We had our brand new Mustang keys, we had been partying all week in Wichita while doing our Flight Safety training and the past couple of days were still partying in Independence with the Cessna folks since this was their 100th Mustang that was being delivered. We were eager to start our trip back to Asia with our sightseeing stopovers.

Mustang key turnover

Supap's "Thank You" speech to Cessna

There were a lot of issues to resolve:

1. Completing our Mustang course at Flight Safety. It was the first time Supap and I had struggled so much to get over jet lag. Hey, we both realized that we were getting old!! We struggled with the Garmin 1000 training as well… very difficult to comprehend when one's mind has not rested and with all the partying come night time. He-he! The new avionics were fascinating but, at the same time, one wrong turn of the knobs or punch of the key can bring chaos to your well-planned departure or approach. There are several ways of inputting information on this FMS and sometimes you get confused or find it hard to remember which procedure you just did because the end results are the same. I sometimes felt that the round dials, VOR, and NDB manual approaches were better than autopilot entering a holding pattern, knowing when to change frequencies, and do go-arounds on their own. Gee, this is technology that’s hard to comprehend for two aging pilots! The Flight Safety guys were good and gave us extra classroom time on their fantastic Flight Training Devices. The sim is also much better than the old hydraulic ones. Now it is purely electric. The visuals were great in Level D sim. We could not ask for more. Special thanks to the Flight Safety guys who were very patient with oldies like us falling asleep in class. No, it was not the subject, and it wasn’t the teacher, but just TWO SLEEPY HEADS!

Working on Garmin 1000 knobs and keys in Flight Training Device