Planning a trip

"S Green" wrote in message
...
Welcome any thoughts on best plane for the mission, best time of year /
route to capitalise on the weather re most flyable days.

There are other good replies, but some additional comments...

If you're going to buy a plane for the purpose, you should make sure your
schedule has lots of buffer built in to deal with maintenance. In theory, a
rental or borrowed airplane would have the same issue too, but airplanes up
for sale are often planes that have not been used or maintained regularly,
and a new owner can expect to spend the first year catching up on a lot of
neglect.

Speed is not a major requirement but with mountains to negotiate
performance
could be an issue unless the mountains can be neutralised.

Seems to me, you can have a lot of fun flying around for six months, with
pretty much any airplane going pretty much anywhere. I'd look for an
airplane with a turbocharger, just because that makes flying in the
mountainous areas and hot weather that much more enjoyable. But with that
much time to spend, you can afford to do a lot of morning-only and
wait-for-the-weather decisions, and proceed gradually.

Would also want to rig up a TV camera to record the trip. That would be
covered by someone else as it would be necessary to have camera remote
controls on near control column, yoke.

When you say "record the trip", do you mean every flight hour? That's a lot
of tape. Nevermind someone will have to edit it down to something
watchable.

Of course, I suppose you could keep a log, keeping only those tapes with
something interesting. Or if you bring a laptop, you could even archive the
interesting bits each day (copying it to recordable CD or DVD). Either way,
you could reuse tapes after you've either pulled off what you want to keep,
or if nothing interesting was on it. That would help reduce the bulk of
carrying around a bunch of videotape, as well as ease the editing chores
when you're all done.

Pete