Flying Summers Brothers

Back in January of this year Diamond Aircraft Industries called and asked if I would mind talking with them a little about my plane. I am always happy to talk about the plane. Perhaps ad nausea. I don’t think I know when to stop talking about the plane.

I bought the plane when I had only flown 80hrs. That’s not a lot of experience, but it’s not terrible. I have a friend who bought his at nearly the exact same time, right when he finished his private pilot certification. I wish I had the nerve and confidence to buy it when I first flew it, which was after only ten hours of flying. I knew it was a great plane, and I would have had that much more time in the plane rather than in creaky old Cherokee planes from the 1970s. Ah well, hindsight is so sharp, isn’t it?

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January 6 2006

We only had the plane for ten days when we decided to take a family trip up to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. My parents were out at Catalina Island and after lunch I ran some groceries out to them. Then we picked the boys up from elementary school and zipped down to the airport.
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I’ve only done it twice, so I imagine that I will make alterations to this guide after we have done it as a family. Both times I was with people with a high tolerance for discomfort, which helps with this sort of adventurous travel. Keeping that in mind, here were the simple tenets that helped us across, once to the East and one back home to the West. (more…)

I’ve been a good customer of many businesses across the country, a lot of them situated on airfields. I use a website called AirNav to look up airfields before I land there. It will tell me if the food is edible, the fuel is cheap, and the people friendly.

FBO (I’ve started a glossary!) stands for Fixed Base Operator. So, unlike a charter operator, which could just own a plane and land places to grab passengers, an FBO has at least one location that is fixed to a particular airfield. They vary wildly in the services they provide. I like both ends of the spectrum. Sometimes I am the little guy visiting the huge, jet-ready FBO, and I get all the luxury that the private-jet crowd is used to even thought I am in a little bug-smasher. Other FBOs are geared toward the learning-to-fly crowd (and, indeed, offer instruction and rental planes) and it can feel like you’ve stepped back into the 1950s when you walk in (the flight training business is not very lucrative). I like walking into those, since it feels like so many pilots have stood on the same worn carpets talking about flying. Adam and I learned at a small flight school, so they also feel familiar all the way back to my student pilot days. (more…)

Traveling across the continent in the plane for the first time was not something I took lightly. I read a lot, studied the charts a lot, and talked to a lot of other pilots. After much consultation, this is what I packed into the plane (before we then loaded it with our luggage). As usual, click on a thumbnail to see the full-sized photo.
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Returning west, we were often dodging through the clouds. We flew at ten thousand feet or so, and descending to an airport seven thousand feet below took fifteen to twenty minutes. At least, that was a comfortable rate. We could also just push the noise over and scream down, but then we would be swallowing a lot during the ride to lunch to get our ears to pop.

The ride up through the eastern portion of Kansas was a real game of storm dodging. Kansas City Center was extremely helpful. There was another line of heavy precipitation headed our way, but we were half an hour ahead of it. We were headed for Manhattan, Kansas, which calls itself “The Little Apple.” So cute. (more…)

Here is an important lesson. After my flight from the Canadian border to the eastern tip of Long Island, I was wiped out. I parked in the pitch black at night on an unfamiliar ramp. I did my usual parking job, carefully on the painted T and with the pair of the little red metal chocks under the nose wheel.

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Back on August 17, after our visit to the Diamond factory and our traditional return-to-civilization meal at the CN Tower, the boys and I crossed into the United States, cleared customs at the Buffalo airport and headed toward the eastern tip of Long Island, trying to make it to their cousin Freddie’s birthday party the following day.

There was weather. (more…)