King of the Sky
Things just move way too fast. This is Abel Tazman Lehman, Adam’s son. He’s only two, but he already dwarfs a Kansan variant of the Beech D18. He is very into trucks, cars, tractors, airplanes, anything with a motor. He is sporting a shirt from a tiny, tiny town in Ontario and his trip to Canada this summer is going to be the highlight of his scant years. Nothing but boats to vroom-vroom and cousins to clamber around the rocks with.
KSMO – KOAK – KMFR – KPDX – KALW – KFHR
Our plane is registered with a vanity tail number, N971RD. It means that Rudy and Dexter were nine and seven when we got the plane (and I have just the one wife). It seems astonishing, but Rudy is now seventeen and in the fall will enter his senior year of high school. So it is time to start thinking about colleges. Continue reading
Student Pilot
This is Swayne Martin. If I had managed to get into aviation a little sooner, and if I have been born a little later, I like to think that I would be as focused, optimistic and communicative as him. I could be kidding myself.
I follow blogs like pieces of pasta. Delicious, informative pieces of pasta which I slurp up as one is connected to the next. I would love to be able to piece together how I found Swayne, but I only know that I read his story on Karlene Petitt’s blog. And I think that Sam’s blog pointed me to hers. Continue reading
Adam is a better pilot than I am. He has had a deep love of aviation from when he was old enough to put together a model airplane, so he should be a better pilot than I am. And his current location at KFHR gives him a real reason to love it, since it makes being on an island a lot less isolated.
I am happy in my one plane. I wish I had either bought it as soon as I began my training or that I had been at a school that had that particular model. I do well with familiarity. I am more than monogamous, I am monomaniacal. Part of it is being a slow learner and trying to get lost in the depth of really knowing a single thing. Adam is more comfortable learning about a lot of things. Continue reading
Second Article
This is going up late, but I realized I hadn’t put a link in here to the second Plane & Pilot article. Adam was critical to this one getting out there because I was in the middle of writing code for the dot-com I joined in April of 2011. So I eagerly accepted the assignment and was promptly buried by work.
By talking to Adam about the various things that needed to be reviewed, and making sure he had copies to look at himself, the article came together like a kit plane in a garage. We tossed it back and forth a few times, but it’s more Adam’s work than mine. I think he was nice and said we should just split the writer’s fee.
While on these extended trips, we make constant use of the Internet’s community of fellow travelers. I hope to eventually write up our recent trip up the West coast to the Seattle area, but before I do I need to fix some of the damage the script kiddies did. And I needed to give back to the community that reviews Fixed Base Operators (FBOs) at the various places we land. The best site to read these is AirNav and I’ve posted my reviews for them before. Continue reading
A few months ago my mother pointed out that the flying blog had gone down. It’s not that she’s the most loyal reader (although it works out that way), she kept it as her home page in her browser because of the randomly rotating images in the header. So she noticed immediately if it went down. Or at least as soon as she opened a new browser window.
Roald Dahl knew how to write. And he had a little cabin on his property that was his writing space. He disappeared to it almost every day, which is one of the secrets to doing something well: do it all the time. Frequency is important to honing a skill. That’s why I try to get into the plane, and into the sky, every week. That frequency keeps the skills a lot sharper than if I fly just when the family is all going on a trip. In fact, the FAA is pretty sure that frequency is key to keeping you alive. So they have regulations about how often you need to fly in order to legally carry passengers.
As a pilot, I train constantly. One of the things I loved about learning to fly was that as soon as I was signed off to solo I could go out in the plane and, as long as I focused, I would be a better pilot when I returned. Apparently all of the FAA examiners pause before giving out the certificate allowing you to be a pilot and they say, “Remember, this is just a license to keeping learning.”
That’s why I try to fly twice a week, both because getting rusty is a life-threatening trap and because as long as I pay attention (rather than just enjoying the ride), I get a little bit better. I learn to land a little more smoothly in a crosswind, I get just a little more concise and professional speaking to the tower controllers, and I get the checklists ingrained a little more deeply in my behavior in the cockpit.
Michigan on to New Hampshire
We woke up later than we had been which was nice. Rudy wasn’t there so Mom yelped for breakfast. She found about a place called Commonwealth, but before we went we checked out a boarding school called Cranbrook Academy. We went there to see the architecture because one of my dad’s friend’s dad designed some of it. Continue reading
Flying Summers Brothers 