Heading out TONIGHT I R-44 Ferry Flight I

It's romeo.

All right.

We're kind of laid back today. This is the day before taking off on our trip. You just saw Romeo. Romeo, is he our mascot? I wouldn't call him a mascot. Here he comes. He's our motivator. He's our fun throughout the day.

He's the airport dog. A lot of airports you stop at here and there have a dog.

So if you hear the heavy panting in the background, it's Romeo. So we're getting ready to go tomorrow. And Gary, you've been doing all the planning. Yesterday, he flew with our guy from Alaska, is going to work on a cfi. So he was busy all day. I spent the whole entire day doing nothing but charging batteries, emptying SD cards, doing all that. Had it all packed up and ready to go. And now, of course, it's back out. So we can do some filming for you for this video on the trip for tomorrow. So we talked a little bit about the initial planning in the video we did the other day. So if you're watching, you haven't seen the video about the Levac run, about the member that's coming up here with the R44 and his story. I'll put that link up here. You can go click on that video, check that out to hear a little more about the owner and the aircraft. So we're going to Florida tonight. We're heading to Indianapolis. Stay the night, get an early flight out of Indy, land in Sarasota, Florida, and then start heading home tomorrow. We've already covered in the first video kind of just a little bit about weight and balance and the weights and what the fuel and the things we're gonna need. But that's all we really discussed so far. And Gary, you've been working on our stops, right?

Yes.

So tell them where we're gonna go first. What will be our first stop? Heading back north for Indiana.

We'll stop at Lake City with Class Delta. That'd be our first fuel stop. And, well, if the winds are as they are right now, we'll be looking at about an hour and 50 minutes, averaging 100 knots on the ground.

I like to stop about every. At least every two hours. Some people can go longer than that. But my back starts hurting and I got to get out and walk around. So hour and a half to two hours sounds pretty good to me. And you just say we're going to stop prior to getting to the mountains, right?

Yes. I have the next fuel stop after Lake City. What I'm looking at is another Class Delta Just prior to the mountains, which has a lot of services for us to get out, you know, find a hotel and some decent accommodations.

Hot wire. I do so well with hot wire. I love it. You want to kind of just show us with foreflight what you got planned so far?

Yeah, I found the Delta where we'll be overnighting. Jackson County. Just a lot of services. And I guess while you're. While you're showing foreflight there, I'll show you how I've tapped on the airport where we'll be overnighting. It brings up the airport information. I'm just going to scroll down here, and this is what we're looking for when we're looking to stay the night. We could tell right there we have fuel. Of course, on a paper chart, it would have little ticks around the center of the airport. We can look right here, restaurants, lodging, and we can see that there's a comfort end there. Putting my finger on here, and I'm just pulling this over because actually, I think we were talking about a Golf there. And I'm going to click on Athens, Georgia, and boom, it adds it to the flight plan. It replaced that Golf that was in there. Since we're going to overnight, we do want to be at a Delta. Now I'm going to tap on that again and I'm going to go down to lodging and we'll see how much better it is by going to that Delta that's real close to that Golf that was initially selected there. We have 14 lodging to choose from. I have the nav log pulled down up here at the top, and we can hide that tap, pull that up. I can click it again and it bring it down. The explanation point that you're seeing there is my. The pack that they want me to download before we leave. And that's just going to download our VFR sectional charts that we'll have for referencing without Internet connection. You can see the nav log tells us the travel time and how much fuel we'll be using between each of the legs of our trip. Now, the one thing is it actually shows a waypoint to get us away from the Tampa class Bravo right when we leave. And so that actually shows an initial leg of 24 minutes. We won't be stopping there. We'll be continuing on to Lake City for another hour and seventeen. And it just keeps track of your ground speed, it keeps track of your ETA for the next airport. We can change what airport we're heading to if we decided to divert easily just by dragging like we Just did a minute ago take that away and kind of show you the whole route here.

So you were saying 8 to 12 hours, depending on wind the other day. Now, with the winds, you're looking at what do you.

Nine to ten hours. Because no matter what altitude we fly at, we're going to have a northwest wind pretty much the whole way.

So we're planning on stopping just before we get to the mountains. And that is about halfway.

Yes, we'll stop here in. I believe that was Athens. That's where we'll be overnighting. So the weather looks good throughout the entire flight. Sky is clear. Very little chance of precipitation. TFRs are popping up here. Of course, we'll call flight service before we head out and check for any weather advisories or TFRs en route. We're not going to totally trust foreflight for that information, but it is a handy tool. We can see right off the bat here, even before we call where the TFRs are in place at. And we'll be able to see the winds while we're flying. And if we do lose Internet connection, of course, we have our paper charts we can pull out. But the iPad will continue to track our course because of the internal gps. I also have a Bat elf, which is an external GPS that we plug into the bottom of the iPad. The iPad will have GPS connection in flight when we lose Internet connection.

Hey, there's the UPS driver.

What do you have good for us today? Something from Amazon.

Awesome microphones. Hell, yeah. So that means it's been 20 over 26 years since you and I were trying to get you in the bar over here at Story's place, and they kicked us out because you were 18 or 19.

Yep.

Can we leave you in our video? Walking in, bringing a package in.

I don't care.

All right, good.

I'll see it on Facebook.

You probably will, probably. This evening.

This evening.

All right, I'll check it out.

We'll see you guys.

Thanks, man.

That's kind of neat.

Yeah, we had an actual GPS guy came in and brought us some new microphones. One, two. We're gonna be trying some different things on the way back from Florida in the aircraft, some different ways of recording audio. Back in the day, we'd get all the charts, go home at night, lay them out across the floor, draw that gray big line across, and then fold every chart just right. And then we would stack them one by one. Having the back seat. We used to transfer a Jet Ranger once, once a year, and just, like, pull up one chart. Go down, follow your line. When that one's done, throw that and grab the next one. All of them folded and stack nice and neat. So you go through one chart to one chart to one chart. Kind of a pain. But paper doesn't go dead.

That's right. And iPads do. So you know, you do have to have a backup.

Alright, so we'll wrap this up pretty quick here because we got a lot to do to get ready to go tonight. So we just want to make a real quick video, give you a little bit of the background of the trip, what we're gonna be doing. So anything else we need to add, like our video, put any comments below, anything you want us to film or see along the trip and like and subscribe to our channel. You do that by hitting the subscribe button, click the bell so you can get notified of our upcoming videos. We got links down below for helicopter ground school, our instrument course, all of our different stuff. There's a free book download below if you'd like to go down below to get. So give us a like and share on the video. Any parting words for our trip tomorrow?

Well, we'll be in Lake City, Florida at approximately 12:31pm Eastern tomorrow and we'll be at Athens, Georgia probably around 3 or 4, I would say towards the end of our day. But if you wanted to connect with us, if you're one of our members, feel free to text 574-767-1797 and we'll make every effort to let you know our ETA and we'll stop in and visit.

That is the Helicopter Land Ground school customer service number, by the way. So you will reach Gary at that number. He is on that 8 to 4 Monday through Friday. So this weekend will be a little busy. We may not get back to you real quick. If you got a general question or need a login or something, we'll take.

That phone with us. We'll take that phone with us. That way if you do want to meet us at Lake City or Athens, just shake hands and chat a bit. Then you can text us and we'll try to make that connection work.

Alright, we're gonna wrap this up so I can get this edited up so I can go after Glory because we're taking my daughter and one of her friends with us or with us in the R44. So give us a like and a share and we'll see you in the next video. What do you think, man? What's up? What you doing?

Wag your tail.

Wag your tail. Yeah, wag your tail, you gonna lick the camera.

Cut to walk down there.