SNF 2006

I made a quick trip to Lakeland for Sun-N-Fun 2006. It was a easy trip compared to Oshkosh last year with all it's weather delays. My route was 8A7-N52-AMG-LAL. This slight joggle from a 482 NM direct routing added a couple miles but allowed for a cheaper fuel stop at AMG ($2.90) and fewer airspace headaches. Weather was great each direction. It was 3.3 hours going down and 3.4 back.

I've been to SNF a couple times before, always as a passenger in someone else's plane (good training), and we always had to hold over Lake Parker. Not this time. I got in line behind an Arrow and went right in. Even caught it on video via the tail cam (see below). However, my luck ran out during the never-ending taxi to parking. The first sign of trouble was low fuel pressure after several minutes of ground operations (never happened before). I hit the boost pump and that fixed things temporarily. In front of the parking area (finally), the engine stumbled and quit. Brief efforts to restart failed, so I just secured everything and pushed it twenty feet to a parking spot. Vapor-lock was my diagnosis then, and the problem didn't reoccur since, so I think that was accurate.

I stayed in homebuilt camping for two nights. While the volunteers at the campsite were very helpful and friendly, the location was too far removed from the action for my taste. Next time I'll stay closer -- or maybe in a hotel!

A lot of time was spent looking and chatting. No shopping, not even a souvenir -- that's a first. I did attend three or four forums and spent some time at the Bearhawk booth looking at the quick-build and a demo plane. Even took a demo flight in N303AP, piloted by Greg King. Overall a very nice plane with good manners. Totally different rudder habits than my RV-8. I've considered taking this on as the next project, but it would be a tough transition from the RV in many ways. Don't know. Something to ponder...

Here are the video highlights of the trip down. The video quality gets a little shoddy towards the end due to compression, haze and crude on the lens. It's about 12 minutes long.