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...

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...

As mentioned in many other posts, I fly along waiting for my engine to fail. That was an integral part of my training: always have an emergency landing location picked out. The whole way from airport to airport. (And, subsequently, I plan my routes to fly over enough airports that there is a real...

On Tuesday (April 8 2013) I flew down to Air Flite at Long Beach and took a FAA Safety Team seminar “The Twenty-five Biggest Mistakes Pilots Make.” It was put on by the Pilot Safety Institute, and the speaker was Gary Reeves, a CFII with all sorts of accomplishments (top ten percent of CFIs in the...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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:

It always bothers me to see "a miracle" used to describe really excellent engineering and materials selection.The Suqanee couple is alive because the engineers at Diamond Aircraft made the decision to design a plane for a possible crash, rather than just for flying. That's an odd decision since it...