Flying little airplanes with single engines you want to climb up as high as you can. Altitude is safety, since if something goes wrong you have some time to glide toward a good emergency landing spot and some time to diagnose and solve the problem. Thinner air up higher means the airplane faces less drag and you gain some speed. The engine also gets less oxygen, which means it burns less fuel. All in all, higher is better. Click to continue »

West to East

An adventure is only an adventure if it has the potential for something to go a little wrong. A bad magneto is certainly always possible when flying, and that’s what happened to us trying to cross the country. As misadventures go, this one only cost us time. No one was hurt, the airplane was not bent, and there was no outrageous cost (it was covered by warranty).If we didn’t have those two nights motionless after only six hundred miles, it would have been a great crossing. My goal was to fly the plane across the country, dropping Adam in Maryland where Sharalyn and Ellie were, and continuing on to pickup Nell and the boys in Boston (they would fly in on the redeye Jetblue flight) to bring them up to New Hampshire. Click to continue »

AOG. Dreaded triad of the alphabet for pilots. Airplane On Ground. Almost always due to a maintenance issue. Last night was our second night spent in Albuquerque. People I spoke to about being stuck at ABQ all said, “Oh, I love Albuquerque.” Well, I might love it if I were here voluntarily. Maybe I’ll come back so I can appreciate it more. Last night we moved to a hotel in the bustling down town and walked to a decent dinner. That was better than being at the airport Wyndham and trying to choke down enough of their microwaved entree to not starve. Click to continue »

The engine in a piston-powered airplane is not like the engine in your automobile. It is much more primitive. Until fairly recently they still had carburetors. In fact, when you rent planes you are sometimes climbing into a thirty year old plane and it will still have a carburetor. Ours has fuel injection. (That’s good, since there are quite a few accidents caused by improper application of carburetor heat, usually not enough so the carburetor inlet fills with ice and the engine dies.) Ours also has a lot of monitors so we can get a decent picture of what is happening in the cylinders, but for the most part the engine is technology they use in tractor engines. Or did use in tractor engines until the early sixties. Our ancient engine technology includes magnetos. Click to continue »