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What a relief, all the nuts/bolts/washers and fittings, along with the frame of my stabilizing rig is finally at "Armscoat" for finishing. I'm guessing that it might be between Christmas and New Years before it's finished, but the guy is meticulous so perfect is better than fast.
I stopped by to see our aircraft rental folks on the way back to HQ, they have a late model G1000 Cessna 182 that I have been wanting to check out in for occasional trips that come up. The women who runs the operation is a friend, she knows that I have several thousand hours in 182's so it's not going to be a big deal, but I have no time flying a Garmin 1000 suite. I bought a King course on the G1000 a few months back and told my friend that I'd dive into that and get familiar with it's operation, she said "come down the hall with me." She led me into a dark room that was filled with a Cessna 182 G1000 equipped simulator, apparently they had it installed a few weeks ago. There was an instructor just wrapping up a session and he had just shut the aircraft down at Austin Bergstrom, he smiled and said, "she's all yours...."
My 182 had a state of the art Garmin stack, but "state of the art" has a whole new meaning 15 years later. I went through the checklist and cranked the Cessna up, taxied out and lined up on the centerline. I've flown a number of sim's, Lear 55, GV, Phenom 300, even a Southwest 737-800 when I was photographing their new sim center at Love Field. Sickest I've ever been in an "aircraft" was in the Lear 55 sim, shooting dozens of approaches. All of those jet sims were full motion and, of course the 182 model has no motion, but they all play with your middle ear. No matter how accurate the simulation is, the darn things mess with one's physiology because what you're seeing is amazingly accurate, but there is still a gap in what you are seeing and what your senses are telling you. I left the Lear sim covered in sweat and about the color of a pale green sheet. My mistake was keeping my eyes open as my instructor zoomed me back to the outer marker a dozen times so we could reply the approach, definitely not a good practice.
So, now alone in the sim room, I launched off and climbed up to 3,500', dialed in McKinney on the big Nav display to my right, and proceeded to learn. Surprisingly, for about 15 minutes i drifted 5 to 10 degrees in heading and my altitude was up and down by 2-300', but then my scan synced and heading and altitude looked like they had been paused, dead on. I had a couple of hours to kill so I flew back to KTKI in real time with a few steep turns, Lazy Eights, power on/off stalls thrown in for good measure. The sim was much more difficult to fly than the real aircraft, that's kind of the way simulators are for some reason or other. Just under two hours later the centerline of 18/36 at McKinney rolled into view and we touched down uneventfully, soooo much fun. I'll spend a couple of hours with my King course over the weekend and then Chili and I will go check out in the real thing next week. Technology, it's amazing, I was as riveted flying that sim as I would have been in the real thing, forgetting completely that I was in a seat that was bolted to an office floor, and the adrenaline rush when the left wing dropped in the the power on stall was very familiar.
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Ultimately Jennifer sat down with Halle and explained that Faith felt she needed to breach that confidence for the good of all involved. She applauded her ingenuity, but encouraged her to clue her Mom in on this kind of stuff so they could consider the ramifications together, before it is too late. 
