EBR-I Museum, Nuclear Jet Engines, and Automation

On Friday, I had a free day, and my preferred airplane was free, so I flew out to Idaho Falls, rented a car, and spend an amazing few hours at the EBR-I museum over in Idaho National Labs. The weather was… windy, and so I also had a particularly interesting flight back. This post is rather long and may indicate a weird geeky obsession with 1950s nuclear technology, among other things. I would normally make this a series of posts, but for reasons I’ll cover at the end, I’m not, and I apologize for nothing ! Flying Out In Idaho, in the summer, the best time to fly is the morning. The winds tend calmer, and the ground hasn’t heated up enough to create heavy thermals. The glider folks may disagree, but I’m a big fan of “just after sunrise” sort of flights. I reserved 93F for the day, filled the tanks (I love the 180HP conversion, it climbs great and cruises well, but it does mean you should be on the ground after about three hours to get fuel). I’ve been loving 93F lately - in addition to the nice GPS and comm panel upgrades, an autopilot showed up some while ago, and I have thoughts on automation later! But, suffice it to say, I do very much like an autopilot for long distance cruising. Airports happen to be great places to see airplanes, and even weird things in which the wings are going faster than the fuselage. N86KT is a, in my opinion, very good looking Sikorsky UH-60L . I expect it’s getting ready for fire season - the heavy lift helicopters get good use when forests get lit on fire. Take off into the wind, head east, and cruise . The straight line path between Nampa and Idaho Falls goes over more mountains than I prefer to fly over with a single engine, so I detoured a bit to the south and cruised along the edge of the foothills. There are plenty of good landing spots if you stay over the flats, and given the winds today, it wouldn’t be much of a ground roll, either. I don’t mind views like this off my wing. I’d just rather not have to figure out how to put…