Stretch

I closed out the house in Parrish. After turning over the keys to the Leasing Agent I jumped on I75 and headed north to Tampa Executive. It was time to get away from the moving boxes and clear my head from all of the issues involved with moving household goods from one location to another.

Sally was dirty. All of the upper surfaces were spotted with dirt and pollen. (The belly was clean.)  I'll need to give her a good cleaning before we fly down to Sebring to get the D120 replaced. But not today. Today we would go flying.

Twelve pulls was all it took. I would have expected 4x that, but the engine is much tighter now. Full choke, throttle at idle, she caught immediately but I removed the choke too quickly and she sputtered. Sorry Sally. She started cleanly on the second attempt. I'll get the soft start modules figured out sooner or later.

Over 5000RPM for the static check, 10 degrees of flaps, the take of would be normal except for the oil pressure low warning. That warning would go of many times during the flight. Each time I would carefully check the validity and each time I would silence the alert and continue the flight. So after a visit to Tampa North and Pilot's Country I headed back to Tampa Exec. The Gulf Coast was within reach and my plan had been to fly down the beach for awhile. But not with an engine alert. This is how a bad habit gets developed and I didn't want to continue even though I'm sure it is just a bad sensor. But what if it isn't?