Midwest/East coast trip, day 11

Day 11, the day we broke the airplane. Sigh...another night in the DC area. Not that I'm complaining, I can think of much worse spots to be unexpectedly stuck with a broken airplane.

Upon raising the landing gear, the gear in transit light stays on while all gear down indicators go out and eventually, the landing gear circuit breaker pops. When the gear lever is returned to the down position, voila, three green gear down indicators. This little sequence of events happened upon departure from Leesburg today so we elected to return to the airport and have a local shop take a look at things.

The good news is that we now know what to expect for an IFR departure out of Leesburg. This morning we'd checked with one of the local flight schools for any preferred routing heading South out of the DC ADIZ and the answer was essentially "nothing special". I filed a route that would take us West out of the ADIZ then South then Southeast to our next destination, a route that avoided any restricted areas and got us out of the ADIZ as quickly as possible. I thought it was a nice plan until we called the clearance delivery folks at the Potomic Tracon. We get a different route and the initial waypoint is an intersection that doesn't appear to exist on the IFR enroute chart. Adding to this, in the end, we were unsure of the spelling. We thought we had it but it turned out that both of us copied it differently when getting our clearance. I then called clearance delivery a second time for further clarification and we let the GNS-430 find the intersection for us.

One very cool thing that happened is an impromptu arrival of six Army helicopters. Five OH-58 Kiowas and one UH-60 Blackhawk arrived as I was putting some gear into the plane. I look up and see multiple helicopters arriving on runway 35 and in no time, get my camera out of my backpack and start snapping pictures. They parked every chopper within 100 yards of where we
were parked. Very cool.




















































I can hear it now, "Honey, I'm going to be late tonight, had to stop in Leesburg for gas" :-)











No word from the repair shop so we call in the morning. I say odds are 50/50 that we wind up driving to our next destination while the airplane gets fixed. We'll see what tomorrow holds.