Pilot Mike’s Weblog

I had been reluctant for years, but my wife and I finally “had it” with paying Comcast for our cable TV bill. It was a huge hassle calling them up every 6 months and playing the “I don’t want to pay full price for your service so I’m going to threaten to disconnect so they give us another 6 months on a promo rate” game. Face it folks, cable is expensive. We can get in an extra XC flight in the DA40XL by ditching the cable service for one year!

My wife and I don’t really watch too much TV anyway but if I was going to ditch my cable, it was going to not be without a few caveats.

Read all about our new TV setup after the jump…
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The family and I took a trip up to Omaha on Thanksgiving Day in the Diamond DA40XL. Weather was forecasted to be good, however, there was some warmer air aloft and I had some concerns of visibility due to the recent snow fall to our north (colder ground temperatures). The issue was that the Blair airport had no published instrument approaches. We decided to proceed with the flight as visibility was good (10+ miles), there were no icing concerns, and if we could not get VFR into Blaire, we’d go to Omaha International as our alternate. We’d also watch the XM Weather close on the flight up to see if the weather closed in on us en-route.

Read all the details after the jump.
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Last weekend I finally upgraded my old BlackBerry 7100t to the new BlackBerry Curve (aka: 8320) on T-Mobile. It had been almost 3 years since I upgraded my cell phone (once I decide on something I typically stick with it for a while) and the 7100t performed pretty well, however, I was ready for an upgrade. I have been waiting for this device for almost 4 months and was very happy when T-Mobile decided to release it a few days earlier than expected. Although I was not the first one I know to procure the device, I’ve been pretty happy with the performance of my new BlackBerry.

Read all the details after the jump.
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A lot of you have been emailing me and are interested in my Robinson R22 cost calculations that I mentioned in this post. I came up with this spreadsheet (posted as a JPEG file below) after looking at lots of new and used Robinson R22s and concluded that if you have the appropriate cash flow, it can be cheaper to buy a new Robinson R22 for initial helicopter training and fly it for 5 years vs renting. I’d welcome your comments on my cost estimations.

Find out all the details after the jump.

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This past weekend I had the chance to use my shiny new VFR/IFR checkout in the new Diamond DA40XL on an overnight cross country flight to Iowa with my family (minus the dogs). Get the details of the flight including lessons learned after the jump.

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Today I had my first flight and VFR portion of my checkout in N793US, a 2007 Diamond DA40 XL. I plan to post an in-depth review of the airplane after I complete my IFR checkout and do a XC flight back to Iowa next weekend. In advance of a more detailed write-up, I want to say that this was the most enjoyable flight in an airplane I have ever experienced!!! I’ve got time in various Cessna models, Piper models as well as a few others and this airplane was awesome to fly! It is a very light weight and fast airplane that would be a good transition to some of the faster, and more complex singles out there — however, you won’t find better fuel efficiency!

I hope KCAC has more of these planes on order because these composite airplane manufactures are on to something with their light weight, fuel efficient and technically advanced aircraft!

More to come…