A friend of mine and I departed our home airport in my 1976 Piper Arrow II. I recently had a new autopilot installed in the airplane and, while initial test flights showed everything worked as expected, we wanted to go put the new equipment through some exercises. We were eager to see how it worked, which included entering a flight plan into the GPS.
Our planned destination was an airport almost directly east of the airplane’s base. Between us and the destination airport was an active restricted area. The plan was to fly northeast, turn east over a small airport that we had set as a waypoint in the GPS and then shoot a VFR practice approach to Runway 23 at the destination. One of the features of this plan is it would have kept us well outside of the restricted area.
