Friday, July 20, 2012

125 Hours

I now have 125 hours on the new engines since they were installed last August.  Not bad considering I had over a month of downtime for the panel.  Today I flew over to LVK to see Chris and the fellas at MxExpress and got an oil change and some cheap gas.  No idea why, but Livermore has now surpassed Tracy as the cheap gas destination... funny when "cheap" is $4.98 a gallon.

I'm converting over to Blackstone for analysis, I just couldn't deal with Aviations Labs... even though they had a quicker turnaround their reports suck.  I also dropped a couple quarts of Camguard in there.  The engines were installed last August, but that was also when the annual was signed off so I'm fast coming up on my next one.  I'm hoping this one will be a good barometer of what I can expect ongoing, since I've now finally got the plane up to my standards.  Everything is new, so their will be nothing to fix right?  hahaha...

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Best free pilot logbook

Why does the world need another online logbook app? Well, maybe the world doesn't, but I decided I did. I've been looking at the online pilot logbook apps for some time and even though I used one, I decided that it sucked... so recently I built my own.   It supports custom columns.. it's already mobile friendly but I'll build a native iOS version soon. I don't use Android so not sure about that. Right now I'm working on a new report, when that's done I want to add the ability for instructors to be able to add digital sigs and endorsements, then I'm going to add some weather briefing functions. It's also designed to be more fun and with a sharing component, so you can easily add photos and youtube videos and publish to Facebook, add your own custom columns, filters, etc... Why do all these tools read like an ugly boring grid?

For my logbook, I wanted to fix all that and create the best free online pilot logbook http://pilotica.com The IPhone version is IN PROGRESS

Sunday, July 1, 2012

Big gun

My hangar has a pretty big lip where the concrete meets the asphalt, and my electric Robotow struggled with getting my relatively heavy Baron over the lip.  I bought some little metal ramps but putting them down every flight is a pain... anything lighter would be fine, but my plane's empty weight is over 3300 lbs.  I gave up and bought the big gun... a gas powered tow.




I don't really need both so the Robotow is up for sale, the new one is seriously beefy and whips the Baron around like a toy.  That's more like it!