Ferry Flight Pic of The Day
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.
Ferry Flight Pic of The Day
This is what it looks like when you break out of the clouds on a windy, rainy approach into Reykjavik Iceland. You might notice that the plane is high on the glide path and left of the runway. Now it might be because there was a forty knot crosswind and moderate to severe turbulence on the approach, or it maybe it was because we’d lost an engine, had an electrical failure, a small fire in the baggage compartment and snakes in the plane. Or maybe we’d been flying for two weeks strait and just didn’t give a crap anymore. Either way ten dollar beers and beautiful blondes were only minutes away.
Ferry Flight pic of The Day
Help wanted, people skills not a priority
This island is off the north coast of Scotland on the route from Wick to Reykjavik. I bet whoever runs that light house gets to see some great storms. One thing that I couldn’t figure out is how they get back and forth to the mainland. I didn’t see anywhere to dock a boat, must have to use a helicopter.
Ferry Flight Pic of The Day
Deviation left approved
Last spring I was hired to ferry a Piper Super Cub up from Florida to Minnesota where a float plane operation uses it to train in the summer. I wasn’t sure if I was going to enjoy flying a plane across the country with a top speed of ninety miles per hour, when a plane goes that slow I use miles instead of knots, it makes me feel like I’m going faster. I hadn’t flown a Cub in a while and thought it might be a fun adventure cruising down in the weeds with the door open and boy was it ever! The Super Cub was just what I needed to get me back to joy of basic flying. The plane only carried eighteen gallons of fuel meaning I had to stop every two hours, more stops means meeting more people. Another feature, and yes I thought of it as a feature, was it’s lack of an electrical system, so no lights, a battery powered radio and best of all no starter, meaning I would have to hand prop it every time, good fun.
The first day set the tone for the whole trip with showers all across Florida making my flight path look like a solemn course. The next day things got even more interesting with a powerful cold front producing wave after wave of thunderstorms blocking my way. But I was not to be stopped. I’d brought along my trusty Garmin 696 GPS that had XM satellite weather on it. I spent the next two days dodging storm cells at five hundred feet and loving every minute of it. At one point I ran across a farm that had just been hit by a tornado.
The trip took me three days and I loved every minute of it.
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.
Ferry Flight Pic of The Day
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.