I stumbled across this picture of my 1960 BE-65 Queen Air that someone took as I was leaving Oshkosh last year.  I was pretty excited to find this because It’s the only photo I have of Black Betty in flight and seeing that I’m the only one who flies her this is the first time I’ve gotten to  see what she looks like in the air!  I think I’m in love all over again.

After a really disappointing Memorial Day weekend, lots of rain and low clouds, Super Girl and I am off to Canada to wrap up the filming of Dangerous  Flights season two.  It should be a nice few days of hanging out with some of the best pilots in the world and my daughter, take that how you like, but my time is limited so I’ll try and get a post or two off if I can but don’t hold your breath.

 

Twenty year old Californian Jack Wiegand’s quest to become the youngest person to fly around the world solo recently hit a problem: He forgot his passport. Even worst, Jack only noticed not having his passport when he arrived at his first international destination, the remote town of Iqaluit, Canada, located northeast of Hudson Bay.

Luckily, Jack remembered making photo copies of his passport and visa documents the night before his hometown of Fresno, California, and he told his mom to check the copy machine. Luckily for him, it was still face down against the glass.

According to Jack’s blog, his flying adventures began on his 13th birthday when he piloted his first introductory glider and then on his 14th birthday, he became the youngest pilot in the Central California Soaring Club to solo a glider. At aged 16, Jack soloed his first single-engine power plane and now he intends to break the Guinness World Records™ title by becoming the youngest person to fly solo around the world with the trip being paid for by donations which will also benefit two non-profit organizations, Big Brothers Big Sisters and International Agri-center Ag Warriors.

Jack is actually scheduled to arrive in London today and then its on to Rome on Monday with his final arrival back in Fresno scheduled for June 8th.

An aircraft that’s big, fast and has two engines is what I look for in a plane that I’m going to use to go places.   Get there fast with a lot of stuff, safely.   But when I want to just fly for fun I want something that I can either do mad aerobatics in or something I can fly very low and slow, and I mean LOW.  A few years ago I bought a powered para-glider.  Flying it was incredibly fun and seeing that if you lost the engine you were already in a parachute, the safest aircraft in he world.  The only drawback was it was a pain in the ass to set up and launch, as two broken props will attest to.  It looks like the AirCam looks like exactly what I’ve been looking foe.  Great low speed handling characteristics, good short field performance and two engines.  The last feature is the most important one to have when flying low because if you lose an engine you just keep flying.  I think I’m going to have to start looking one……. just don’t tell my wife.

At 10 years old the girl in the video is a better pilot than a lot of guys I’ve flown with over the years.  Not as good as Super Girl though, she rocks it in the cockpit!

Took pseudo student (PS) up for a flight yesterday and I think we might actually be making some progress.  We started the flight with a take off, what else?  and apart from him taking FOREVER to get the mighty Cessna 150 up to full power he got us in the air like a pro.  At which point he let the airspeed get low, not good, and drifted to the left.  I managed to coach him back to the proper “not about to die” airspeed and decided that we would start the days lesson with departure stalls.   A departure stall is what happens when a pilot points the nose of his aircraft at the sky light he’s flying an F-15 when in fact he’s flying something that has let’s say, less power.  A plane goes up only when it has sufficient airspeed, then it goes down.  If the pilot has enough altitude to recover from the stall and keep flying great, if not…well.

   After PS had the departure stalls down pat I looked for something else to teach him and as luck would have it we had a broken cloud layer at three thousand feet that would do nicely.  I had PS climb up to the cloud layer and used the clouds to simulate rising terrain and what to do when confronted with such a situation.  We pretended that we had flown into a box canyon and didn’t have enough power to clear the mountains on either side.  I showed PS how to orbit inside the valley while climbing to gain enough altitude to clear the terrain.  I also showed him how to do a hammerhead turn if you there wasn’t enough room to circle.

After that we went back to the airport where his landings were much improved over our last flight.  I only thought we were going to crash once.

Did a little flight instruction with my pseudo student to day and had a small scare followed by some definite improvement.  We started out by taking the mighty Cessna 150 up to 2500 feet for a little slow flight practice followed by power on stalls and then the ever popular accelerated stall.  For those of you non-pilots types an accelerated stall is where the pilot puts the plane in a steep bank and then hauls back on the yoke to increase the angle of attack to a point where the wing stalls, basically.  In practice it’s a lot of fun if your skilled at the maneuver, if you’re a new student pilot it can be downright terrifying.

We did three or four of them before I decided that he’d had enough fun for one day so it was back to the airport for landing practice.  On the first attempt I had to grab the yoke at the last second to keep us from crashing into the runway at an angle that would’ve rendered the aircraft un-flyable, always considered bad form, the second wasn’t much better with my student pushing the wrong rudder peddle as he was about to land pointing us at the grass on the side of the runway instead of the long paved part, causing me to save the day yet once again.  But the next two landings were positively lovely.  Ok he ran out of airspeed a little high on the last one and fell out of the sky like a turd from a tall Moose but the airplane was still usable when we stopped bouncing so I gave him that one.  All in all a good day’s flying.

In 1932, Allen Carpé, a research engineer with Bell Laboratories in New York who was also an accomplished mountaineer, received a grant to collaborate with Nobel Prize-winning physicist Arthur Compton on investigating cosmic rays in Alaska. Compton was organizing expeditions to measure the rays in locations around the world, and Carpé was tasked with putting together a group that would test their measurements at 11,000 feet on Muldrow Glacier, which sits on the flanks of Alaska’s Mount McKinley. To give his climb a greater chance of success, Carpé decided to do something unheard of at the time and contacted aviation companies in Alaska to discuss the viability of landing on the glacier.

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  For the last few months I’ve been sort of teaching one of my friends to fly.  I say “sort of” because technically I’m not a certified flight instructor, or officially, or legally.  But that doesn’t stop me from passing on my vast supply of aviation knowledge to the next generation of budding pilots.  Or in other words teaching my buddy bad habits that a real instructor will have to spend hours and hours trying to correct.  Anyway, we had a lesson planned for today but as luck would have it the weather was less than stellar, light rain, poor visibility and gusty winds.  The prelude to a winter storm that’s going to dump up to a foot of snow on Minnesota and Wisconsin, in April, thanks.  So I did what any good flight instructor would do, I think,  I called my pseudo student and asked if he still wanted to go flying.  He asked a few questions about what it would be like flying in those conditions but then asked me “is it safe?” I was taken aback for a moment.  Well of course it was going to be safe, “I” was going to be with him.  I mean of course I wouldn’t ever let him go up in those conditions by himself, but with me in the plane he’d be safe as……..well something really safe, I tell you what.  I was just concerned that he wouldn’t get the best training out of our flight.  Well he agreed to come out and we spent almost an hour bouncing up and down the runway while the conditions got worse and worse before finally calling it quits due to the visibility dropping below VFR minimums.  In retrospect flying in those conditions taught him a lot.  Maybe I have something to teach him after all.