Lost
So there we were, seven skydivers hanging around behind the counter at Skydive Twin Cities , which my office manager hates BTW, watching Flightaware track the Twin Otter that was flying up from Texas. Everyone was excited because the Twin Otter is the best aircraft in the world to jump out of and our toy for the summer was almost here. As we watched the aircraft symbol on the screen approach Red Wing Airport in Minnesota, the closest “real” airport to ours, we could see it swing west then back east and start to descend indicating that the pilot was shooting an instrument approach. This made perfect sense as the cloud base in the area at the time was seventeen hundred feet AGL and our private airport with it’s grass runway didn’t have an instrument approach. I expected the pilot to fly the approach until he got under the clouds then cancel his instrument flight plan and continue north under the clouds to our drop zone which was only ten minutes away. Imagine our surprise when we saw the plane turn away from Red Wing and head west.
“What the hell? Where’s he going?” we all shouted at the computer screen. “We’re over here!”
I grabbed the radio and tried to call the pilot but got no response. In frustration we even tried to text him but had no luck, the little aircraft symbol continued to head west away from us toward Minneapolis. A few minutes of frustration later the plane made a turn to the south and began to wander. There was no question now the pilot was lost. How could he be lost? Did nobody tell him how to find our airport? He’d managed to fly all the way from Texas to within twenty miles of his destination and I knew for a fact the plane was equipped with a GPS. I was really starting to get worried about the fuel situation in the Otter. He’d been in the air for over three hours and all his flying around at low altitude really burns up the jet A. Suddenly the aircraft stopped moving. Did he find an airport to land at or was the Otter a crumpled mess in some farmers field? The phone rang a few minutes later to answer our question. It was the pilot of the Otter and he was at a small airport south of St. Paul and was ok. Apparently he hadn’t really been on the approach into Red Wing when he had some sort of problem with the aircraft’s instruments and being unfamiliar with the area and not knowing if there were any mountains around he broke off the approach at two thousand feet and yelled for help. That was Minneapolis Center started giving him the vectors that finally got him on the ground. When I asked him why he didn’t just look at his map which would have told him that Wisconsin is practically mountain free I informed me that he didn’t have a map! I couldn’t believe it, he flew all the way from Texas without bringing a map along. Well long story short we finally got the Otter to our drop zone, along with it’s case of Shiner Bock beer one of our skydiving buddies put in for us, and the pilot is on the way back home for a Texas size ass chewing.
Aviation, Diversity, and Uncomfortable Truths
Ferry Flight Pic of The Day
Say “Cheese!” As some of you know I’m starring in a new reality show on the Discovery Channel called “Dangerous Flights.” The show is about ferry pilots and follows six of us as we deliver real planes to real customers around the world. I did four trips last year with a human anchor cameraman/director along filming almost every minute, although he did manage to have the camera rolling whenever I made some boneheaded mistake. At the beginning or end of each flight we would spend a day doing air to airs with a helicopter that had a gyro stabilized camera mounted on it. I love formation flying, doing aerobatics and having my picture taken so doing all three is like a dream date for me. The first two times we did it a director in the helicopter would tell the helicopter pilot what he wanted me to do and the pilot would call me on the radio and pass that information to me. It was a time consuming and sometimes frustrating process that usually sounded like this.
Helicopter: “Scary, come left thirty and give us a hard left bank as you pass as close to the big cloud off my nose as you can.”
Me: “Roger… you mean the one with the big gap on the right side?”
Helicopter: “No, the one with the tall knob that looks like a chicken.”
Me: ………….”I don’t see a chicken…….I see one that looks like a horse.”
Helicopter: “Never mind, we passed it.”
By the third time I got to know what kind of shots the director wanted so all I had to do was play around in front of the camera and have a good time. It’s a blast, especially when I got to do it in the Phenom 100.
Sh!t Fighter Pilots Don’t Say
Hat tip to The Castle Argghhh!!!
Ferry Flight Pic of The Day
Here’s a shot I took of the fjord that leads to the airport in Narsarsuaq Greenland last fall. I normally don’t fly the northern route that late in the year because the weather is so unpredictable. The strait lines in the ice are the tracks left by the last supply ship of the season.
F-22 Refueling
These Guys don’t waste any time.
We Must Fight – President Reagan
Terminator Drones In Paradise
US considers launching drones from Indian Ocean coral atolls
The US is looking to use the Australian-administered Cocos Islands – a group of tiny coral atolls in the Indian Ocean – to launch unmanned drones as it continues its strategic pivot away from the Middle East towards Asia Pacific.
We hopefully never completely do away with brave men, and women, hurling down runways and flight decks, flying into harms way to put warheads on foreheads but the writing’s on the wall. Unmanned drones are going to play an increasingly important role in the combined arms package in the future and having a few cheap and “unsinkable” bases in the Indian Ocean would be a thorn in China’s side in any regional conflict.
Ferry Flight Pic of The Day
Amman Jordan
This was taken just after takeoff from Amman Jordan last October in a SR-22 Cirrus. Amman was one of the most magical places I’ve ever spent ten hours in. I was struck by the fact that all the buildings were the same color from the air. If you look carefully at the left center part of the picture you can see that they had some kind of archeological dig going on in the L shaped clear area that a temple at the far end.