Flying Summers Brothers

Front Office

I am writing this blog entry almost three miles above the earth, tapping away on a little bluetooth keyboard, watching the words appear on the iPad that is held by the RAM mount suction-cupped to the canopy. At the end of every sentence I check my engine instruments, my navigation (time to next navigation fix), and glance at the fuel. That’s silly, since I have seven and a half hours of fuel for a two hour flight, but I have a ritual. I also pause to listen to the voices on the Air Traffic Control frequency, since I am “squawking and talking,” which means I have a discrete beacon code, ATC is watching me on the radar scope, and I have chatted with them about where I am going.  Continue reading →

For a little while after we got the new plane there were boxes arriving every week. A lot of minor things, like the collar for the circuit breaker, but some larger things, like the gust lock that the broker had to supply new from Diamond in Canada. That was a big box (for not that large an item) and had a lot of customs stickers on it.

The first plane had a cover from Bruce’s Aircraft Covers. It seems like they have changed a little in the decade between orders. The covers are made over in China, but I think the design is actually a little evolved and better. Sadly, they no longer offer monogramming of the cover. It seems a little silly, but I think it’s a bit of a hedge against someone taking the cover. (That’s a really small probability to offset. There are about two hundred of these planes in North America, the vast majority in hangars. Do I really think some other DA42 owner is going to sneak onto an airfield (some of the most secure property in the United States) and take a cover off my plane to put it on theirs?) Mostly I like that the pieces of the plane, including the cover, have the tail number on them. Continue reading →

We’ll just tweak it a little…

There are people out there who build their own planes in their garages, basements, and occasionally even on airport grounds. My friend Ariel is building one in a shed on his property. My friend Dean wrote an essay about it which is buried in the Internet Wayback machine.

I can tighten a screw. I have built a computer, several. I have installed hard drives, memory modules, graphic cards and even replaced a power supply. I have even built a house or two with my own two hands and was able to do everything, frame, run flooring, roofing, decking, install windows, hang sheetrock, wire the electrical… really everything except plumbing (a dark art) or finish sheetrock (those guys are masochists). But I am really not at all mechanical.

When I was up at Friday Harbor a few weeks ago and started the engines for a quick flight with my parents the RIGHT COOLANT warning lit up. That would have been the end of the visit for me, I would have had to find a shop that could fly someone out to the island to figure it out. My brother took the cowling off the engine, found the clamp that had loosened a little bit, tightened it, found the proper coolant in his garage, refilled the reservoir and watched me takeoff for a test flight. He poked around the engine (which to me always seems amazingly clean) and said, “You can see the white spray of the leaking coolant, you can smell it, too. That’s the sweet smell.” I couldn’t smell anything. Continue reading →

Hazel, awaiting engine start

The thing that I struggled with the most when I was training was radio work. I readily admit that to any student pilot, or newly minted private pilot, when I meet them and they ask me what was most difficult. Radio work is the source of one of my more embarrassing mistakes that I still make every few months.

But in a meta-sense, or in the long term, the hardest thing for me about learning to fly (and continuing to learn to fly better) was trying to reconcile all of the different advice I was getting. And the more reading I did (and especially the more reading Adam did), the more we identified things that were Old Wives Tales (OWT on the web boards we were visiting). Since then I have learned that there are lot of topics that you can introduce to a table full of pilots and get an endless discussion (or a short argument where someone leaves in a huff). Continue reading →

Adam thinks that between my two visits to Friday Harbor my landings improved significantly. I was certainly more tired for the second one, having done a lot of IFR in IMC before touching down. And I feel like the approach for the first landing was more stabilized. But I also know that I touched down sooner, slower, and had the plane under control on the runway a lot more quickly.

You can watch both and decide.

Antoine and me

South along Malibu’s shore

Ready to go

I continue to make little improvements to the plane and significant improvements to my flying. Antoine Wilson came to lunch with me in Camarillo and I am pretty sure that he’d say that nothing scary happened. It might not be pretty yet, but it certainly isn’t unsafe. And it is getting better bit by bit. (Photos by Antoine.)

Continue reading →

Back in middle school I watched a film called Reading Writing and Reefer. It was a typical scare film made to discourage drug use. Before we watched it our seventh grade teacher told us that she was aware that some of the characters in the film were stereotypes and she didn’t expect us to believe their stories or recognize our peers. In hindsight, I’m pretty sure she was trying to distance herself from the propaganda she was being forced to press on our young brains.  Continue reading →