Flying Summers Brothers

Oh, I have quite a few things to write about, since I’ve flown both directions across the continent. I’ve crossed the northern border to our colder brother to the north. I’m working on those entries, but in the meantime, just a little news:

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Flying little airplanes with single engines you want to climb up as high as you can. Altitude is safety, since if something goes wrong you have some time to glide toward a good emergency landing spot and some time to diagnose and solve the problem. Thinner air up higher means the airplane faces less drag and you gain some speed. The engine also gets less oxygen, which means it burns less fuel. All in all, higher is better. Continue reading →

AOG. Dreaded triad of the alphabet for pilots. Airplane On Ground. Almost always due to a maintenance issue. Last night was our second night spent in Albuquerque. People I spoke to about being stuck at ABQ all said, “Oh, I love Albuquerque.” Well, I might love it if I were here voluntarily. Maybe I’ll come back so I can appreciate it more. Last night we moved to a hotel in the bustling down town and walked to a decent dinner. That was better than being at the airport Wyndham and trying to choke down enough of their microwaved entree to not starve. Continue reading →

The engine in a piston-powered airplane is not like the engine in your automobile. It is much more primitive. Until fairly recently they still had carburetors. In fact, when you rent planes you are sometimes climbing into a thirty year old plane and it will still have a carburetor. Ours has fuel injection. (That’s good, since there are quite a few accidents caused by improper application of carburetor heat, usually not enough so the carburetor inlet fills with ice and the engine dies.) Ours also has a lot of monitors so we can get a decent picture of what is happening in the cylinders, but for the most part the engine is technology they use in tractor engines. Or did use in tractor engines until the early sixties. Our ancient engine technology includes magnetos. Continue reading →

The Whole Way

On Tuesday morning at 0800 Adam and I will leave Santa Monica Airport for Carroll County Regional Airport in Westminster, Maryland. (Nell and the boys will follow on JetBlue, arriving in Boston on Saturday morning. Then we’ll be able to flit up and and down the East coast, starting with a week in New Hampshire.)

Because of the variability of the winds aloft and weather, we can’t plan more than a couple legs ahead. We know that we are going to land in Sedona, because it is meant to be a beautiful airport and it has a good diner. A logical stop after that is Albuquerque, and then probably on to Amarillo.

We will be trying to write blog entries along the way, but for up-to-the-landing coverage, make sure that you are subscribed to the Google Group. I will send a time, photo, and airport identifier each time we set down (as long as I have cell signal). Then you can go to Runway Finder and put in the collected identifiers (separated by semicolons) to see our route. Try KSMO;KSEZ;KAEG as an example, that’s our first two legs on the map. (You can press the map button on their page to see it as a regular Google map instead of an aviation chart.)

See you on the other side.

Travel Chocks

So I have these cute little yellow chocks. They are steel, perforated with large holes to keep the weight down, and low profile. The wheel pants on the Diamondstar come down closer to the tarmac than most wheel pants. That makes them more aerodynamic and makes the plane faster, but it also means that when the line man at the FBO puts the regular size wooden chocks against the wheels the wheel pants actually sit upon them a little. And then the wind shifts the plane a little, and the wheel pants crack. (Carbon fiber, fiberglass… not cheap to repair.) Continue reading →

Okay, maybe that’s not fair. Maybe I hate them all. But I particularly dislike making the mistake I made today.

The radio tunes to different frequencies. There’s a knob you twist to set the frequency and then a button (the flip flop button) to move the newly-dialed frequency into the active position. Then you are talking on it.

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