Flying Summers Brothers

It seems unlikely that we will make our usual jaunt from coast-to-coast this summer. Rudy starts college on August 20th, Dexter is booked solid for the entire summer up until a Shakespeare performance on August 9th, and we are here in Los Angeles for a wedding the following weekend. So we’re pretty pinned down.

I’m going to count our trip up the west coast as our summer family flight. I’m hopeful that in August we’ll get up to at least the Bay area, or maybe even Lake Tahoe, but for now this one will have to do. 

For Rudy’s college tour we flew much of this same route, stopped overnight to look at Berkley (too big) and stretching as far north as Wala Wala, Washington for Whitman college (too small) while also stopping in Portland to look at Reed (just right!).  Continue reading →

The great thing about flying little planes is that you never know which flight is going to be an adventure. It could just be a milk run, or it could turn into the time you saw the most gorgeous sunset of your life as you flew past the largest wildfire you’ve ever seen, complete with fire service planes dropping fire retardant on the conflagration.

You never know. Continue reading →

It is interesting the way worlds collide sometimes.

My friend Andy has taken me up to the Mullin Museum in Oxnard before. We went up and looked at the most beautiful cars of the 1920s and 1930s. The sort of things that architects want parked next to the homes they design, so some of the breathtaking aesthetic rubs off on the viewers’ eyes. Their website (as of April 2013) is stunning. Peter Mullin is currently the curator of the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles as well.  Continue reading →

This is a little like when Adam and went airport hopping.

Our plane needed a software upgrade (that’s the sort of world we live in now), and there was a clicking in the radios that the mechanic thought he could trace to the ignition system. So N971RD needed to be in Long Beach for most of Thursday. Friends online suggested that once I had the multi-engine certificate I should make sure to do something fun with it, since the lessons themselves are not a lot of fun (you fly around on one engine a lot of the time). So while our plane was in the shop I rented N570TS, one of the Twinstars that I had not been in for training.

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The follow up check ride to my failed multi-engine flight was uneventful. I had gone down on Wednesday, October 23rd and had yet another lesson with my instructor. We did three landings on a single engine, just flying the pattern around 25L at Long Beach. I did well on each of them, even the last one, where Zach messed with the power lever, pulling power from the failed engine, simulating a feathered propeller becoming unfeathered.

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I have been training to get my multi-engine rating for the past few weeks. When I tell people they always ask, “Oh, are you going to get a bigger plane?” But it’s not really about that. 

In the spring I took a motorcycle safety course (getting a perfect score on the written and a perfect score on the riding test), which was the best way to get an M on my California drivers license. I have not gone out and bought a motorcycle (although there are some tempting electric ones out there now). In fact, I have not even been on a motorcycle since getting the M. Two things figured into it. The first is that I rode motorcycles quite a bit when I was younger (putting ten thousand miles on a bright blue Yamaha Seca II, and spending two years driving around Las Vegas, Nevada on it). It seemed like if I was going to do any more of it, I should get proper training and become legal (here in California even our governor was riding around without the M). The second thing is that learning something new (or getting real training for something you already “know”) is good for your brain. It gets harder to learn new things as you get older, it gets very easy to settle into the same patterns and that is bad for the brain. We live way too long now for us to stop learning new things when we are fifty. That would mean we spent the next fifty treading the same little paths. What good can come of that? Stretch, explore, learn. Continue reading →

This was a great trip, with our first successful landing in the Chicago area (but we hope not our last), and a stop in Michigan to see the set of Oz the Great and Powerful. I had asked the boys to contribute to the blog, and I recently found Dexter’s entries in my email, so they are here:

• Santa Monica to Liberal
• Liberal to Chicago
• Chicago to Oakland
• Oakland to Lebanon