Leg 5: Gary, IN to Taunton, MA -- 3:40, 31.0 gallons
It wasn't a big surprise that this morning the starter refused to cooperate again. This time, moving the prop didn't do diddly. I have no idea why it did diddly before, but put it this way -- we were getting even less diddly out of it today than we had yesterday. Nobody at Gary had a Sky-Tec starter, but they helped me get in touch with a Sky-Tec distributor. When I called them, they said they could have it within a day or two. Yikes. Stuck in Gary? Oh, I hope not. I went back out to the plane and gave the starter button a few more tries. Clickety-click, the starter contactor was happily doing its thing, but no motion up front where it counts. I have no idea why, but on the third try the thing came to life. It started up, and we were off. Just get to Boston, where we can stay with friends and take our time fixing the starter...and I'll be grateful!
After taking off, we climbed up to 7500' initially and were feeling the effect of a nice little tailwind. Originally we had planned on stopping in Pennsylvania for fuel, but I started doing some math and playing around with power settings. I think I can...I think I can...
I pulled the mixture to about 40 lean of peak, and we were burning just over 8 gallons per hour, and we were still doing well over 200 knots ground speed. Taunton was within three and a half hours, and we had four and a half hours of fuel left. Let's go for it! The notion of making a stop and having the starter give out completely was unpalatable...and at the lean-of-peak power setting I had set up, we could easily make Taunton with over an hour of fuel reserve. It honestly hadn't crossed my mind that we could make this leg non-stop, because I had previously assumed we'd have about 170 to 180 knot ground speeds. But at 208 knots ground speed it's a no brainer!
Here's a fuzzy shot of the engine monitor when we were just under an hour away from Taunton. Happy happy. Lean of peak everything was running nice and cool, and we were just sippin' the fuel. At 208 knots and 8.4 gallons per hour, that equates to 28.5 statute miles per gallon. That's about what my Honda Accord gets. Not bad for a homebuilt plane!
We made it to Taunton alive with plenty of fuel to spare, and my buddy Bruce was there waiting for us -- I had sent him an SMS ("text message" for the non-savvy folks out there) giving him our exact ETA and it worked out great.
The airport manager at Taunton refused to take any money for overnight tiedowns. He just encouraged us to buy fuel from him...his cash price for fuel was $2.90, which sounds pretty high but is actually decent for the area. For whatever reason, fuel is much cheaper here in southern California than just about everywhere else in the country.
Once we had settled in at Bruce's, I got on the phone with Sky-Tec and bitched about the starter that had let me down by failing after 3 months of flying. Not cool. They overnighted me an overhaul replacement.