Oh! I am so famous now, I’m on the Internet. Well, at least this is good for people that might want to see a video of the plane so they understand the size and shape of the star of most of these posts.

We made it!

We are in New Hampshire in a lovely house overlooking a pleasant lake. I have just barely recovered from eighteen and a half hours of flying. We traveled nearly twenty-three hundred miles. We hope to continue to East Hampton on Saturday morning, so that we can really say that we have crossed the continent from coast to coast. Click to continue »

Santa Monica’s little airport has a restriction on early morning departures. You can’t start your engine earlier than 7am on a weekday or 8am on a weekend. So we all rolled out of bed at 6:15am, finished packing up the last few items, locked the house up and armed the alarm. Dexter wanted to listen to loud music (Weezer) on the way to the airport, Rudy wanted to read. Click to continue »

Well, if you are reading this on the web page (as opposed to in a newsreader like Google’s Reader), then you’ve noticed a layout change. I upgraded the software (WordPress) which publishes the blog. Oh, exciting, I know. But, it does mean that I can write entries from the iPhone. Click to continue »

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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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. Click to continue »

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. Click to continue »

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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