Mike’s wife Georgina makes all the T-Shirts for Vans and also does custom embroidery with her custom Brother embroidery machine. I couldn’t resist getting a custom tee shirt done for me while I was there.

Notice how I said the transition training wraps up at Vernonia? Yes there is a lot more flying to do before I am ready to fly off into the sunset with Tango Lima Lima. Over the last three days I picked up 10 hours of RV flying time, learned a number of new skills and was refreshed on many I had let rust up. I am getting close to managing a proper RVA landing but still haven’t got it yet. To get there I am going to have to fly many more hours (in the 701) and get back into the spot I was in 2007 when I flew a lot more. I did pretty good on the upper air work, take-off weren’t too bad once I quit fisting the stick and held it with my thumb and forefinger. The circuit had its good and bad moments. Mike flies what I first thought was a real tight circuit but it’s really by the book and everyone who was training in 172s at the airport flies long and wide bomber circuits. What was amusing is that as soon as we got in the circuit doing stop and goes, everyone else tightened up their circuits to keep in sync with us. Mike chuckles. So with this RV aircraft, if you don’t hit the numbers (airspeed, rpm, altitude) as effectively as possible, the rest of the circuit gets squished up and you run out of time (get too far out on downwind leg or too far on base leg) All of these situations can get you into a difficult spot.

I think that its easy to get tricked into thinking that this aircraft has very docile and easy to manage flight characteristics for low time pilots. The company literature might make you come to that conclusion “It’s so easy to fly that low time pilots can make a quick and painless transition”. Mike assured me that the RV9A is same aircraft to land, just does it 10 mph slower than the RV6A we were practicing in.

Flying in the coastal hills and mountains has been a real change for this flatland flyer. I was starting to get my bearings by the end of this session and figured out the local features so at least I had a rough idea of where we were most of the time.

I finished for the day, Carl gets the 7 ready to go. I was totally soaked as Mike worked me hard in the circuit (plus it was in the mid 80’s, probably 90’s in the cabin)

All that confession aside, this morning we met up the Van’s man himself at the fuel stop in Scappoose. Richard (Van) VanGrunsven and another staffer were flying up for the Arlington Airshow and stopped for fuel in the RV10A. It seems the starter pad had worked its way loose over time and the starter was unable to engage the ring gear when they tried to restart after fuel up. It was unfortunate for them but I enjoyed the chance to go over and help them get the lower cowling back on after tightening up starter bolts. Van is such a nice gentleman.

Tomorrow its back to Calgary and then the drive home. Its been a very good experience and will pay off big time.