Marc’s Musings Reality from Marc’s point of view!

I’ve been shifting around my priorities lately and finally took the time to do my biennial flight review.

For this review I elected to use a Diamond DA-20 as I’m intending to use this type of plane much more often on future flights. Also, it’s a stepping stone to the DA-40 and my local flight school has two of those at a reasonable price.

This is really a great idea, every two years, to be legal to fly, you must sit down with a flight instructor for an hour and then fly for about an hour in order to demonstrate that you still know your procedures and that you know what you’re doing.

I think, if we were to adopt a similar system for automobile currency we’d have a LOT less foolishness and carelessness on the roads. I think folks are *way* to cavalier in their approach to driving. Being forced to stay current - as well as to come up to speed on the laws as they constantly change - would be a good thing for us all.

There needs to be some kind of accountability linking people and their care or lack thereof back to the folks who made it possible to be on the roads. Having one’s name endorsing someone’s driving certificate should offer some incentive to ensure that at least some of the basics have been reviewed with that driver.

Obviously, the bloated and ineffective system used by the DOT for driver examination would be useless for this endeavor, but a privatized system of folks who would administer these tests and held accountable for their approvals seems like it would make a lot of sense.

Posted under Aviation, Opinions

As scary as this looks I have to say that I’d *love* to try this someday. There is very little room for error and you definitely need to be confident with your skills.

Of course parking off to the side and watching planes taking off and landing from here would be a lot of fun too! I’ll have to see if I can ever get to St. Barts (maybe via a cruise) and make my way over to this strip for a couple of cool photo opps and some excitement.

Posted under Aviation, Very Cool

I was discussing airplanes with my father earlier today and how the advent of smaller, more affordable jet aircraft will likely affect air travel of the future. Right now such aircraft are so expensive that only very wealthy folks or corporations can afford to take advantage of them. But with new “air taxi” services starting to come online hosting fleets of smaller, much more affordable aircraft, and with our wonderful TSA with all their extremism, I can see a stratification of air travel on the horizon.

Right now we have the big, stuffy common carriers - who fight tooth and nail to ensure that there are no laws to protect the rights of the traveling public - and the more agile economy carriers - who work hard to keep air travel at reasonable prices.

The Achilles heel of both carriers is that they must operate out of airports that are governed by, with all due respect, unimaginative, pandering dolts. There is a tremendous potential market growing out there as America’s super-affluent middle class decides that it would much rather not be caged in airplanes waiting for delayed flight slots or trapped in airports after having surrendered dignity and just-as-valuable time to get past the uninspired, callous, rude and ineffective security systems.

I am predicting that regional airports in America need to gear up for a boon in business as America’s middle class begin to discover affordable air transportation alternatives in their local cities while the poorer classes become relegated to the airports for long-distance travel much as the current underclass are today relegated to bus terminals for their travel needs. Just as with the bus terminal class, poorer folks do not have options and cannot exercise their power to shop elsewhere. But many Americans have more money now than they know what to do with. It will be interesting to see how much dignity is worth in airfare price premium.

*Update* Just saw this story about folks being kept on a Delta plane for 7 hours on Friday… *sigh*

Posted under Aviation, Opinions

Yech!

I can honestly say I’ve only ever had one person throw up in a plane while I was flying. It was while I was still taking lessons and we took a passenger along since she’d expressed an interest in checking out the flying thing.

The nice thing about air-sickness is, once you actually finish heaving, you feel fine afterward. We went out and had lunch afterward.

Now this video takes your air-sickness scenario and goes over the top. I have no idea how the camera was mounted to capture this but it is very stable.

If you’re *really* squeamish you should probably give this a pass, but otherwise it’s great for a laugh!

Posted under Amusing, Aviation

On Tuesday evening (July 3) I rented a Piper Warrior and regained my night proficiency. I practiced soft field and short field landings and takeoffs both with and without obstacles as well as just general takeoffs and landings. I really do need to get out during the day and hone my other skills (steep turns, S-curves, emergency procedures) but it was good to get out after a long hiatus. I haven’t been up in the air since that Thanksgiving trip.

That paved the way to taking Michelle up to watch the Independence Day fireworks over Atlanta. There are always surprisingly few folks up there doing this. I suppose one of the downsides is that you can’t do any alcoholic drinking during the day and I think a lot of folks like to kick back with a cold one and relax on the holiday.

There are several factors to balance, fireworks generally don’t exceed 1,300 feet AGL so you obviously don’t want to be flying anywhere near that low, ignoring the fact that you’d be daring some of the taller broadcast antennae to pop up on your route of travel. In addition to that you have the ceiling imposed on you by Atlanta’s Bravo-class airspace (about 5-6 thousand feet AGL in the area of interest to me) and the minimum altitudes required to not violate Peachtree-Dekalb’s and Dobbins Air Force base’s airspace (3500 and 3400 feet AGL respectively).  I opted to simply fly around those. I’d suggest you really want to be comfortable flying before you do this without an instructor or another experienced pilot in the airplane with you.

Even though there are relatively few folks “flight-seeing” the fireworks, they are all concentrated both at the big fireworks displays and again back at their home airports as the fireworks end. The lower airspace within which we view the fireworks is largely uncontrolled meaning that there is no standard altitude/direction scheme like you have from 3,000 feet AGL on up so you need to be vigilant in avoiding the other aircraft out there. I’ve found that everybody is pretty good at picking altitudes and keeping out of each other’s way.

In the past we found that it seems to be VERY difficult taking digital pictures at night from an airplane. We discovered that film cameras aren’t much better this time around. The constant vibration of the airplane makes long shutter times impractical and we had only 400 ASA film. Pretty much the entire role was a write-off. That picture at the beginning of this blog entry was one that I just found on the Internet to pretty up this posting. We *did* get two pictures but they are so blurry as to be laughable

Anyway, we appreciated the Phipps plaza and Centennial Olympic park fireworks and, as always, the HUNDREDS of local fireworks displays that you can see from the air. It seems nearly every cul-de-sac, not to mention municipality, has their own show and they look spectacular when you look out and can see them all happening simultaneously.

Nearly as spectacular has to be witnessing the absolute standstill of traffic as we overflew the various venue parking lots after the shows ended. Literally like the last scene of “Field of Dreams” only with both white AND red lights stretching out into the distance and none of them going anywhere as Atlanta drivers, typically, gridlocked all of the intersections. All that chaos was done with by the time we landed and secured our aircraft and we had a pleasant drive home.

Posted under Aviation

Continued from part 3.

I contacted my Plane Rental company and they offered to send over an IFR rated pilot in a powerful plane (Piper Aztec) to pick us up. This left our little Warrior at Knoxville airport to be picked up the following weekend.

I had never flown before in IMC in a GA airplane. The altitude assigned to us by Atlanta radio had us right at the tops of the clouds, so we would occasionally be above a valley of cloud and sometimes we were plowing through mountains of white fluff lit by moonlight. The effect was surreal and wonderful.

Overall this was a tremendous learning experience, our plane did not have any autopilot so I was able to hone my basic handling skills. Flying into more complex airspace than normal (C class, TRSA) and pushing myself to take advantage of the services offered have made me MUCH more comfortable with taking advantage of such facilities so that I will do so without hesitation in the future. The in-cockpit weather is a great tool and I think I will keep that subscription, however I will definitely be availing myself of the weather information services both on the ground and in the air on a much more frequent basis than before.

Mich is a great flying companion, she will voice her opinion when she doesn’t understand something or feels there may be an issue but she is cool about the realities of GA flying – i.e. sometimes you just can’t get where you’re going. Of course, bribing her with a nice hotel room never hurts .

This trip also underscored the need to attain my IFR certificate if I am to use the plane in any practical sense for getting places, that and getting checked out in more powerful aircraft will make this hobby a lot more practical for our vacation aspirations.

 

 

Posted under Aviation

This post was written by Marc
on December 29, 2006 at 6:57 pm