Flying Summers Brothers

The Santa Monica Mountains Below

(This is a part of A Summer of Flying.)

Before I returned to London, Ontario to get the plane, I borrowed Susan’s plane to fly Rudy up to Palo Alto where he was going to be a counselor at Great Books on Stanford’s campus. Her plane is just a couple years newer than mine, but it’s got two key improvements. It’s got the Garmin autopilot instead of the King KAP-140, and the G1000 in her plane has Synthetic Vision activated. Both were fun to play with on the way up to KPAO. The autopilot has a really nice feature where it can climb at a particular airspeed instead of a feet-per-minute rate. So I could just tell it I wanted to head up to 10,500 feet at 95 knots, which is nowhere near the 47 knot stall speed, and at first the plane climbs at 800 fpm at sea level. Then, as the air thins, the engine’s performance drops off a little, and the autopilot drops the nose a little bit to maintain the airspeed. We end our climb going a little better than 300 fpm. Continue reading →

(This is part of A Summer of Flying.)

Iowa City to Detroit Metro, hoping the storms will move

Packing up the plane the next morning (when I discovered the broken antenna), I realize that so much of the trip is repetitive. Here I am again, with the roller bag carefully stowed in the luggage area, the nose plugs and gust lock on the floor of the back seat, the canopy open in the late morning sun as I check the oil and test the fuel from the drains. Another walk around the plane, wiggling the control surfaces and checking the antennae (one loose). As I noted the Hobbs time on my kneeboard and looked over my little scribbled notes for the blog I wondered how repetitive the blog was. After over sixteen hundred hours of flying, was I thinking anything new? Even if I was, were there reliable ways to express that newness? Given the structure of the blog, where each entry is written in such isolation, it is possible that I am repeating myself over and over, especially when writing about the longer trips where I sit at ten thousand feet and watch the landscape slide past under the plane. Continue reading →

(This is part of A Summer of Flying.)

Santa Monica Departure

We started out at the end of June. It was sort of luxurious to have the front seat as an empty space to pile my bag of necessities (Kind bars, iPad mini, water) and Dexter seemed like a young CEO climbing into the back with his laptop, iPhone and small fleecy blanket. But it was very sad to take off into the eastern, summer sky without Nell and Rudy along. Continue reading →

It looked like it might be the last amazing summer of crossing the country with the family. And then Nell took a job on The Muppet Show for Disney and Rudy took a job as a counselor at Great Books. Dexter still had commitments, though, so it wound up being a lot of flying either solo or with Dexter along. 

We have owned N971RD for nearly a decade. The plane sits outside on a tie-down at the Santa Monica airport and if it were a metal plane we would probably need to have it re-painted. Instead, we need to have the vinyl stripes (and registration letters) replaced. And, due to a crazing problem in the plexiglas, we need to replace the canopy. That work can be done most easily at the factory (shipping the canopy is a little nutty), so I need to figure out a way to include London, Ontario in my route for the summer.

As I add the entries these will become live links. The summer breaks down into the following pieces:

• The Dropoff – getting Dexter to Iowa City
• Return to Factory – bringing the plane back to where it was created
• The Pickup – bringing Dexter to the East coast (after dropping Rudy in Palo Alto)
• A Run to Fishers – Detour to collect KW and return him to Lincoln Park
• Boston Landing – Collecting Nell from Logan
• New Hampshire Hop – Lunch with a friend of Dexter’s
• Great Books Pickup – Grabbing Rudy from Palo Alto
• Marthas Vineyard – with Brett and Hazel
• North to the Woods – Headed to Parry Sound
• Returning Home – Dexter and I fly west

Hard Landing

Who knows how long the article will stay up, but CBS Denver is reporting that a two seat version of our plane had engine trouble and wasn’t able to make it all the way back to the runway at Centenniel airport in Denver. Instead it landed hard in a grassy field just short of the runway.

The two people got out and walked away. That’s what I like to hear. (Dexter and I flew into that very airport two summers ago, with thunderstorms nearby and darkening skies. I was very glad to be on the ground.)

(This is a part of A Summer of Flying.)

My favorite trips in the plane are those that I would never otherwise make. There was a time when my parents were up at the Lake in Canada and I was working in the City. I wanted to go up for just a few days and it was a major adventure to do so. Train out to Newark airport, an Air Canada jet to Toronto, another to North Bay airport after a couple hours in Pearson Airport, and a float plane to the Lake. When I got there I felt like I had run some sort of gauntlet.

In July had dropped Dexter off at his summer program in Cambridge, MA and had returned to New York City. After some consideration of the calendar I decided it was a good time to spend three or four nights up at the Lake. Pog and Alex were already there and settled in. There were some items at my sister’s house in Providence that Pog needed, so I’d stop there for a night on the way up. As long as I was there with the plane, it would be fun to go on a little flight with Brett and two of her three kids (only four seats…). As it turned out, Jasper was at camp and Willa was busy with friends. So after a night in their palatial guest suite on the top floor, Brett and I headed to the airport with her youngest, Hazel. It was Hazel’s first time in a small plane.

Brett is only two and a half hours by car from Marthas Vineyard. That’s not too bad, although forty-five minutes of it is on a ferry and I bet there’s a little bit of wait to get into line for the ferry and getting the ferry loaded. We took off from North Central State (where JFK Jr. learned to fly!) and steered nearly due east for 1B2, the Katama airport on the eastern beach of Marthas Vineyard. I had been here once before as sort of consolation prize for not getting to land at Fishers Island. This summer I was managing both. Continue reading →