Flying Summers Brothers

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 →

Not Approved

Please stop flying below mandatory FAA regulations over Venice. Actually, stop flying over Venice period.

That was a comment posted on one of the pages of the blog. I don’t approve comments if they are from an anonymous account, I think that’s a bad policy for a web presence unless there’s some sort of physical danger to the poster revealing their identity (whistleblowers, people under oppressive regimes). I wrote to the email given (email addresses do not need capitalization) and it bounced back. So it’s someone spoofing an identity. They misspelled “principal,” which flatters all sorts of prejudices about the Los Angeles Unified School District (which does not actually seem to use the identified domain).

So, basically, we have a drive-by authored by a coward. That’s an excellent time for a civics lesson. Continue reading →

(Many thanks to Demetri Martin for the hours of laughs as we buzzed through the sky. Dexter found Demetri on YouTube, then downloaded his comedy albums and would often be laughing hysterically in the back seat as I was preparing for an instrument approach. Demetri has a bit about batteries and how D batteries must be difficult for foreigners to ask for.) 

There are small upgrades like the little circuit breaker collar to call out the autopilot circuit, large upgrades like the new autopilot, and the medium upgrades, like LEMO. Continue reading →

Heading Mode

Oh, that’s sort of sad for Otto. So trustworthy (except when he’s not). In my head, the KAP 140 in the new plane is the same pilot as the one that was in the old plane. The operation and display are identical, and I talked to Otto the same way when I am flying solo: “Time to climb, Otto,” “Let’s get you ready to follow that approach, Otto,” and near the end of each flight, “Otto, it’s my turn to fly.” Continue reading →

I appear to have lost the “blog roll” portion of my sidebar. I’ll have to fix that eventually. But one of the blogs over there is Photographic Logbook, which always seems clever to me because you want to snap some photographs anyway, your logbook does not include enough description and the pictures are worth thousands of words, and getting an entry up should be a little less work.

Continue reading →

Departing Mid-Continent Airport

I occasionally peruse the online community of Reddit. I’m not an active member and I don’t even change the sub-reddits which are shown when I login. One of the sections I read regularly is called Today I Learned, or TIL for short. It is a good reminder for me that there is a depth to human knowledge that I will never plumb, that there are random facts, stories and  histories out there which we aren’t taught in general but are important and interesting when you read about them. So “Today I Learned” is now something I think about on occasion. Continue reading →

The first crossing in the new plane seemed important to document. I failed on a few fronts (as soon as I announced I was on the east coast my brother asked how many gallons of fuel I burned; I realized I had neglected to log that), but I’ll try to make up for it on the return flight.

I started on Monday morning in Friday Harbor and took off a little before 7:30am. As described in my previous post, I needed a repair at Boeing Field and had a weather diversion. But, if we pretend that wasn’t necessary, that I had everything working perfectly and was able to skip out of the Seattle area ahead of the weather, I believe I would have been in Great Falls at about 10:30am, perfect for a nap and an early lunch.
Continue reading →

Yesterday in an Uber which was dropping me at the Santa Monica Airport, the driver said, “Did you see that pilot who crashed in Van Nuys?” He said it with the usual hook of discussing current events: this is something interesting to talk about. I said, “Yes, that was my friend Art.” He became immediately somber and said, “I’m sorry.” So am I.

After a dozen years of flying, Art is my first pilot friend that died while flying. I have gone through the details exhaustively, to understand (for myself, really) what happened. In aviation we try very hard to learn from other pilots’ mistakes, especially when they can no longer learn from them.  Continue reading →

On Tuesday, August 2, I was having lunch in Guymon, Oklahoma, a place in the middle of nowhere. Or, more accurately, in the middle of the panhandle of Oklahoma, a hard, hot, high bit of the country which feels like it owes no one any favors. I was incredibly surprised to find a place on Yelp! that was good enough that I will aim for little KGUY on my next crossing.

While I was having lunch, my friend Art Newman crashed his plane into a building in Van Nuys, sustaining fatal injuries. My way of hearing the news was that when I finally landed at Santa Monica at 7pm that evening there was a voicemail message waiting from his daughter asking how they might confirm that it was him. “You probably have seen the news about a pilot in an accident in Van Nuys, we think it was dad. Do you know how we could get in touch with someone about it?” Sadly, I didn’t know anyone to call. Continue reading →