That Skywagon sounds fun! How do you find it so far?
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I love it - I mean, it is a throaty little beast with lots of cargo hauling capacity for the price. I can’t remember what I paid for it in Air Hauler - if I scroll up in this thread I can find it. It can haul around 1,500 lbs. of cargo…a pretty good amount for such a small aircraft. You can make up to $14,000 per load if you find a really lucrative contract.
The drawbacks - old school avionics. It has the default handheld GPS, but other than that…nothing exotic. It is slow - you might make 140 knots on a good day (today isn’t a good day - doing about 122 indicated and about 95 groundspeed). It also did not have an autopilot, so I sort of hacked in a basic autopilot because I just couldn’t hold my stick for that long.
The plane itself is gorgeous - it has a cargo pod option. It is an older Carenado product though…so it perhaps isn’t as up to par as their most recent releases.
The real reason I love it so much is the cargo capacity, and with full flaps you can land the thing on a dime. I mean…it was MADE for bush flying. I’ve taken it into some ridiculously small strips over the past year. I’m just about to upgrade to a bigger plane, and my heart really will break when I sell it.
If you do get it (or any small aircraft for Air Hauler) - just be careful when the cargo auto-loads. The 185F has a max cargo in the very aft compartment of 50 lbs. When AH2 spreads the full load out, it doesn’t care about that limiation…so it will put 200 or 250 lbs. in that hold - and you WILL end up with a handful of airplane when you get to flying speed. You’ll be lucky to survive the PIO. So always check your cargo loading and adjust the weight and moments before blasting off.
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…AND there it is…! Mt. Hood. Good call sliding over onto Victor 500 to make sure I was clear to the south of it…
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I went back and looked when I bought it - it was around $255,000. I had started at the lowest level of company cash and airplane back when I started AH2…I think you got a Bonanza and I can’t remember how much cash. I sold the Bonanza, bought a Maule, made a bunch of money over in Norway, moved to the U.S., made some more money, sold the Maule, bought the 185F, and now I’m on the cusp of having enough “rep” in game to finance something bigger.
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Mmm…yeah, the weather we left behind looks pretty ominous. Serious business in the mountains in a little airplane that doesn’t climb so well (particularly in icing…). Glad to be in better skies…
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Yep…gonna have to shoot the LOC 17 into Aurora State, hope we can get below the ceiling and proceed VFR the 7 or 8 miles east to Mulino State (4S9) (our destination for the cargo…)…
Aha…! I found a sucker hole on my way toward Aurora State… Thought about it for about two seconds, then dove in…broke out below the layer and proceeded VFR to my destination…
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I really need to stop browsing this thread. It’s unhealthy for my wallet 
The Thranda Kodiak got a sweet update two days ago with the default Laminar G1000 implemented… That is one sweet ride!
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Wow, that’s really good news. I get along with the LR G1000 much better than the Carenado version, especially the FPL functionality. They would do well to convert all of their G1000 products, including the Phenom 100’s Prodigy to the LR G1000.
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Some might not see that as a drawback. It certainly adds to the experience when flying around terrain, and I find just following the purple line gets monotonous.
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Hmm…got myself into a bit of a jam this morning. Repositioning from 4S9 to 1W1 to pick up a load of cargo…launched out of 4S9 and swoop…into the fog I go immediately. Oopsie. 1W1 has no instrument approaches.
The “plan” is to try to fly the LOC/DME to runway 21 at PDX and hopefully break out abeam 1W1 and spot it. Technically, I’m not legal to fly the LOC/DME 21 since I don’t have DME installed in my Cessna 185F. Nor do I have RNAV approach capability.
Ah…but the ATIS at PDX is showing conditions better…perhaps I will break out much higher on that approach…!
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Back at our home base of Longview Ranch…hope someone kept the wood stove going while I was gone!
Sitting on the cusp…maybe three or four more flights should push my overall rep to the 40% level…
I haven’t done the math on what kind of loan I’ll be able to get - with $348,000 in the bank and perhaps being able to sell the 185F for a couple hundred thousand (Air Hauler lists them as $255K new)…I should be able to spend a good bit of money on a leased aircraft. I am not sure what the fraction is for the lease downpayment…so light Google searching indicated (edit…scratch that - it looks like AH2 has now added an additional column to the Aircraft Marketplace table that just flat out shows the lease price!)…
So here are the aircraft I’m interested in, their purchase price, and their lease price. Like I said, I should have around 500-550K to spend once I sell the 185F…
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DC-10 will be fun to do those small airfields with!
I picked up a 2 for 1 flight last night outbound from my home base. Delivery of Christmas supplies to two little strips near Bend, Oregon…
The weather at Longview Ranch was miserable…and the takeoff at max gross was a delicate affair…
Once airborne…I ran into a problem of having to use carb heat, but at max gross I could not get the plane to climb very well. It became a delicate balancing act of trying to maintain 200 FPM or so while avoiding the higher terrain climbing to the west of the ranch…
Approaching Bend, the weather cleared up. It is very hard to spot these small dirt strips that are snow covered. Usually I have to fly over them to ID them, then set up for the pattern…
Then just a 13 mile hop to the other drop off location…
Sweet…! Less than 1% away from my 40 rep goal now! Two short flights!
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Interesting morning this Christmas Eve. I accepted a contract to move some last second Christmas Trees from Bend, Oregon (KBDN) to Daniels Field (OR78) just north of Eugene, Oregon. I probably should have checked the weather before hitting the accept button, since the prevailing conditions are about 3/4 sm, sky obscured. My last trip ended at Sage Airstrip, so I had to make the 13 nm hop over to Bend to pick up the Christmas trees.
Well, Bend has a VOR/DME approach - but my 185F has no DME. So I just flew the outbound radial (136), identified HANIX on my non-IFR certified handheld GPS, and headed down to the MDA. At the MDA, I was still in the soup…and this being a “sim” and all…I might have bumped down an extra 150’ or so.
My eyes about popped out of my head when I saw the power line tower go flying by under the wing. Brought back some bad memories of the ghostly image of a tree going under my left wing when shooting a PAR approach into Quantico one foggy morning.
The 150’ cheat was enough to show me the airport at about 1/2 mile - it is an offset approach, so I can screaming in low over the hangars…the local old man coffee brigade at the FBO were probably speed dialing the FAA…or wishing they were up there…
I darted onto the ramp, threw the trees in the cargo area, and bolted out of there before anyone could write down any tail numbers…
Of course, the MEA for the more direct route to Eugene is 13,000’ westbound on V121, and given my last climbout problems I had coming out of Longview Ranch yesterday, I went conservative and am heading up to V269 with a 10,000’ MEA (it avoids the 10,000+ MSL South and Middle Sister mountains apparently)…
I’ve broken out of the clouds and weather is improving west of Bend…and Eugene is reporting 1,400 BKN and 10+ SM, so it looks like these trees will make it…
This kind of murky, challenging flying was why I picked the PNW in the first place. It keeps the mind churning and is a ton of fun…!
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