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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.

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...

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...