Mooney, Mooney...

I'm working out a rough itinerary to take me westward, ultimately to California and back. Because some of the legs of this trip are likely to be longer than the flights I've made to date, I've decided to upgrade aircraft again, this time to the Mooney Bravo, a 200 knot sports car of a plane:

It's still a single piston engine, but it's supercharged and puts out 270 horse power, compared to 230 in the Skylane or 160 in the Skyhawk. It's also a low-wing design with retractable landing gear, so it's more aerodynamic. It's at least twice as fast as the Skyhawk I started with and a good 50% faster than the Skylane. It's probably going to be a little more challenging to fly, but hopefully I'm up to it.

For this plane, I'm going to try to learn proper procedures more so than I have been with the other planes. I want to handle the fuel mixture and other settings manually and learn how to keep track of manifold pressure and other data from instruments that tell you if the engine is running correctly or not. I had looked at a 2D view on the instrument panel and liked the design, but the 3D panel you see in the virtual cockpit (where you can look around), is uninspired. I'm a little spoiled from flying the Skylane which is a 3rd party add-on and looks a lot better than the default FSX planes.

This first test flight will just be a traffic pattern around the Dalton airport, with flaps at 10 degrees and gear down the whole way. I just want to see how she handles for takeoff and landing.

Flying the Bravo wasn't so bad, maybe a bit twitchier than the Cessna's. There's a trade-off for faster and more nimble in that you lose some stability. Landing the Bravo was harder than I thought it would be and my first landing was right on the corner of the runway, with at least one wheel in the grass.

You're going a little faster than in the Cessna's (75 knots versus about 60), and it's so responsive it's really easy to over-correct. I had intended a single flight but decided to touch-and-go and try another lap and another landing. Second landing was better:

This should be a good plane for my next big adventure. I'll be flying more around Dalton over the next week or two getting used to the handling before I set out for California. Tentatively I plan to fly to Huntsville, then down to New Orleans, Houston, San Antonio, El Paso and then work my way up past Meteor Crater, Arizona and on to the Grand Canyon. I'll probably stop by Vegas and then head to L.A. or maybe shoot up to Lake Tahoe, over to San Francisco and then work my way down the coast.