4TV had some work done to the nose gear, including adding some shims and servicing of the shimmy dampner. The pins need to be replaced, but that can wait until the annual along with a few other things. After waiting for the nose gear work I took the plane up today after work to test it out, and also to try my hand at right seat flying in preparation for the CFI.
I had flown from the right seat once before - really just to do one landing, and it wasn't pretty. That was years ago in an Arrow. I have considered getting a CFI to ride left seat to help me transition, but figured since it's my airplane, I'd go ahead and give it a shot to see how tricky it would be. The answer: VERY.
Taxiing from the right seat seemed a bit off, but not too bad. Departure was strange, but manageable, although I discovered I had way more right rudder in than necessary for some reason, which I presume is the sense that my nose is off center to the left from this new perspective. Climb out and cruise were ... fine. It didn't feel super comfortable, and I found I had to reference the instruments way more than normal to ensure that I was in the proper attitude. I did have a moment where I realized that if I had an engine loss and needed to put it down, that it wouldn't go as well as it would if I were in the left seat. That made me wonder if doing this solo was a good idea.
Two days later I procurred a 160 lbs CFI to sit in the left seat. He's someone qualified to actually provide instruction for the CFI -Initial, so I'll likely use him for that. With 15 gallons of fuel onboard, we were under max gross by about 10 lbs. Plane flew well, though - climbing between 400-500 fpm at Vy. Right seat felt a bit better this time around, and my landing at SCR was better too. There were slight gusts coming from about 20-degrees off the nose, but even still it went OK, which was better than the day before. We did some maneuvers at altitude and discovered that steep turns are best done at 2,500. When we tried to do them higher than that, I couldn't seem to get enough power to hold altitude.
Came back to TTA and did another landing - this one also went OK. Still have some work to do, but I do feel a bit better flying right seat solo now than I did after that first time.
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