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...

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)...

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...

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...

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...

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...

This isn't really a flying post, but I don't have an architecture blog and my two projects in Las Vegas were one of the reasons I learned to fly. If you are here for the aviation, just skip ahead to the next post. I did not choose architecture because I thought it would make me immortal. I never...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7t4IR-3mSo 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...

It was a glorious evening to stop by the airport and put some freebies on people's planes. The stall warning on a lot of little planes is a small, metal vane. It sticks out into the airstream over the leading edge of the wing and as long as that airflow is there you don't hear the stall horn....

Those Cirrus planes have a handle inside, on the ceiling between the two front seats, but actually accessible from the backseat as well, that is hard to pull. That is so you don't pull it by mistake. From what I understand, you basically lift yourself out of your seat using the handle, that's how...