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This time of year you need to take advantage of good days of weather whenever they present themselves. Wednesday morning I did a scheduled check ride in the Cessna Citation II business jet, and it was such a beautiful day that I took some comp time and headed to the hangar for the afternoon.

I did a quick flight to heat up the oil, then changed the oil and filter. I used the Avery Tools oil filter drain kit to drain the oil out of the oil filter before I removed it. It worked slick as you know what. I hardly dropped a drop of oil when I pulled the oil filter off the back of the engine. This tool is a keeper.

I ran out of time, so I didn't get the cowling back on the aircraft on Wednesday, so I attached that Saturday afternoon. I discovered to my great dismay that a rivet had pulled out of the fibreglas on the transition from the upper cowling to the plenum chamber. I made a temporary repair, but I need to come up with a better fix.

After fixing the pulled rivet, I went flying. I had planned to do a long glide performance flight, to gather descent data at idle, to compare to the results with the engine shutdown. But, I was tired after fighting with the cowling repair, and didn't have the energy required to do an hour and a half of accurate flight testing. So, I ditched that plan, and instead I flew down to Brockville for a circuit, then up to Ottawa for two practice instrument approaches. It had been over 15 years since I last flew a localizer back course (BC) approach with a lowly Course Deviation Indicator (CDI), so this was a good training exercise. All the aircraft I have flown IFR in the last 15 years have been fitted with Horizontal Situation Indicators (HSI). With an HSI, on BC approach, the track bar shows lateral deviation in a conventional sense, but with a CDI, the deviations are reversed, which really messes with your head.

Terry is recovering reasonably well from her surgery. She had her sutures removed on Thursday, and the incision is healing very nicely. She had quite a bit of pain on Tuesday and Wednesday, which was discouraging. But, the nurse who removed the sutures on Thursday gave us some excellent recommendations on what she should do differently to avoid the postures that were triggering the pain. Now that we have a better idea on what is triggering the pain, she has been able to avoid it for the most part. We are encouraged.