Over the Thanksgiving holiday we worked the runway a bit and smoothed it out. This made for a rather dusty takeoff.

Gotta love the wife’s way to keep herself occupied while flying IFR. While she is slightly still nervous she has come a VERY long ways and I am VERY proud of her. We think her new challenge will be to make a video of each flight we do together, I am sure the video skills will get better as time goes on. Turn up the volume… gotta love the music selection.

1 hour, July 3rd.

After putting the interior back together and adding baggage tie downs to the back of the airplane and putting many access panels back on the plane I was able to start thinking I might have a chance at first flight on July 3rd. I contacted Nick Nafsinger who owns an RV10 and has lots of experience with the 10 to perform my first flight.

The flight left out of Polly Ranch heading towards Pearland Regional. The aircraft performed well but soon showed it had an engine cooling issue. The #2 CHT hit 454F before Nick could pull back the power to 20″ MP to keep it out of the red. He landed at Pearland where I took the cowling off the engine for inspection. The engine looked great with no signs of loose fittings for fuel or oil. I decided to have Nick fly it back to Polly Ranch at a reduced power setting so I could perform the needed baffling re work to get the CHT’s down.

I looked at the engine data and other than #2 CHT reaching the 450F limit all other cylinders remained lower.