Category: Cool videos

 

Pretty damn cool, if it’s real,  just don’t fly it too close to the sun.

 

Aviodrome.  

   Make sure you have a bib on to catch the drool before you click the link.

I own and fly a 1960 Beech Queen Air which is expensive to maintain and uses a LOT of gas but at least I can take my friends and family on a trip.  I would trade it in a heart beat for a world war two era fighter.

Personally I like cross wind landings, after flying for so long a little challenge is usually, but not always, welcome.  I’ve always been in the slip it in on final camp vs. the crabbing method because that’s how the examiner on my private pilot ride wanted it done. 

 

 

 

 

 

Even the Swiss can bring it.

I really have to start BASE jumping.

 

The crack refers to the canyon although some may argue that it’s what the wing suit pilot must be smoking.  I started flying a wing suit about six or seven years ago and instantly became hooked.  Back in those days the BASE jumpers used their wing suits to get as far away from the cliff they jumped from as possible.  As the pilots, and yes we are pilots, we just fly the smallest aircraft there is, got more experience they started flying closer and closer to cliff faces.  Of course there were a few accidents, pioneers rarely go un-punished, but the result has been some  spectacular footage.  In the video above one of the balloons gets caught in the wing tip vortices, very cool.  I must confess that I have yet to make a BASE jump, there are no really high cliffs that are legal to jump from in the US. and I’m not jumping from anything lower that 2500 feet.  Now I know to non-jumpers, or Wuffos as we call them, that sounds bass-ackwards but in skydiving the higher you are the safer you are.  when you deploy your parachute at two thousand feet, the lowest altitude we normally pull at, if you have a malfunction you have time to cut away the bad chute and deploy your reserve.  Base jumpers pull so low that there isn’t time to cut away so they don’t even bother jumping with a reserve, you get one shot.  So for now BASE jumping is not for me.   Someday I’ll go to Norway and jump off the three thousand foot fjords  but until then I’ll have to be satisfied with jumping out of a plane and flying my wing suit among the clouds.  

 

 

 

 

This is what I do when I’m not being productive.  Of course I’d have to get 100 times better at head down flying to be able to jump with these guys!