May, 2006

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Learning to Fly Better

Tuesday, May 23rd, 2006

If one took no chances, one would not fly at all. Safety lies in the judgment of the chances one takes. That judgment, in turn, must rest upon one’s outlook on life. Any coward can sit in his home and criticize a pilot for flying into a mountain in fog. But I would rather, by far, die on a mountainside than in bed.

Charles Lindbergh

You know, I am no critic of dying in bed. I’m not even a critic of staying home in bed. I like sleeping in a bit on Saturday morning, waking up, reading, writing some email and considering the big picture. I am working really hard to learn to fly in fog without flying into a mountain, as unadventurous as that might sound to Mr. Lindbergh.

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Aborted Flight to Vegas

Monday, May 22nd, 2006

Bob was in Las Vegas and I needed to visit the Castle site. Adam had a research friend who was in town and interested in taking a flight. I am not sure you could pay me to ride back and forth to Las Vegas in the back seat if I had nothing to do in Las Vegas, but Steve seemed game.

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First IFR in IMC

Tuesday, May 16th, 2006

IFR: Instrument Flight Rules. You can fly in the clouds.

VFR: Visual Flight Rules. A lot simpler, but you can only fly where you can see.

IMC: Instrument Meteorlogical Conditions. You can’t see where you are flying.

Way back on April 12 I made my first real IFR flight, from Santa Monica to Las Vegas (Henderson Executive Airport). It was very exciting, copying the clearance, figuring out the route and putting everything into the Garmin 1000 to help me find my way through imaginary clouds. I flew the whole way “under the hood,” with my flight instructor watching for traffic and helping me decipher instructions from Air Traffic Control.

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Watch Me Fly

Monday, May 15th, 2006

Okay, this is pretty cool. You can click on that link and it will show you the last time I flew the DiamondStar on an instrument flight plan. Amazing. It will show you the actual radar trace of the flight. There’s a link to the altitudes I flew at.

I need to write up the two flights I took and I also need to write up my birthday present, which was a couple hours of acrobatic training. I’m behind the blog, which is not as bad as being behind the plane.

SBA Redux

Thursday, May 11th, 2006

I didn’t know I had connivance. I’ll have to get those inserts for my shoes, which I think takes care of that.

Axel was a great passenger. He loved the entire ride and he pointed out all sorts of interesting nature events and talked about the recently published study about the effectiveness of prayer. He writes a column for the German equivalent of the Wall Street Journal and that week’s column was about how we really don’t need to keep doing that study; prayer doesn’t work.
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