2023 year in review: flying

Let’s start with the high level: 128.7 hours flown, 12.9 of which were training hours flown with an instructor. 15 hours were in actual instrument conditions, and 10 hours were at night. Not bad, but could have been more. The map view is instructive too: I made it as far north as Montpelier, Vermont and as far west as Dallas, Texas.

Despite the modest number of hours, there were lots of things to highlight, both positive and negative.

My best trip of the year was, hands down, flying the girls to NYC, Niagara, and Vermont, including doing the Hudson River exclusion. It was an amazing trip, and one which wouldn’t have been at all possible without a personal airplane. Bonus points for flying into Teterboro and just missing Taylor Swift’s arrival.

In the same vein, the rapid-fire combination of going to New Orleans, rural Arkansas, and Alexandria, with returns home in between, made it possible to do a family photo shoot in New Orleans City Park, attend my cousin’s wedding, and go to my mom’s for Thanksgiving while still accomplishing all the other Thanksgiving-week things we had to do (including Erica’s departure for Romania. This was another set of trips that wouldn’t have been possible without a plane.

I made a renewed effort to get my commercial multi-engine rating, training for my commercial multi-engine rating with Brian Frederickson of Elon Aviation. I’m happy to count Brian among my friends– he’s a great guy and I learned an amazing amount from him. We hit a few obstacles along the way (more on that in a bit).

Finally, I was able to squeeze in a few desired and/or needed upgrades throughout the year. The biggest, both in time and cost, was adding two Aspen displays installed to provide redundancy in instrument flight. The safety and situational awareness improvements are significant, but it wasn’t cheap or easy.

What about the less-positive parts of the year? There were a few. I did have to miss a few trips due to maintenance, something I always hate. The plane was down for a new alternator for a couple of weeks (an adventure in itself– thanks to Tim Blount of Tim’s Aircraft Service in New Orleans for getting me fixed up!) and I had to cancel one planned checkride flight with Brian because of a broken flap bumper. The Aspen installation took an extra few weeks over the original estimate, which meant I missed a planned trip to Orlando and a couple of last-minute pop-up opportunities. The overall installation process was a bit of a mess, since my autopilot was down after the installation, meaning a lot of hand-flying back and forth for my November trips. I think it turned out OK in the end. I’ll do a longer post on the process, and what I learned, once I know for sure that everything is properly installed, but here’s a preview.

For those of you who aren’t avionics technicians, just know that the red wire shouldn’t be loose, there shouldn’t be any pink fuzz or silver shielding visible, and the whole thing looks like it was wired by a drunk one-eyed monkey wearing oven mitts. To be super clear, my shop didn’t do this; they fixed it when they found it in this condition.

The biggest aviation lowlight of the year was when I failed my oral exam for the commercial multi. I’ll be doing a longer post on the process of getting my multi once I take the actual checkride, but it’s fair to say that I didn’t adequately prepare for the oral exam and the examiner figured that out pretty quickly.

What did I learn this year? Well, let’s start with that oral exam. I learned I didn’t retain as much of the basic private-pilot-level knowledge about VFR charts and flight rules as I thought. In my partial defense, I don’t typically use that information when I’m blasting through the clouds on a cross-country flight, but that’s not an excuse. My first learning is therefore “I need to keep learning.” It’s trite, but it’s true.

Second learning: I know a lot more about the systems in my airplane as a result of doing some work on it myself and researching the maintenance issues I had this year. This knowledge is useful in troubleshooting, but also in getting the most out of the plane when I want to plan a trip.

Third learning: practicing emergency procedures is a must, as when I had my first real one-engine-inoperative (OEI) landing. The time I spent reviewing and practicing with Brian paid off big time. Knowing that I can be proficient with OEI flight, approaches, and landings is super important. I’ll be doing more of that kind of training in 2024.

Goals for 2024? Simple. Get my commercial multi; average at least one day trip down to Louisiana to see my mom each month; have a 95% dispatch rate for planned trips; continue to learn about and enjoy my Baron. Stretch goals are to attend some combination of Sun-n-Fun, the Beech Bash, and Oshkosh.