At 9.30pm on Friday 28th May, the engine on N131JF fired up first time (as ever) and ran like a watch in the hangar at Lancaster, following a pre-oiling using the J&S Aviation home-built pre-oiling kit.
The plane had been sleeping since last August, after which time work committments (up to 3 weeks per month in California) had resulted in my being too busy to fly. The Annual expired in December, and my Biennial Flight Review expired at the end of January, which meant I had to complete the annual and get my BFR out of the way also.
The annual was the usual non-event, and the BFR was pretty uneventful, although Gerhard decided to improve our amusement level by having me do soft-field landings and takeoffs at Kittyhawk, a grass field just west of McKinney. Of course, I never do this sort of thing in the Long-EZ, but it was fun to find out that I had not actually forgotten how to do a landing in a C-150 carrying 40 degrees of flaps...
After completion of the BFR, it was back to Lancaster on Memorial Day to actually pull out the plane. I did some pattern work to get current on landings, but it was interesting how within 5 minutes I felt at one with the plane once more.
We flew to a couple of local airports on Memorial Day to shake the rust off the plane and the pilot. All of the airports were only one step above dead as a doornail, everybody seemed to be either clustered around the swimming pool or down at the lake.
On the way back to Lancaster via McKinney the McKinney tower informed me that my transponder was producing erroneous readouts. It was oscillating between 0606 and 7777. Since this transponder is older than the Ark and is due to be replaced in the next month, this was not a fundamental issue. Yet more impetus to get the avionics upgrade done (see next posting).