2015 Year in Review

2015 Totals

Hours: I surpassed 1000 hours! TT 1048.4

ASEL: 118.6
97 Landings (97 Day), 20 Approaches
Approach ILS: 2 

Approaches Localizer:

1

Approach RNAV/GPS: 16 
Approach VOR/DME: 1 
Cross Country: 96.8 
IMC:  7.4 
Simulated Instrument: 5.9 
PIC: 118.6 
Total Time: 118.6

New Airports:9
KCDI,KVPZ,KDBQ,KLYV,KRAP,KLXN,KIXD,KHSB,KMRB

New States:6
Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas

Fun Flights:
Kayla's Foster Flight - Mid-Atlantic English Springer Spaniel Rescue (MAESSR) flight. 
Lucy Finds Her Forever Home - Mid-Atlantic English Springer Spaniel Rescue (MAESSR) flight.
BACFest Dubuque,IA - Annual get together for Baby Beech owners. Record turn out; 33 planes and 88 people.
Rapid City, SD - Cross this off of our bucket list.  We finally got to see Mt. Rushmore and Crazy Horse!
Olathe, KS - Mary and I wanted to stop in and say hello to our friends in Kansas.  Mary helped out in January taking care of their new born twin girls when they were in Ohio, so this was a great reunion with their family.

Airplane:
I went ahead and had the ADS-B added to 08Romeo. Equipment installed is a Garmin GDL88 and the FlightStream 210. This upgrade really has added to the Garmin 530W usability with flight planning. The ADS-B traffic is amazing, the weather, meh. I'll keep my XM weather subscription.
A new Alternator was required following annual. The existing Kelly quit in flight and a new Hartzel unit was ordered and installed.

Notes:

It was a strange year as Mary and I entered into our retirement. I thought I would be flying more but the weekend hops to the beach were now old news since we were living here full time. There wasn't much need to fly north with no home to go to.

 

Through the first three months up until retirement in March I had just 13 hours. Thinking my flight time would still increase, I saw a slight rise after the first quarter. New house projects became the norm and occupied most of my time. From April through the end of September I noted only 46 additional hours for a total of 59 through nine months.

 

With the house renovations completed and a fresh third class medical in hand, we decided to head west for BACFest. The group dubbed our trip BAC to BAC since a few of us decided to add on Rapid City, SD then for some members on to Colorado, for us Kansas City, so it was BACk to BACk adventures.

 

October through December was very busy, racking up an additional 59.6 hours despite being down for annual, the ADS-B install and an alternator replacement that required a VFR only day to fly back to the shop.

 

I'm not really sure what's in store for 2016. Mary and I want to travel more and we would like to attend the next BACFest in Branson, Mo. If we do make Branson we would like to visit Sandra in Plano Texas and then head south to Waco Texas and tour the shops of one of our favorite tv shows, "Fixer Upper".

 

We still have Jekyll Island, GA and Mackinac Island, MI on our list of places to visit. We love the Florida Keys and there is talk of a BAC flight to the Bahamas in the Spring. So many places to visit and explore!