I’ve been anxious to get the RV–8 flying again for over two weeks now, but on the the only good weather days were always during the week, and I had major conflicts on each of those days. But yesterday, everything finally came together - the weather was quite good, and I was able to juggle my work schedule so I could take some time off.

It was fairly cool, about –10 deg C (14 deg F), so I preheated the engine for a long time to avoid the need for a long ground run. The engine behaved perfectly during the hour long flight. I spent most of the time at 75% power, testing the autopilot. While the aircraft was down I had sent the Trio Pro Pilot autopilot in for a software upgrade, as Trio had told me that they had improved the altitude hold performance in turns, which was my one major performance complaint. Before, it would lose up to 200 ft during turns with more than 15 deg of bank. Now, you can see the autopilot start to react by raising the nose as soon as the altitude starts to decrease, and it does a much better job of holding altitude. Most turns it kept the altitude within 50 ft of the original altitude.

I discovered a problem with my round dial, analog altimeter. We’re in the midst of a high pressure area, and I had to increase the altimeter setting to about 30.20 to get the altimeters to read field elevation. The altimeter setting knob became much harder to rotate as I tried to increase it through 30.00, and the knob unscrewed from the shaft (it is secured with a jam nut). Something is going on inside the altimeter, and I’ll need to get it sorted out before I fly IFR again.

I finished the flight with two touch and go landings, and a full stop.