Don’t forget the GUMPS checklist!
Previous leg: Harrisonville to Lamar
Landing gear are more effective in the down position
This week’s leg of the Missouri Flight Simulator tour took me through the southwestern corner of the state. The aircraft of the day was the FSX Mooney Bravo M20M. This is a much faster aircraft than the Cessna 172 I normally fly and it allowed me to begin to experiment with the joys of complex airplane procedures. Retractable gear, high power engines, and variable pitch propellers are not something that I have any real world experience with, and that lack of familiarity quickly became very obvious.
Pilots of complex airplanes are taught to perform a GUMPS check before landing. This means that they are to verify that the GAS is on the correct tank, the UNDERCARRIAGE is down, the MIXTURE is full rich, the PROP is on high setting, and the SEATBELTS/SWITCHES are correct. Such checklists exist for people like me. On my first attempted landing at Joplin I failed to put the landing gear down and bellied into the ground.
Needless to say I lost control and skidded off the runway into the snow. After conversing with the virtual NTSB I decided that accident was non-fatal and went back to Lamar to try again. Properly humbled, I paid extra attention to the GUMPS checklist and flew the rest of the journey without another landing gear incident.
The day’s route
After the second take off from Lamar (KLLU) I worked my way around the southwest corner of Missouri. The first destination was Joplin (KJLN), the largest city in Jasper County. From there I stopped in Neosho (KEOS), the seat of Newton County. Of historical interest, Neosho was the provisional Confederate capital of Missouri during the Civil War.
The Journey So Far (13.55 hours, 914 NM)
A complete lack of airports forced me to bypass McDonald County for the time being. Someday I will have to come back and visit by helicopter. Instead, I headed directly to Cassville (94K) in Barry County. The final destination was supposed to be the Branson West Emerson (KFWB) airport just south of Galena. Upon arrival, however, I discovered that the FSX version of the field was actually a small grass strip, instead the long paved runway that appears on a real world sectional. Because of the discrepancy between the real world and the FSX database, I made a diversion and landed at Kimberling City (MO64), overlooking Table Rock Lake in Stone County. Including the first crash landing and the last minute diversion, the 90 NM journey took just over 0.7 hours.
Next leg: Kimberling City to Dexter
