7/13/11-Last Day in Arlington

I got weathered out today-so I got some business settled on the plane and am preparing to get back to Michigan tomorrow morning. N449MF has about (12) hours on it's Hobbs meter as of today. The plane will spend the next 5-6 weeks here in Arlington finishing up some minor items, getting flown another (20) hours by another pilot (Alan Negrin), and getting an oil change at (25)hours. It will go into paint with about (32) hours on the clock and when it comes out of paint I plan on coming back out to Washington, finishing up the (40) hour FAA initial requirement and then flying it home. All of this is dependent on my school schedule. It is going to be really close to see if they can finish while I'm still on break.

7/12/11-Day Two of Flying

I got 6.9 hours on the plane today-that is a lot of time in a spam can! But it needs to be done to satisfy the FAA requirements before we can take it out of unpopulated areas.

Had some clouds today so we had to spend some time VFR on top of the cloud layers

This little island is the farthest Northwest point of the continental US (excluding Alaska). Go across the channel and you're in Canada

151 knots ground speed converts to 173.8 mph-not too shabby!

How flying in the mountains looks on the GPS

How the mountains look from outside the window

7/11/11-First Flights

The damn thing actually flies! We put about five hours on it today. For about the next 25-30 hours we're going to be getting the engine broken in correctly. We basically have to run it between 75-85% of full power while watching the cylinder head and exhaust gas temperatures to insure that the rings seat in correctly. Once the oil consumption begins to stabilize that's when we'll know that the rings have seated. Not many pictures of this momentous occasion because I was actually busy flying and paying attention to the engine gauges. Maybe when we get to setting up the autopilot I can take some more pictures.

View outside over the nose during a climb. Notice the glareshield that goes on top of the panel is missing. We'll add that later.

View of the panel-We're at a little over 3500' in this shot. Notice the big hole in the middle of the panel-that is where the back-up attitude indicator goes-we had to send it back to the manufacturer to get replaced-the first one was "toast".

7/8, 7/9 & 7/10

Not able to do much on the plane with the airshow going on. Here are some pictures from the show.

B-25 "Mitchell" bomber-restored by some folks in Arizona-only took them 18 years!

Nicely restored DC-3.

T6-Texan. God I love the way those big radial engines sound when they're running!

7/7/11-Day 14

Today was spent putting all of the inspection covers and cowlings back onto the plane and doing an official weight and balance calculation. The plane weighs 1432 pounds without gas. The maximum gross take off weight that the plane can weigh is 2350 pounds. That leaves a useful load of 918 pounds. Subtract 300 pounds for 50 gallons of gas and you have a load of 618 pounds of people and stuff. Should be able to haul my fat butt with no problem!

7/6/11-Day 13

The plane now has an airworthiness certificate! The FAA DAR (Designated Airworthiness Representative) came in about 2:00 pm this afternoon and by 4:30 we had all the paperwork needed to begin to fly. It will take a couple of days to get it buttoned back up and with the airshow going on this week we won't be able to fly until early next week.

Steve got all the paperwork in order, inspected the plane and signed us off!

I needed this paperwork to be legal. The feds are happy! We are legit!

I needed this paperwork too.

The flight testing will be postponed until these guys finish up later on this week.

7/5/11-Day 12

Not much been going on here over the last couple of days because of the Fourth of July Holiday weekend. We had some great weather so I got to fly to get up to speed on my tailwheel endorsement. Today I was working on some minor fix-ups getting ready for the FAA airworthiness inspection tomorrow. Assuming that goes OK then we can button the plane back up again and get her ready for some test flights. I'll be meeting with the painter later on in the week to finalize the paint scheme for the airplane. There is an airshow this week at the Arlington airport so I won't be able to test fly it until next week, probably Tuesday.

7/1/11-Taxi Day! (Day 11 of the build)

Well we did it! N449MF is under it's own power. We taxied in the late afternoon. Most everything works as promised. We have some fixes to take care of next week as we prepare to go for our FAA inspection and our airworthiness certificate and then we need to fly for (40) hours to work out the kinks! Should be fun!

Electrons are flowing!

The interior gets buttoned up

The crew minus my son Eric. From the left to right is Joe, Justin, Ed, Mike, Ben, and Devin.

Pushing the plane out of the hangar for the first engine start

She started right up! The cowling is off to check for leaks.

How she looked when we did the taxi-RH view

LH view