On Sunday, April 27th, I flew to Dallas, TX. I previously made arrangements to get some
transition training from John Albury.
John built an RV-12 a couple of years ago and offers transition training
to new RV-12 owners. John is well
qualified and has been given authorization to do transition training from the
FAA. He is an American Airlines 737
Captain. He has been flying for American
for 28 years and also holds a CFII. I
met John at his hangar at 9:00 am on Monday the 28th at Propwash, an
airport community west of Justin, TX. We
spent the first 2 ½ hours getting to know each other and going over the ground
school presentation on the RV-12. It was
very informative and a great preparation for flying the airplane. As part of the prep we did the pre-flight,
fueled the airplane and proceeded to go flying.
We fired up the airplane and took off at 11:30 am. We flew up to Gainesville, about 35 miles
north of Propwash. Along the way John
had me do normal turns, steep turns and some power on and power off
stalls. The wind was blowing at 15 knots
and when we got to Gainesville I had to contend with a cross wind. John talked me through the landings and all
went well. We stopped for lunch about
1:00 pm and took the courtesy car to a local restaurant. We returned to the airport did some more take
offs and landings before heading back to Propwash. All in all I flew 2.4 hours the first day.
That
evening Dave Wissinger sent me some photos of the airplane. The white paint had been applied and he was
laying out the red. My impression is it is going to look great!
