Flyout to Lockhart
David , Zach, and I (we all live in the same neighborhood, they are each building RV7A) met out at the Georgetown airport this morning for a short flight down to Lockhart for a hangar party/BBQ with Keith Uhls (RV7 complete) and the great RV community down there. Zach and I arrived at GTU and David was already there with breakfast tacos ready for us. That was super cool. I rented a Diamond Star DA-40 (4 seat with lots of bells and whistles) for the day.
I did a pre-flight and we all loaded up. David was in charge of navigation and radios, I flew, and Zach was in the back seat looking for traffic, and generally critiquing operations in the front seat :). It was a blast. We were joking that David had turned into my fully automated voice activated avionics stack. All frequency changes, GPS and nav inputs, ATC copies, etc., just magically happened. I think that is the first time I have had a real fully competent co-pilot that was fully engaged in some of the flight duties. Needless to say, that made the flight a lot more fun when the workload is distributed. Thanks David.
So we launched from GTU and headed out toward Taylor while David got comfortable with the radios and multiple GPSs. Then we turned south direct to Lockhart and got vectored just around the outside of the Austin class C by Austin Approach. We landed at Lockhart at about 11am. It was a very short flight of about 30-40 minutes. We parked and arrived at Keith’s hangar to find the party in full swing. We had some BBQ and looked over his recently painted RV7. It is beautiful. The guy that painted his plane is going to get a bunch more business out of having done Keith’s.
After BBQ, the rest of the day was a bunch of hopping from one hangar of RV builders to another. It is a great building community out there. I am quite envious. We (David, Zach, and myself) were in the right place at the right time to help in the complete installation of a set of wings on an RV9 under construction. All the way from wings in the cradle to insertion of the main spar, the alignment process, setting incidence, and drilling of the rear spar. We all had a hand in it. Wow, that experience was worth the whole day right there. But it just got better…
Later in the afternoon, as things started to wind down a bit and the crowds started to thin out, Keith took us each up for a ride. Zach and I had never been up in an RV. Keith took the time on each flight to really demonstrate the characteristics of the plane and give us a little stick time. He also pretty fully demonstrated the qualities of the Grand Rapids EFIS that all three of us are planning on using. He also had a mode S transponder in the plane that was displaying area traffic on the Garmin 430 GPS. I had never seen that in action. Super cool. That sure solidified my decision on whether or not to get a mode S transponder.
After the last of the rides, the sun started getting a little low in the sky. We were all a bit tired and sun burned. It was time to load up and head toward home. The return flight was just as uneventful but just as much fun. We landed back at Georgetown a little after 7pm. Total flight time for the trip was about 1.5 hours.
What a day. It was a blast. I can’t thank Keith and the RV community at Lockhart enough. It was very much a learning and motivational day for sure.
