It was a bit of a busy week at work, trying to get caught up after the week at Oshkosh. But I did manage to escape to do proficiency flights in the King Air and Citation, so that helped improve morale. Terry is still in Wisconsin, visiting various sisters, so I took the RV-8 flying both Saturday and Sunday. Saturday I tried out recording flight test data on my small EeePC 901 - that proved to work well, once I invested the time to get a suitable version of Linux installed on it. I had been using an ancient Apple PowerBook, but its power cable is dieing, so charging it has become hit and miss.

Today I flew up to Carp for the EAA Chapter 245 Fly-In Breakfast. They had a huge turnout, even though the weather was looking a bit dodgy, and one of the electric grills was giving them grief, so I waited in line for an hour to get the excellent breakfast. There was a gusty crosswind both at Carp and Smiths Falls, so I took advantage of the opportunity for some practice stop and goes at Smiths Falls, and I used the out of wind runway at Carp.

On the way back home from Oshkosh a week ago I remarked to myself that my landings had been very nice the last few flights, and allowed myself the thought that maybe I had finally gotten on top of them. Big mistake. I paid the price for that hubris this weekend. I did several landings on Saturday, and one of them was the worst landing I have had for months. I bounced bad enough that I decided to go around from what was intended to be a full stop landing. Two other landings were safe, but not at all pretty. Only one of the four was satisfactory. Today it was quite gusty, so that gave me a small excuse. The landings were all quite tidy from a directional perspective, which is a worry in a crosswind. But I got a bit of a skip on every one, as I always had just a touch too much rate of descent at touchdown. The landing gear legs are spring steel, with no damping, so the rate of descent at touchdown must be very low to avoid the gear throwing you back in the air. Oh well - this would all be very boring if it was too easy. I'll do a bunch of landings on my next few flights. Hopefully we'll get some more crosswind too, as I need to open up the crosswind envelope a lot further.

I spent quite a bit of spare time this week reading the Operation and Installation Manual for the [Trio Pro Pilot autopilot] that I ordered at Oshkosh. I made up a list of stuff I will need to install it, and put in an order with SteinAir. I also started writing up a list of various tests I will want to perform once I get it installed. It has quite a long list of capabilites, so that leads to a very long list of tests at various weights, CGs, airspeeds, etc to confirm acceptable behaviour. And there is a also a long list of potential failure case scenarios to assess - e.g. what happens if the GPS dies when the autopilot is commanding a turn at a GPS waypoint, etc. The autopilot should ship on Monday, and I hope to install it when I do the annual inspection in September.