Owning a Sportsman

Well, it's been 8 months since I'v posted about my Sportsman and I have many things to update. In a nutshell, I've been really happy with the plane. I flies great and handles beautifully at slow speed. Since this is my first airplane, I've learned what most of you owners probably already knew; you're always tinkering with it. I'll list here some of the minor things that went wrong and let you judge how common this is.

The first thing I noticed was that the landing and taxi lights were working intermittently. Not that I do a lot of night flying but it bothered me that it wasn't working right. Ed at A&P found some loose connecting terminals and a couple of hundred bucks later, things were right again. But after a few flights, it happened once more. So I looked into replacing the lights with something better, mainly some HID lights. More on that when I talk about my annual.

Next I had the database not show up on my Garmin 530W. One day the display showed no airports, no airspace, nothing. Now since the autopilot and PFD run off it, I couldn't do much in the way of navigating. I still have the 430W so no problem there, but no coupled approaches, no IFR.

It turns out the Database card was bad. How often does that happen?? Garmin got me for $75.00 for a new card. Ouch! But problem easily solved.

I few months later I had a problem with the second smaller display on the copilots side of the panel (The whole glass panel is from Advanced Flight Systems) I didn't know it at the time but the engine monitoring displays on the AF-3500 were red x-ing out and then the whole AF-3400 panel would reset and restart, claiming the backup battery needed to be replaced. No flying that day. So I checked in with Oscar at Islip Avionics (who has been great with the whole set up) and we needed to send the display back to Advanced for a processor upgrade. It seems they have seen this before. One week later and at no charge from them, the unit was back in and working.

So that takes me to the fall of '09. I basically keep my flying local, with some IFR flight plans here and there. I did make it to the Simsbury Fly-in in October. Got a lot of interest in the plane there. Not too many people seen a Sportsman, but I did meet a few who were in the process of building one and really look over my plane. Saw some other great plane there:

Also took some video with my new Canon HD Camcorder and got this great shot of my dream plane, a Grumman Widgeon coming in for a landing. Awesome sight...

So between the beginning of June till about the end of the year, I put on about 60 hours on the plane really enjoying it. Always trying to fly every week and keeping current with my IFR rating. The hardest thing has been fully utilizing the AFS and Garmin GPS for approaches. I really still need to learn more on getting the most out of the system.