Pre-Race Travels

Teresa took the plane over to Montauk, New York across Long Island Sound and gave the avionics a live test in real-time navigation. Although the bug settings seemed to match, the Century autopilot did have one apparently un-commanded course deviation but was quickly corrected and performed flawlessly throughout the flight. The powerplant purred effortlessly for the fast trip across the sound.

Today both Teresa and Denise took the plane up for a run to test some altitude performance. Since the air race will take place in Arizona, right out of the gate, the team will have a large altitude change quickly to top the mountains while heading East. They have purposely grounded the Wheel Pants for the race and did not handicap with them so as to slow the plane down just a tad and save the extra weight. As a fun aside, Teresa and Denise did a fly-over of the house. Due to heavy tree-cover we used colored smoke flares to aid the pilots as they circled overhead.Nothing wrong with having a little fun practicing search and rescue techniques while training for air race right?

- editor-

Pic: Teresa landing at Montauk - New York's most Eastern airport.
 Photo credit: S.Greenstein