Monday, February 16, 2009

Poll anyone?

My friend Rand recently did a poll on who was reading his blog. Honestly I do not know who comes by here and reads this. I do have a counter so I know it gets hits, but I have not really looked at the history of visits in months. At one time I knew this blog had hits from 13 different countries. I never really thought this blog would have any "followers" since its just my random thoughts about where I have been so far in my short aviation career. I wanted to be able to keep track of what is going on. Kinda like a log book. I go back every now and then and look at my old log book entries. It triggers memories of past experiences and flights. I try to add information in my log book entries not just about flight details, but where I went, with who, did we go for a $100 hamburger...was it any good? Was it their first flight? It is interesting to read those older entries. So back to Rand, He was curious who was reading his blog, and it made me curious too. I would like to know about your aviation background. If you care to share check out the poll to the right. Feel free to leave a comment if you would like to share in more detail your flying experience...or non-flying as I am sure there might be a pilot to be reading the blog too :-)

Saturday, February 14, 2009

In Memory of...

First I want to offer my condolences to the friends and families of the victims of flight 3407. God bless you. You all will be in my prayers. I was shocked to wake up and see the news on the web that a Dash-8 had gone down. For those of us in aviation, especially General Aviation we know and understand that accidents can and do happen. We never like to see it, but obviously we do learn from it, and it continues to make aviation the safest form of transportation. With each accident we learn something new. Just today I watched a video produced by NASA talking about tailplane stalls due to icing. I had never heard of this before and the stall characteristics and recovery of a tail stall are completely different then for a wing stall. There is speculation at this point that icing is what cased the accident of 3407. we will not know for sure for some time. I know crashes like this make big news. There is a lot of false information being reported, and there are even those who publicly are saying horrible things about the crew. The simple fact is there was a crash. We lost brothers, and sisters, moms and dads, and sons and daughters. Let the pros do their job, figure out what happened, and lets all learn from it. Now let's honor the memory of those who perished.

Monday, February 9, 2009

Learning to fly!



WOW, $100 to learn to fly with a "qualified" flight Instructor! The funny thing is, half of those planes are still sitting on a flightline somewhere still flying!

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Something old...

So just a day after flying the Geronimo, my friends ask me if I can pick up a Mooney for him. Sure why not, I love Mooneys! Come to find out it was the Mooney I used to own! It had an annual due. It was a nice surprise
Then he comes to me asking if I would take the 150 into KSAT leave it and pick up the Mooney. better yet. The 150 is another plane I owned before. It is also fun to fly. It has a 150 horse engine in it rather then the factory 100 horse. This thing leaps off the ground!



Here is my arrival into KSAT
It ended up getting very turbulent on th ereturn trip, and it had turned into a cross wind at Kestrel, which made for an interesting landing. It has been an interesting few days, you just never know whats going to pop up next!