(January 2010) — We were settled in at 24,000 feet, cruising along at around 225 knots true, burning 24 gallons of 100LL every hour while watching the nautical miles slip behind us. We’d taken off from Orlando Executive (ORL) in a Cessna Corvalis and were an hour into our flight, cruising at an altitude that few people actually use.
My flying buddy that day was Cessna regional sales manager and central Texas neighbor Chris Lee, who has hundreds of hours in Cessna Corvalis airplanes — for the record, I don’t know what the plural of Corvalis is, either. Even though we both live in Texas, we met down in Orlando, Florida, for the flight, since that’s where the airplane, which needed to be brought back to Texas for some demo flights, was situated. (What we really wanted to do was fly the Corvalis all the way to California, where Chris and I would be attending the AOPA Summit in Long Beach later that week, but we’d be forced to go on the airlines for the second half of our trip.)
