morning I will drive up to Jacksonville to meet the previous owner of the aircraft for a run down on it and a familiarization flight.
The goal of this trip is to ensure the plane and I are both ready to do the trip and to identify any potential issues that need to be addressed prior to the ferry flight.
The familiarization flight is a key part of this process, because I have never flown a Cessna 337 before. Technically, the FAA says I am qualified, and I have flown multiple other multi-engine aircraft, but not one of these before. And there is no doubt that a good checkout is at least a good practice since the inline twin-engine configuration is different than that which I have flown before.
More tomorrow after I have met the plane. I must admit, I’m looking forward to the prospect of a new adventure trip. If all looks good, the bulk of the preparation will begin to get ready for a proposed launch date of May 4 from Jacksonville for 5-7 days of flying nearly 3/4 of the length of the Americas.
For now, time to ride down on Delta Airlines to Orlando via Minneapolis.
Weather is a major factor in the ability for pilots to safely and successfully conduct flights. It is the same for pilots seeking training. We all know that cancelling training flights slows down training, can result in increased training costs, and if nothing else, can just be really frustrating for a pilot working to get a rating or certificate completed.
Without a doubt, some places naturally have better weather than others. I have had many people ask me over the years where they should go to get training and I didn’t really have an answer for them when they further queried about where the weather was best for flight training. So I got curious, where should a pilot go to minimize the effect of weather on their training schedule? The aviation dork in me just knew there was a way I could break this down to a spreadsheet and math to get a solid answer on which I could hang my hat for recommending where the best training weather exists.
Fortunately, the NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) at their NCDC (National Climatic Data Center) which is a part of the NESDIS (National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service) [are you tired or acronyms yet?] compiles all the weather reports we commonly refer to as METARs in aviation and archives them. You can find access to this at http://www7.ncdc.noaa.gov/CDO/cdopoemain.cmd?datasetabbv=DS3505&countryabbv=&georegionabbv=&resolution=40 if you want, but I already did the hard part for you , I compared the data that is available for a period of time.
To compare the weather, I selected 44 locations around the country that either represented major regions, were larger metropolitan areas, or were places I knew that there were high densities of flight training and people would want to know about. Sorry if your home airport wasn’t selected, but I had to cut off the data compiling somewhere before my eyes crossed and my spreadsheet program got overwhelmed. Oh, I also made sure to pick places for which a reliable period of time for reports was available that compared with other locations. In this case, I compared every METAR report that had a full report (winds, ceiling, visibility, etc) from January 1, 2010 through December 31, 2014. A full 5 years of METARS for each location. Continue reading
Here is a video from in the AOPA Air Safety Institute’s Runway Safety online course….with a special appearance from Jason Blair.
Check out the full course at: http://www.aopa.org/lms/courses/runway-safety/