All,

Merry Christmas to all and Happy New years!  Had some great fun this past month with Britt.  We took the C-182RG from Edwards and flew some ILS approaches at Plant 42.  Britt was in a bad  “need for speed” mood and needed to get airborne again.  We did some air work north of the airfield then dropped in for the approach work.  The C-182 is a fast aircraft for its class and very slippery ( hard to get it to slow down) as both of us worked hard to keep from tearing off the gear and flaps.  After the landings (Britt’s first in a couple of years was great!) we headed back to Edwards on the
Lancaster recovery.  This was a blast cause it’s a low level recovery (500 ft agl) on the desert floor to stay under the R -4800 complex airspace.  Again we tested how fast the little bugger would go and had no complaints.  You push the nose over to get to 500 agl from 5000 and 150 kts was easy.  The air field was closed and the weather was perfect (Sunday) so we elected to take a tour of Rocket Ridge east of the Rogers dry lake bed (low level again!). Attached are some pictures.  It was spectacular!  We finished up the day with some overheads and I stole the last pattern with a nice closed pull at max speed off the deck…how sweet it was!

Both of us are looking forward to flying the new GS100 C-172 that just arrived.  We got a tour of the sucker before we flew.  It is sweeet!. Brand new leather interior and the Garmon GS1000 avionics are to die for. All glass cockpit!! Two big color MDU screens with every bell and whistle to include internet access though the XM satellite (go figure?) for weather and runway conditions ect ect.  Even has TCAS.  Full digital autopilot and FCS that will fly approaches automatically.  Only problem is that there is so much stuff its easy to loose SA just playing with the “video game” gismos.

Till next time.  Merry Christmas all!

Reed