After a short flight with Chris Bartels in the Cardinal on Friday night, we discovered a small oil leak that has to be checked out. Chris is home for one day before heading back to Atlanta for the start of his first real job in the right seat of a Delta Canadair RJ. The passengers will never know that the co-pilot hasn't ever flown a jet before Monday morning's flight.
Later on Friday, Mort asked me to go out for some formation and aerobatics on Saturday in the Nanchang / Yakalov CJ-6. Since I don't have another plane available at the moment, this is worth getting up early for.
We depart N14 for Ocean City, New Jersey where we will meet Marty and Phil, two other CJ owners. The air is really still and clear above the New Jersey Pine Barrens at this hour. You can see Philadelphia, Manhattan and Atlantic City from this amazing glass canopy in the CJ.
The CJ is a place that clears your mind like nothing else. Every flight starts with the same drill about use of the parachute. "Open the canopy; unlatch the harness; stand up; headset off; jump toward the center of the wing; pull the D ring." I am pretty sure that this is all for show, as I have momentarily lost consciousness in this plane three times now, and always at the exact moment that I would need to jump.
I flew down at 900' MSL to stay below the Atlantic City Class C airspace. Mort landed, since I don't have a tailwheel endorsement, and I can't see too well from the rear seat either. The CJ is a beast to land compared to the 177RG. During the approach to Ocean City, I cracked the canopy for some air, but I didn't know that Mort was about to put the smoke machine on to let Marty know that we had arrived as we made a low pass over his house. The cockpit filled with smoke, but quickly cleared.
After some breakfast, we flew about 45 minutes of close formation along the Southern NJ coast between Atlantic City and Cape May. It was early still, and the beach crowds had not become too large yet on this next to last weekend of summer. I am always glad to be making this trip by plane instead of a car and beach chair.
Marty let us know that the ceiling had come down below 3,500' as we headed back toward the Flying W, so there was not enough vertical space for any real aerial combat practice. We ran into some rain squalls forming ahead of a front pushing up from the DelMarVa peninsula. This was really good news to me, as my breakfast was not very well secured and I had no desire to be decorating the canopy with eggs and coffee. The protocol calls for puking into your own flight suit on such an occasion, so that no one has to clean the nooks and crannies after you fall out on the tarmac.
