Slight change in plans

So, the Mooney is still out. Yep. Here's what's going on. We took it in to have the starter looked at...every once in a while, it was sticking, and that's not great for the airplane's electrical system and avionics. That's fixed. We thought, "hey, while it's in the shop, let's get that gross weight increase STC done."

That's actually pretty simple---this particular model was built with the strenghened landing gear that the STC requires already installed. All we really needed was to have the airspeed indicator re-marked for the appropriate speeds (a higher weight changes some of your airspeeds at critical phases in flight) and get the paperwork done. Simple, right?

Well, the avionics shop that our airspeed indicator was sent to somehow "forgot" about the job. And, they outsource the actual re-marking of the instrument face to a screen-print shop, which also apparently either got behind or forgot about it. After a lot of he said-she said between the instrument shop and the screen print shop, the airspeed indicator should be in Don's hands by "next week" and we'll have a Mooney back.

BUT, Tim is gone for the next two weeks. So my next commercial flight will be on 4/27. I'll make good use of the time while he's gone, getting my written finished up, flying my long cross-country, etc. That, and the small matter of my graduate capstone that's still staring me in the face.

The long and short of it, though, is that I'll be doing my CFI and CFI-I in early June. Time-wise, it's really not that much of a setback. And, it allows me to focus more on finishing grad school and actually spend a little more time preparing for those three instructor writtens I'll have to take. All in all, it's going to let me slow things down, just a little bit, which is kind of nice. Everybody has setbacks in training. Hey, I finished a rating that normally takes people about 9 months in less than 60 days. A little break ain't going to hurt me :).