Hangar flying.
It is nice to be able to jump in the seat and work on your panel skills or load information into a CPU, from time to time. We use an old trick. With a ground power plug mounted just to the rear of the oil fill door, on top of the engine mount. We have a set of jumper cables made from #4 arc wedding cable, with good automotive type clamps on one end and a Cessna plug on the other end. The cables length is about 15-18 feet. We first started using this jumper arraignment with old Cessna's that sat for a long time. We could park a car off the end of the wing, open he hood and stretch out the cable, in order to charge the battery in the aircraft without getting in the way of the aircraft. After you put a good enough charge in the battery, you could start the engine in the bird and have the aircraft warm up and ready to go. Then someone would pull the plug at the aircraft, roll-up the cables and close the car hood. You go fly for a hour and come back and park at the same place, without having to move the car or truck. We have found that using the same cables rolled up under a bench beside an aircraft parked in the hangar work very well for hangar flying. We put a good but used car battery at the bench end of the cables and a 10 Amp automatic charger on that battery. We can just plug the charger in to the wall outlet any time we want to hangar fly or top off the aircraft battery and just roll out the cable and plug into the aircraft ground port. Even with the panel fired up we don't quite use 10 Amps and the other battery in the set-up acts as a buffer. I also like the fact that if we are going for a long hall, say like to KOSH for a week, we an roll up the cables and stow them in baggage somewhere. This is the same thing the big birds do when they pull up to the gate or that you do with a boat when you plug into Shore Power.
Just an idea as you will like to hangar fly a lot while getting used to your panel or just practicing your programs Yours, R.E.A. III # 80888
