Handicap flight confirmed!

Just received confirmation that the data from our handicap flight was acceptable, so we won't have to refly it. We won't know our handicap speed until race time, but this is the speed we're going to be trying to beat by as big a margin as possible by planning our flying time and altitudes to find the best tailwinds we can. Based on previous years, it's going to be about 143 knots, which is about 165 miles per hour.

Handicap flight photos

Here are some photos from the handicap flight.

Mary and Alison strategizing

A small complication. Alison discovered straw and twigs for a birds nest in the engine. You can see the debris that was cleaned out on the ground.

If you look closely, a potential suspect for the birds nest is sitting on the tip of the propeller of a nearby plane.

Taking off for the flight.

And they are back after a successful flight ( at least we hope it will be acceptable to the handicap team)

Handicap flight

We have been waiting to complete our handicap flight with our handicap pilot Mary Wunder, before the May 15 deadline, but the weather has not been cooperating. In order to complete the flight, the winds need to be very light, and the cloud deck high enough to climb to 6000 feet density altitude in visual conditions. This weekend is the deadline, and a big storm was predicted to come in by Saturday afternoon into Sunday, but there was a small window of calm weather early Saturday morning. So Linda flew Mary over to South Jersey Regional (KVAY) at 8am on Saturday morning, which is where N222VW lives.

We were a little late starting the handicap flight, because during the pre-flight inspection I noticed a couple pieces of grass protruding from the the belly of the airplane at the cowl flap. We reached in and pulled out even more grass, and when we took the cowl covers off we found that there was probably a bucket full of grass in there, probably a bird trying to start a nest! We pull it all out and cleaned it up, put the cover back over the engine, and we were ready to go.

Mary and I took off and climbed to the required altitude to the Southeast of Philadelphia, then flew a box consisting of 5 minutes East, then 5 minutes South, then 5 minutes West, then 5 minutes East. The plane had been cleared of all extraneous items, and we flew the box at maximum power with the autopilot. Mary took speed readings throughout, and we also had a Bad Elf GPS tracker with us. The data will be submitted to Race Central and if it meets data consistency requirements it will be used to calculate our handicap. This is the speed against which our race performance will be measured, and that will be used to calculate our final score.

It was a nice flight, and afterwards we had breakfast together in the Runway Cafe. What a nice start to the day!