Photo of departure from Turku, Finland, courtesy of Jussi Lempiainen

Meet N315L

N315L is a 1993 Mooney MSE, which I purchased on August 4, 1999. It’s a single-engine, normally-aspirated (non-turbo), retractable-gear, four-seater, except that to make the circumnavigation possible I purchased a 100-gallon ferry tank and put that where the back seats used to be. The ferry tank is connected to the fuel tank in the left wing. You cannot run the engine by using the fuel in the ferry tank; instead, you run the engine using the fuel in the left wing for a while, then, when you’re ready to move fuel from the ferry tank into the left wing, you run the plane on the fuel in the right wing and turn on a pump (or a back-up pump) that pumps fuel from the ferry tank into the tank in the left wing.

The wings hold 64 gallons, combined. The ferry tank holds 100 gallons. I normally use about nine gallons per hour. This gives me a lot of endurance, even though I cannot use all of the ferry tank’s capacity because of the weight of the fuel.

The engine is a four-cylinder, 200-horsepower, Lycoming IO-360-A3B6. I normally cruise between 4,000 and 11,000 feet above sea level, with 24 inches of manifold pressure (or, if I can’t get that, whatever I can get with the throttle full forward) and the propeller at 2500 rpm.

After two decades of flying the airplane with the avionics and instruments that it had when I bought it, I made some upgrades. It now has an Avidyne IFD540 flight management system, which acts as both my No. 1 navigation radio and my No. 1 communications radio. Most of the time, the IFD540 is navigating by GPS, but it also can fly instrument approaches using ground-based navigational aids known as instrument landing systems (ILS) and VHF omnirange (VOR). Unlike most aircraft owners who do an avionics upgrade, I decided to retain my automatic direction finder (ADF), which is a simple navigation radio that drives an indicator that points to the tower from which an AM radio signal (or a signal just below the AM range) is being transmitted. My No. 2 navigation and communication radio is a King KLX 165. This is an old but solid radio, which gives me an independent source of VOR and ILS navigation and a backup means of communication. That communication functionality is somewhat limited in Europe, though, as Europe uses 8.33 kHz VHF channel spacing rather than the 25 kHz spacing still used in the United States. In other words, most of the frequencies used in Europe cannot be accessed via the backup radio. My No. 3 communication radio is a Barrett high frequency radio, which allows me to transmit and receive short-wave signals.

I replaced my attitude indicator and my horizontal situation indicator (HSI) with dual Garmin GI-275 instruments. The switch to solid state from moving-part analog devices should give me greater reliability and also enabled me to get rid of my vacuum system that drove the physical gyroscope in my old attitude indicator. The No. 1 GI-275 acts as an attitude indicator, altimeter, airspeed indicator, rate-of-climb indicator, a turn coordinator, and heading indicator. The
No. 2 GI-275 acts as an HSI and also backs up the attitude indicator function of the No. 1 GI-275. One very nice thing about the GI-275s is that they can translate the navigation instructions from the IFD 540 into heading and climb/descent instructions that can be understood by my autopilot, a King KFC150. This means that once I program instructions into the IFD 540, the plane can follow those instructions and the navigation signals received by the IFD 540, almost all the way to landing.

My transponder is a Lynx L-3 NGT-9000. In addition to letting air traffic controllers know where I am and at what altitude I am flying, it can provide me traffic information (position, altitude, direction, tail number or airline and flight number) for planes that are appropriately equipped and in a radar environment.

A JPI EDM 900 engine instrument provides a ton of information about how my engine is performing.