Plane Porn
Here, this ought to kill 12 minutes of your life.
Slacker
Sorry for the total lack of posts lately but the weather here in Wisconsin has finally gotten good and I’ve been jumping my butt off trying to make up for all the lost time. Not all that much new happening around here anyway, fly, jump, repeat. We finally finished filming season two of DANGEROUS FLIGHTS and it should be airing in Canada sometime in September and word has it that season one has been picked up by a network in the US but I’m not at liberty to say which one at this time. We did have an interesting visit from the local police last week. I was about to get on the plane and make a jump when one of Baldwin’s finest drove up, got out of his squad car and approached me. “I don’t suppose your plane crashed today did it?”
I looked over at our Cessna 208 Caravan that we use for skydiving and noticed a complete lack of fire damage and crumpledness and responded “No, I don’t think so.”
“That’s what I thought, apparently a train engineer reported that one of your planes flew right past the front of their train engine and crashed into a field.”
I could see how a train engineer might mistake our plane landing on our grass runway for a crash landing because the end of the runway is only fifty feet from the train tracks and we don’t clear the raised tracks by much when we come in. Satisfied the cop left only to come back a few hours later to inform us that the railroad had reported us to homeland security for buzzing their train. That’s rich I thought, a pilot doesn’t have any such restrictions during takeoff and landing. I can’t wait to see how this plays out.
Here’s a shot of the Caravan over the raised train tracks on final. He’s usually closer.
Your Weekly Lex, For Strength
By lex, on March 12th, 2008
Short sea story:
One of my first training command CO’s had last flown the RF-8P before taking command of the training squadron. The RF-8P was a photo-reconnaissance version of the venerable Crusader jet – last of the gunfighters. The F-8 cohort were hard men, and they threw themselves into the art and science of air combat knowing their lives depended upon it. They played hard ball in the air, even in training: Mishap rates for the single engine gunfighter were atrocious compared to the newer F-4 Phantoms just coming on line during the Vietnam war.
The Navy had placed a huge investment in advanced combat systems in the F-4 Phantom to increasingly take the aircrew out of the loop, meaning that dangerous air combat training could reduced or eliminated – smart missiles would make up for dumb pilots. The Navy tried to tie the hands of the Crusader crews during training as well, but that proved a much harder policy to enforce in the single seat fighter community. Their Spartan devotion to the art of air combat paid off: The F-8 had the highest kill ratio of any US aircraft in Vietnam.
The Navy Fighter Weapons School – TOPGUN – was instituted as much as anything else because we’d come to rely on the technology of the box more than the capability of the man flying it. It was a successful expenditure of resources: Navy kill ratios after the Weapons School’s debut went from 2.3:1 to 13:1. […]
Gravity Check
Yours truly following a student out on his graduation jump.
Get Some
Your Weekly Lex, For Strength
By lex, on March 1st, 2007
It’s funny how the memory well can run dry, and then something comes along and primes the pump and there’s one story after another waiting to spill out of you. This one, like yesterday’s, is not my own, but told to me by the man to whom it happened. Another Marine captain, an instructor in the TA-4J training squadron in Meridian, Mississippi. Had a livid scar across his eyebrow, a white line that ran from atop his brow half way to his right ear.
I often wondered how he got it. One day, without prompting, he told me.
It was a night bombing hop out of Cubi Point Naval Air Station, south of Olongapo in the Philipines. He was dash-2 on a dark and drizzling night – a night maybe, where wisdom might have called for discretion as the better part of valor, but that was not our culture in those days. We didn’t scrub for darkness, and we didn’t scrub for weather if there was any way around it. Only non-hacks cancelled. They were Marine attack pilots. They were going flying.[…]
Truth
Aviation is not so much a profession as it is a disease.
Busy As A One Armed Skydiver
yesterday we had a big event at Skydive Twin Cities with my good friend Kevin Burkart trying to set a world record for the most skydives made in one day by a one armed man. He’s doing this to raise money for Parkinson’s disease because a few years ago his father was diagnosed with this terrible disease and Kevin has made it his mission in life to do whatever he can to help find a cure. This was the third time Kevin has attempted to make a large number of skydives in one day to raise money and awareness for Parkinson’s. The first year we used a Cessna 182 and a 206 to make 100 jumps in one day. Two years later Kevin’s goal was to make 200 jumps using a single engine turbine jump plane called a PAC-750. That plane was screaming fast but very low clouds and fog prevented us from starting until 11:00 in the morning, and even then I was busting clouds and not even close to being legal. Once we got started we were averaging one jump every three minutes and thirty seconds but the late start prevented us from doing more than 150 jumps that day. After that disappointing day Kevin decided to up the anti by going for three hundred jumps in one day. It was an ambitious goal that could be done if the weather cooperated and both Kevin and I could keep up the pace. Unfortunately three months before the attempt Kevin was in a head on snow mobile accident that damaged his spinal cord rendering his left arm completely useless. But Kevin is a determined man and would never let a little thing like the loss of an arm prevent him from achieving his goal. Two months after the accident Kevin approached me and asked if I could help him figure out hoe to skydive and land a parachute with only one arm. It took some doing but I finally figured out that if he hooked the steering toggles together with a carabiner he could steer the parachute with his right arm.
With the technical problems sorted out the only thing standing in Kevin’s way was his endurance. A lot of us were concerned that Kevin couldn’t keep up a three minute jump pace using only one arm but there was only one to find out was to go for it. The morning’s weather was as nice as it could be and at 5:15am I pushed the throttle forward and we were off on jump number one. Things went well at first with our times ranging in the three and a half to four minute range. The PAC-750 is a wonderful plane to fly for this type of event, getting up to 2000 feet in under 45 seconds and back on the ground just as fast. I would beat Kevin to the ground then wait for him to land and have his ground crew take the used parachute off him and strap a new one on. I’d taxi up to him just as he was getting the last strap on, he’s jump in and I’d hit the throttle spinning around and rocketing down the runway. Even with an oxygen mask on for the ride up the exhausts fumes took their toll on Kevin and about three hours into the day he threw up in the plane. The medics were a little concerned but Kevin insisted that he felt better after getting sick and continued going. The pace was fast but having only one arm was taking it’s toll and Kevin started needing a break every twenty jumps or so. In the end Kevin made 151 jumps and set a new world for most jumps in one by a one armed skydiver.
Father’s Day
With the sun making a rare appearance last Sunday there was no time for the usual Father’s day activities due to the bodies that needed dumping out of airplanes. This year however was a little because my own Number One Son (NOS) has started working at the drop zone as the aircraft loader, fueler and all around slave. At the end of the day things slowed down enough I was able to reward him with his second tandem skydive where I taught him how to do turns and forward motion in free fall and pull the ripcord. It was a pretty good Father’s Day after all.
