Heading west tonight with three old high school friends to the fabled city of Deadwood South Dakota for classic male bonding, you know drinking and cards. We are taking a Cessna 182 instead of my Queen Air Black Betty because the annual isn’t quite finished. The difference in flight time is almost an hour, bad enough, but the 182 will require a fuel stop as well. These inconveniences alone would be bad enough but loosing the all important relief tube, no that’s not an intercom, will seriously effect on the beer consumption going on in the back seats, at least I hope so. The 182 isn’t a bad aircraft, I’ve owned two of them and have about a million hours flying skydivers in them. It can haul a reasonable load, necessary for this trip, and it’s fast enough, I guess.
On this trip I’ve got the opportunity to compare my three year old Garmin 696 to the new 796. The 796 has a few new bells and whistles like a touch screen and some sort of synthetic vision on it. I’ve been extremely happy with my 696 having flown around the world with it and will have to be really blown away to spend the money and make the change. I’ll let you all know my impressions when I get back.