On our way to Burbank in the back of 137SL.

East to West Coast

I finally made the transition from St. Petersburg, Florida to Camarillo, CA in a Piaggio. This marks the first time in nearly four years with the company that I actually flew a plane from the east coast to the west coast. Most of the time when we get a cross country trip, it is going east and I end up flying home on an airliner. I left St. Pete on Thursday morning in Piaggio N137SL (Piaggio I)and flew to Houston,TX - Harlington,TX - Dallas,TX - Fort Smith, AR - Albuquerque,NM and ended up in Camarillo on Saturday.

The company needed a Piaggio II qualified captain in Palm Springs, so tomorrow I am catching a ride in the back of Piaggio N137SL from Camarillo to Burbank, where I will rent a car and drive to Palm Springs to take over N172SL and fly it to Aurora, OR with five passengers.

Six check complete

I completed my six month check ride today in the "red rocket". This is actually one of our older airplanes that was painted in Ferrari colors. From what I understand, it was painted to celebrate the close ties between Ferrari and Piaggio ( Ferrari owns part of Piaggio ) .

I also got the chance to test out our new touch screen EFB's (Electronic Flight Bag) which are really cool. In the past we used tablet PC's with a stylus, but these are much smaller and have a touchscreen to access important information easier.

I have been very busy lately with holidays and getting things done around the house, so it's been a while since I posted some pictures. I am currently in St. Petersburg, Florida at our company headquarters to do my six month check ride which is required by the FAA.

The checkride is basically the equivalent of taking your drivers license test every six months (but more difficult obviously) and if you fail, you will be required to do more training. If you fail again, then you may lose your job, so failing is no good.

The first pic is of my luggage under some interesting hotel room lighting, the second picture is from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico and the third is from Kalispell, MT.