Date: Monday, July 16, 2001, 6:57:38 PM Subject: Trip from Scottsdale, AZ to Woodward, OK Howdy, Today we left Scottsdale, AZ, and headed for Woodward, OK. Originally, I had planned to fly into Buffalo, OK, but our friends suggested that we fly into West Woodward, OK, since they had some available hangars, as well as a mechanic on duty during the week, in case we need any miscellaneous repairs. The WX briefing earlier that morning showed a bunch of T-storms marching across eastern AZ and western NM, so we would have a pretty good chance of having to route around them. So, after much ado (packing up our entire household it seems -- when you travel with a five and three-year old, it feels like you are carrying *way* too much), we finally got into the air at 11:30 am. It felt like we were leaving at least two hours too late, but it turns out that by having taken so long to get to the airport, get our gear loaded into the plane, and finally get into the air, that one of the biggest T-storm had already crossed our flight path. The density altitude was pretty high, so our heavily-loaded-but-within-limits, 300-hp plane took a bit of time to get off the ground, and even after gaining some airspeed had a sluggish climb rate. There are some mountains east of Scottsdale which we would normally have no problem climbing over, but today, we decided to head left and past them, and then direct to LVS (Las Vegas, NM) as a fuel stop. The ride was occasionally bumpy, sometimes sluggish with a downward headwind, and sometimes very quick with an upward tailwind. The speeds ranged from 80 kts (once or twice with a "surprise" stall warning) to 160 kts, but we averaged around 138 kts on a fuel-flow of about 11-12 gph. When got to LVS, we found out that rwy 14-32 was closed due to construction, and landed with a 12mph cross-wind on rwy 20. The airport attendant was very courteous and helpful, a former Navy pilot with over 5000 hours, but a bit cynical about the aviation economy in that part of New Mexico. After cleaning up from the boys misadventure (they had thrown up from the bumpy ride -- my wife had planned for this, and had some plastic bags handy, but these things are never that neat), we packed ourselves into our flying airvan, and taxied back to rwy 20 to depart. Here I learned firsthand the problem of failing to lean a hot engine at high density altitude. During the run up, after bringing the engine back to idle, the engine would die. After restarting it twice, the light bulb finally went on (doh!), and I figured it out (remembered someone's past teaching or something like that). Anyway, it's important to not run your engine too rich at a hight density altitude or it will fail to run just as with too little gas. Again, a high-density altitude at a 6877 ft. elevation runway induces a very long run, and a very sluggish climb, but eventually we rise above the cows munching in their pastures, and we climb back to 9500 -- but it feels like we're barely 1000 ft. AGL (of course, we are, but with wide open spaces and no tall structures, it's hard to tell visually). We had been using ABQ for flight following, so about 30 miles out from LVS, we contact ABQ again and get them to tell us current info on the altimeter, and then we mostly listen to the jet traffic routing around the big storms above us. Surprisingly, we saw only *one* plane during today's flight. Somewhere around DHT (Dahart), they try to hand us off to KC, but KC can't hear us though we can hear them. I suspect that it was caused by the towering T-storm off to our left. We were very lucky: not once did we have to deviate from our GPS-direct flight to our destination -- in both legs, we ended up flying between two different storms -- a very dark, large one about 75 miles to the NE of our flight, and some lighter but active (with many strikes, according to our WX500) to our right, maybe 25 miles south of our flight path. When we got to about 40 miles west of Gage, the cloud formation became very solid and dark, but no convection to speak of. So, we descended to 5500 to remain very clear of the dark cloud mass. After about 10-15 miles, the clouds lighted up, and the sky got a little brighter, even though it was now after 7 pm, and dusk was approaching. We crossed WWR at midfield, with nobody home -- no people, no traffic -- and landed after making the 3 left turns into rwy 17. Since we landed after hours, the airport manager, a very nice guy named Dave, drove out (by prior arrangement) from his home and towed our plane into the hangar, and made arrangements to have some minor work done to the plane (a panel needs a new screw or two, and the nose strut needs less air). This is the furthest east I've gotten in our airplane -- it's a great feeling to have flown here, instead of having driven here in our car. Now, our vacation on the farm starts and we'll be helping with the farm work. -- Best regards, Alan K. Stebbens , N4184R, PA32-300, SBA