April 2012 – Page 6 – Dead Reckoning

Saftey Day

The United States Parachute Association recommends that every DZ (drop zone or skydiving school for all you Wuffos) set aside one day a year for a safety day. yesterday was safety day at Skydive Twin Cities . My instructors gave talks on gear maintenance, canopy flying, aircraft operations and first aid. My job was to run everyone through the hanging harness and get them up to speed on emergency procedures. The hanging harness is basically a skydiving simulator that has the cutaway and reserve handles on it that a jumper can pull in response to the emergency situations I throw at them. It’s great training and seeing that I love to torture students lots of fun. I love to make up preposterous situations with unlikely twists and see how well the jumper can handle them. My goal is to get them to keep fighting all the way to the ground even in what might seem like an hopeless situation. I kill a lot of them, because I cheat, but in the end they come out of it better prepared to deal with a malfunction that most of them will have some day. I also like to get them to think outside the box, although I hate that saying. My favorite is to tell them that they have come out of the clouds over a large lake and have no hope of getting to shore and ask them what they think they should do. It usually takes a minute to get them to tell me that they maybe look for a boat to land close to. I then ask them why they want to land next to a boat,

“What do they have in a boat that you will want?”

“A life jacket?” “No.” “A radio?” “No.” “First aid kit?” “No.”

“If you skydive into a lake in the summertime and land next to a boat they are going to give you a BEER!”

Hopefully it’s a Guinness, for strength. Safety First you know.

Ferry Flight Pic of The Day

Ran into this Huey in Sydney last summer that was being used in a movie. Not sure if the paint job was for the movie or if that’s how it always looks but it was one nice bird. I sure do miss them.

Homage to The Huey

I had the privilege and honor of serving as a crew chief for twelve years on God’s own aircraft, the Huey. If you were not so blessed I’m sorry but there’s nothing I can do about that now. Gotta love the refrain in the song, “YEAH! YEAH! YEAH! YEAH! Fixed wing are Gay!” Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

F-18 Down

Navy jet crashes into Virginia Beach apartment building – USATODAY.com.

Looking at the photos I can’t believe that no one was killed. Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.

Update: It sounds like the pilots were able to dump most of their fuel before having to eject and thereby preventing a huge fireball and post crash fire which would have almost certainly cost some lives . If that’s the case they were both good and lucky.

Gravel Strip Landing Cockpit B737-200

Ferry Flight Pic of The Day

This is the flight engineers station on a L-1049G Super Constellation that Marcio and I got a tour of in Australia last year. The plane was still operational and was part of an incredible museum we stumbled upon while test flying the Phenom 100.

DSCF0550 — The Connie

DSCF0542 — The Connie

Zero Gravity

There are an infinite number of lessons a pilot can learn about flying airplanes. Some of them are basic and covered by his or her instructor in flight school, some can be picked up hanging around the airport and some are learned the hard way. If you’re lucky you can survive the hard ones and live to pass them on to others.

I’ve never been one to follow rules if I can get away with breaking them. I guess I’ve always thought that most rules were made to keep people that weren’t as good as I was from hurting themselves. After I made my first solo my instructor told me that I was cleared to fly by myself even if he wasn’t at the airport so long as I remained in the pattern. Well me being me the first thing I did was go out the next day when my instructor wasn’t there, hop in the mighty Cessna 152 and take off for the wild blue yonder. I was sure that the restriction to remain in the pattern was a good idea for most new pilots but rather silly for a great pilot such as myself. I flew about ten miles away from the airport and proceeded to let my inner fighter pilot out. I did steep turns, stalls and wing overs. I was finally free to fly like I always knew I could. Having a blast and wanting more I decided to push the nose over hard and do a little zero gravity. Things went well for about two seconds until I floated out of my seat and into the yoke. I did have my seat belt on but had it very loose not thinking about the ramifications of zero gravity. With my chest resting on the yoke I was unable to pull out of the dive and the ground started coming up fast. In a panic Thinking quickly I pushed myself away from the yoke with one hand and pulled out of the dive with the other. A little shaken and thoroughly humbled I flew back to the airport just a little more experienced than when I left.

I thought I’d learned the main lesson about doing zero gravity in an airplane, always tighten your seat belt first, until years later when a mechanic told me about a plane that had crashed after a loose nut in the belly had become jammed in the elevator cable after doing the maneuver. Since then I’ve found a lot of loose screws, nuts and all kinds of junk in the belly of planes I’ve worked on. Yesterday while cleaning under the floor boards of Black Betty I found so much loose junk that I was amazed that nothing had ever gotten jammed in the maze of cables and pulleys that ran under there.

All that being said doing zero gravity can still be a lot of fun.

Ferry Flight Pic of The Day

Sometimes when I have the chance to take in the sights on a trip I bring my camera out and try to get artsy. In my early days of ferry flying I carried a 35mm and tried to take only “good” pictures and not waste film. The result was usually failure on both counts. Now with digital cameras I take more of a shotgun approach to my picture taking, it doesn’t rise to the level of photography, I just blaze away and hope for the best. This is a picture of a light house on somethingorotherolipolis on Crete.

Air Racers 3D IMAX

I haven’t been to Reno yet but really hope to fly my Queen Air “BLACK BETTY” down there this year. One of the pilots on Dangerous Flights races’ his L-39 there every year and it would be awesome to watch him race in person. I just hope they don’t do anything stupid like move the crowd too far away because of the accident last year. The only way air races’ are fun to watch is to be close to the action. That carries an assumption of risk that people who go there are willing to take, I know I am. Maybe I’ll enter “BLACK BETTY” Do they have a big, slow former military transport category?

PAL-V Flying Car – Maiden Flight

Ok now they’re just teasing me. This flying car actually looks practical and simple enough that the final price might be affordable, or not. The key to making flying cars work would be to have small runways located next to the highway every so often, sort of like mini car pool lanes.