Flying Summers Brothers

Way back in 2009 I took a friend up to the Bay Area and he shot a little film of it.

And one of the latest passengers has written a book of poems about a flight up the west coast to Seattle in N972RD. Check it out on Amazon.

Another failure to properly document a long flight. But I took a few photographs. My goal for my next long flight is to properly gather the images for a real photographic logbook (my first effort was in September).

At 4am I woke up and stumbled out to my Uber. American Airlines lifted off on time for the 6am flight to Phoenix. After strolling the huge terminal for an hour I was on a CRJ that landed in Midland, Texas at 12:46pm. Continue reading →

If you fly two thousand hours over eleven years you will see some equipment failures (and some pilot failures). This was the first time I had a failure and didn’t know it.

Friends who follow me on Facebook are familiar with these two pictures:

As I was flying Dexter from Santa Monica, California to New Orleans, Louisiana for SICB’s annual conference we stopped for fuel (of human and engine both) in Austin, Texas. We took off into a night sky. I could spot traffic coming off Houston’s main airport more easily and watched the passenger jets coming in from the north heading for a long downwind leg to land.

A good pilot is always scanning everything. I take photos and on long, daylight legs will read a book, but I don’t read more than a sentence or two before I glance at all the important information. My ears are tuned to the hum of the engines and when they cough or mumble I am instantly alert and double-scanning everything. More often with the twins the propellers will get out sync, with the left engine at 2090 RPMs and the right at 2100 RPMs. A little nudge on the throttle and they are back humming evenly again. But I am always checking the groundspeed, comparing to the true airspeed, the tailwinds, the estimated time en route (ETE) to our next navigation point, and then a glance to check on the passenger (snoozing). Continue reading →

Austin Executive

I would love to document a perfect flight. I know that I did a little round-robin of airport hopping a few years back and I was really happy that I had not made a single mistake on the radio. Since the radio is the source of my least-favorite mistake, I still work hard to match that.

On small airplanes things pop open. That sounds sort of scary, but the engineers designing the planes are away of the fallibility of latches, so almost everything that CAN open on an airplane is attached in a way that makes it popping open immaterial to the continuing flight. (One of the rare modern exceptions is the two seater version of our plane, the DA20. The canopy opens up and back, which is different than the four-seat models. There were two accidents early on where the canopy popped open on instruction flights and the canopy acted as a huge speed brake, bring the airplane down. They changed the latching system.) Continue reading →

From October 9 to December 6 I did not fly an airplane. That’s the longest I have gone since learning HOW to fly an airplane. That was disorienting and a little depressing. It coincided with dropping Dexter at school and having a truly empty nest for the first time, so it was difficult to know what part of being despondent was about not having the usual energy and enthusiasm of the boys around and what part was not being able to visit the sky.

Nell and I decamped to New York City, rather than being in the empty home. That was a good decision, except that it’s pretty hard to be in Manhattan and still bum around at the airport and get up in a little plane. I debated going to a simulator club in midtown, but always decided that the aviation dollars were being Hoover-ed up fast enough by the factory. I could try to not add to that side of the ledger.

While in New York I received rather desperate looking photographs of the plane up in London, Ontario. Continue reading →

When I wrote up my impressions of the Diamondstar after my first few flights, I didn’t dwell on the three drawbacks that I noticed even after my first test flight in the plane:

1. The canopy offers incredible views, but that means that you get warmed by the sun. A lot.

2. The seats, which are engineered to help you withstand a 27g crash, do not move. That position you are in when you sit down? You’ll be in that position for the duration of the flight.

3. The controls for the airplane are the rudder pedal and the control stick. That comes up through a hole in the seat, right between your knees. It makes you feel like a fighter pilot, but it might not be that nice for the passenger in the right seat.

I have now moved to a new plane, but those three disadvantages remain. And I have a few other minor ones that I have added to the list. Part of the time with the plane is nudging forward (toward perfection), looking for solutions to each of these issues. Continue reading →