The Milk Run

Posted on September 16, 2006 by Colin Summers
Otto flying, pilot posing

Otto flying, pilot posing

According to my logbook I have flown the round trip from Santa Monica’s municipal airport to Henderson Executive Airport fifteen times (as of September 12, 2006). I had one more flight into Las Vegas, but it was a stop in Boulder City. Same flight, I suppose; it is about two hours each direction. It seems like it should be routine at this point. Certainly by the time I had made even a dozen flights on Southwest along the same route I had settled into a jaded shuffle from airport lounge to airplane seat and out to the automobile seat that I would ride either to the site or back home. Flying myself, though, I am still fascinated by every stage of the journey.

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Mixing with the Big Boys

Posted on July 25, 2006 by Colin Summers
737 at Lindbergh Field

737 at Lindbergh Field

This past weekend I took Rudy to Comic-con. It is the international convention of people in the comic business, held each year in San Diego. With the success of movies like Batman, The Matrix, Spider-man, Batman Begins, X-Men and so forth, Hollywood has discovered Comic-con. Attendance has exploded. In my later youth (maybe I’m still in that), I was one of only a few kids I knew who read comic books, so I’ve always considered comics a small, niche audience, a strange little subculture. When it was possible to schedule a day to take a look with Rudy (who loves comics like only a ten-year old can) I jumped at it.
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The Longest Nautical Mile

Posted on July 20, 2006 by Colin Summers

Adam was running his laboratory and teaching classes up at Friday Harbor Island Marine Station. That’s on one of the San Juan Islands off of Seattle. Bob and I were curious about taking a long flight, and I checked to see how long it would take. Eight and a half hours each direction, and since I couldn’t be away from home for more than a night it would be seventeen hours of flying in two days.

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Engine Out

Posted on July 19, 2006 by Colin Summers

Here’s the thing about emergency landings. I don’t expect to have to do one, but I’ve trained to do one, I’ve practice them a number of times, and my training keeps me focused on one question while I am flying: If the engine stops now, where do I put down the plane? A lot of the time that’s an easy answer. Almost all the way to Las Vegas and back I am within gliding distance of a real airport. (Sometimes a private field, sometimes a restricted defense contractor’s field, but there’s always a strip of tarmac down there to put the plane down on.) For a couple short stretches I would have to find a road through the desert, but I have read a few accounts of those landings and they sound possible, like beach landings. Not something I want to try, but something I am confident I am capable of surviving. Continue reading →

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The Trip We Wouldn’t Have Taken

Posted on July 18, 2006 by Colin Summers

Nell has friends, Tom and Marcy, who live up in Sonoma Valley, north of San Francisco. We visited them when Rudy was too small to walk and had a great time. Rudy and I stopped by again when Rudy was around three to go to a wedding in neighboring Napa Valley. We’ve been saying ever since that we should go back. “We should go up to see Marcy in the spring…” would turn to “We should go up to see Marcy in the fall…” and around again to the spring. It’s a long drive (over six hours), but seems too short to use a commercial flight for. (We’d fly from LAX to Oakland and the truth is that between parking, getting through security, renting a car on the other end… we probably would be close to the driving time anyway. It’s an hour and a half in a Southwest 737 and Oakland is still nearly a two hour drive from Sonoma.)
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Terrain Terror

Posted on June 24, 2006 by Colin Summers

Okay, so I had to put some out-of-state hours on the airplane and I had gotten a little tired of the flight to Vegas. I checked the chart and decide to fly to Lake Havasu, just over the Arizona border.

I worked out ahead of time for this to be my IFR cross-country flight. It was going to be a fun flight where I landed at three different airports with three different types of approaches and did at least 250nm in the plane. It was going to be an early morning sort of flight. Then the scheduling computer that Justice Aviation uses screwed up, and my flight instructor was booked during the time we would be returning, which meant that I couldn’t do it during the day. Continue reading →

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Learning to Fly Better

Posted on May 23, 2006 by Colin Summers

If one took no chances, one would not fly at all. Safety lies in the judgment of the chances one takes. That judgment, in turn, must rest upon one’s outlook on life. Any coward can sit in his home and criticize a pilot for flying into a mountain in fog. But I would rather, by far, die on a mountainside than in bed.

Charles Lindbergh

You know, I am no critic of dying in bed. I’m not even a critic of staying home in bed. I like sleeping in a bit on Saturday morning, waking up, reading, writing some email and considering the big picture. I am working really hard to learn to fly in fog without flying into a mountain, as unadventurous as that might sound to Mr. Lindbergh.

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Aborted Flight to Vegas

Posted on May 22, 2006 by Colin Summers

Bob was in Las Vegas and I needed to visit the Castle site. Adam had a research friend who was in town and interested in taking a flight. I am not sure you could pay me to ride back and forth to Las Vegas in the back seat if I had nothing to do in Las Vegas, but Steve seemed game.

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First IFR in IMC

Posted on May 16, 2006 by Colin Summers

IFR: Instrument Flight Rules. You can fly in the clouds.

VFR: Visual Flight Rules. A lot simpler, but you can only fly where you can see.

IMC: Instrument Meteorlogical Conditions. You can’t see where you are flying.

Way back on April 12 I made my first real IFR flight, from Santa Monica to Las Vegas (Henderson Executive Airport). It was very exciting, copying the clearance, figuring out the route and putting everything into the Garmin 1000 to help me find my way through imaginary clouds. I flew the whole way “under the hood,” with my flight instructor watching for traffic and helping me decipher instructions from Air Traffic Control.

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Watch Me Fly

Posted on May 15, 2006 by Colin Summers

Okay, this is pretty cool. You can click on that link and it will show you the last time I flew the DiamondStar on an instrument flight plan. Amazing. It will show you the actual radar trace of the flight. There’s a link to the altitudes I flew at.

I need to write up the two flights I took and I also need to write up my birthday present, which was a couple hours of acrobatic training. I’m behind the blog, which is not as bad as being behind the plane.

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