I was not expecting that to be the title of the post! I had no idea we were going to fly to Michigan today. I knew we were doing a multi-engine flight to check it out, but figured we’d just go to the practice area. This was way cooler!

We’ve never flown over the lake before because the school doesn’t allow you to take the single-engine planes farther away from the shore than they can glide in if the engine fails. And it’s not really smart to fly a single-engine plane over a large body of water anyway (because see previous sentence).

So! Exciting day!

Steven scheduled this flight to see what we thought of flying in a multi-engine. He is currently rated to fly single-engine planes (and endorsed for two Cessna 172s), and if he wanted to get his multi-engine rating, he’d have to do more lessons and studying. We flew in a Piper Seminole:

And Steven did all the flying!

With an instructor, of course. It was his (and my) first time flying with Chris. We had a lot of fun flying and chatting with him.

The deets:

To prepare Steven read about light multi-engine planes, and watched some videos. When we got there, we sat down and discussed some of the differences and risks of multi-engine planes. They’re A LOT more complicated than the single-engine we normally fly. First, there’s like, double the gauges and shit in the cockpit since there are two engines:

and it has retractable gear, and constant speed propellers (meaning you can adjust the blade pitch). It performs differently and has different V speeds (standardized airspeeds), and… probably a ton of other stuff I am forgetting.

It was fun for me to listen to all of the things Chris was explaining to Steven – he seems like a really good instructor! But there was SO MUCH going on. Whoa. It was constant instruction on takeoff and the way over (which makes sense – he’s never flown this plane before).

So when we were discussing the flight Chris suggested flying to Michigan, and I had no concept of how far away it is since we’d never done it by plane. But the South Haven airport (LWA) is only 72 miles, and took about 30 minutes. Not bad at all! We got up to 185 knots ground speed. Speedy!

We landed at the South Haven airport,

taxiied, then took back off.

I was looking at the shore when left and thought it looked somewhat familiar – that is where the last ultra Rachel and I ran finished! Aww.

We flew back across the lake and chatted a bit more than on the way over – we talked about music, books, podcasts, what Chris’s wife does for work, what I do – then when we got closer to shore Chris adjusted the throttle so we could see what it’s like with one engine off and how the plane wants to fly asymmetrically.

Ha, he said several times we’d only do that if everyone was comfortable. I certainly was – I think it’s exciting and trusted him.

So this is the prop completely stopped and feathered out. Cool, right?

Or maybe not. This freaked out a few people I told about it. But remember, the other engine was still running!

After that we flew inland a bit then landed at our airport.

We got to chatting after and I shared a few of our flying stories with Chris – the mix-up with the Hookah Lounge at Timmerman, the 20′ wide runway at Roosterville… it’s fun to share these stories with other pilots. They are way more interested in them in non-pilots (makes sense, right?). We need more pilot friends.

And Chris even wanted me to show the 20′ runway to lineman there, and told him I was cool as a cucumber in the passenger seat, AND laughed at some of my jokes. I felt pretty good LOL.

So what did Steven conclude?! He isn’t going to train on this plane right now. He plans to train and get checked out on the the Cessna 182 (bigger model similar to the Cessna 172 we usually fly), which is also “complex” with retractable gear and a constant speed prop, and get used to that before moving on to something with more than one engine.

It was really fun to try it out and see how different it was though. Steven said it landed like a brick. I thought he did great! I mean, I am here writing this! LOLOL, jk guys.