I could describe our two days at Moab Utah but I’ll let pictures tell a few thousand words.
Update from The Road
Skiing in Utah was fantastic, fresh snow and sore legs. Gotta work on that before my upcoming backcountry ski trip.
The Apres Ski scene was fun too. Our hosts taught us a new card game called “Asshole” which consists mainly of drinking. Before heading on to our next adventure we went to Pete’s condo to relieve him of some of his excess wine. while we were there I couldn’t help but notice a few of his new knick knacks he had laying around.
Oh, did I mention that Pete won the gold in the Reno air races again this year? Pete was flying Cory’s de Havilland Vampire and managed to squeak out victory in-spite of some major problems. Cory acquired this plane when he bought the Ogden jet Center. the plane hadn’t flown for many years so you can imagine how much work went into getting it ready to race in the open jet class in Reno. They worked on this old jet for over 2 years and on the day they had to show up for race inspection they couldn’t get the engine to light off. This was a major problem because if they couldn’t get the plane to Reno from Ogden they would be disqualified. They finally got the jet started on their very last try and pete raced full at throttle to make it to Reno just in time. When Pete flew the first qualifying heat the jet performed poorly and they only placed third. They couldn’t figure it out. The Vampire should have been much faster than that. They were left scratching their heads until on of their friends showed them a picture he’d taken of the Vampire in flight. When they looked closely they noticed that one of the main gear doors was hanging down just a little bit. They fixed the problem and placed first on the next qualifying heat.
Race day came and Pete was doing great. He was in first place with only two laps to go when over his headset he heard a scratchy call “Speed Speed Speed!” Pete didn’t hear anything else over the radio but took the call from his crew chief to mean that he was in danger of breaking the course speed limit. Pete backed off the power a little bit and tried to call his crew chief to confirm but got no response. He did, however, see the number two jet pass him. That was all it took. Pete punched it and with just half a lap left regained the lead and crossed the finish line just half a plane length ahead.
Yes, that is R2D2 in the back of the number five L39
So to the victor belong the spoils. when you win gold at Reno Breitling makes you a brand new watch especially for you.
Now I know what I want for Christmas next year.
He also got this pretty cool coin from the Breitling race team.
Hanging out with two great pilots like Pete and Cory is a lot of fun, a little hard on the old liver maybe, but still a lot of fun. But Cathy and I still have a lot of adventuring to do it’s off to Moab UT for to see the sights. Stay tuned!
Road Trip!
Seeing that we have a little time to kill before skydiving season starts again I’m taking a road trip with she who must be obeyed, the better half, the o’l ball and chain. (No, she doesn’t read very many of my posts) We left on Monday and hard charged all the way out to Ogden Utah to spend a few days skiing with my buddies Cory and Pete, Yes that Cory and Pete from the Discovery show “Dangerous Flights” Neither one of them is quite as big of a TV star as I am but what ya gonna do? The plan, such as it is, is to head to sin city, Las vegas for a couple of days and then for the big goal of the trip, camping in Death Valley! That is if I can talk Cathy into sleeping in a tent in the desert, in the winter…..might be a tough sell. I’ll be giving you sporadic progress reports along the way but don’t count on too much.
Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everybody! I know, I know, Christmas was last week and my New Year’s hangover is but a distant unpleasant memory, but if you look at my past history of posting, a holiday post that’s only five or six days late is something of a miracle. A Christmas miracle……get it? OK, it’s not turning water into wine, which would be pretty damn handy I must admit, but hey, it’s all I got.
Our Thanksgiving was pretty quite because Super Girl decided that she’d rather go skiing in Vail and have Thanksgiving dinner with 20 of her friends than fly home to see the people that actually brought her into this world. A good call in my opinion. And because the Army in its infinite wisdom has decreed that thou shalt have turkey and all the fixings in the mess hall and then back to class. Also a good call. So to avoid the same empty nest this Christmas we forced the stars to align, cashed in our frequent flyer miles and got the band back together. Connor was the first one home from Fort Eustis Virginia where he is one month into the four month long UH-60 Blackhawk Crew Chief school. Connor’s faithful sidekick Koda gave him the kind of homecoming you see from most good dogs when their master comes home from a long time away in the military
Connor told us that he’d been feeling a little home sick and was really looking forward to being home for the holidays. He also didn’t want to miss out any Christmas traditions and wanted to be there when we picked out and decorated the tree. (We always make a big night out of it.) No problem we said, We can wait until December 21st to get our tree this year. Unfortunately when we went to the tree lot it was closed for the season and all that was left were a few scraggly bushes in a pile in the corner of the parking lot. With no other option it was time for dad to come to the rescue and make a tree. How do you make a tree you ask? Well, you dig out part of an old fake tree from the attic and prop it up on a plastic cooler, plop a couple of ferns in front to make it appear bigger, and cram two bigger house plants on each side for……I don’t know, effect? Either way I got the job done and Christmas was saved! And I didn’t even have to water it.
Claire, AKA Super Girl, managed to tear herself away from the glamours life of wind tunnel junkie and got home Christmas day. After seeing Connor get a new holster for his 357 revolver she asked if she could get a pistol. Apparently all her girlfriends in Denver carry one and seeing that she comes home from work very late almost every night and lives in a pretty shady part of town I heartedly agreed. So the next morning it was out to our cabin to see if she could hit the broad side of a barn. I need’t have worried because I’d taught her how the shoot years ago and she was still a dead shot, even if her form needs a little work.
All in all it was a great Christmas but it was over too soon and before we knew it both kids were gone leaving us with an empty nest once again. Oh well.
Have a great year everybody!
Gumby Suits
When we last left our super unlucky ferry pilot he’d managed to successfully ditch his stricken aircraft, exit with his life raft, inflate it, and climb inside. This is the absolute minimum a pilot needs to do to survive when he makes a full stop landing on something other than solid surface, i.e. water. Of course where in the world that patch of water is makes all the difference in the…..well….all the difference in the world. there are many stories of pilots ditching in warm waters surviving for weeks with nothing but their underwear and a smile. If, on the other hand, our unlucky pilot finds himself in a somewhat chillier location, say, halfway between Canada and Iceland, in January, he might want his winter wooly’s on. And that’s where the survival suit comes in. Survival suits are full body suits made out of 1/4 inch neoprene and do a REALLY good job of keeping you warm in cold water. Unfortunately they also do a REALLY good job of keeping a pilot hot and sweaty in the cockpit of a small plane. And if you wear a survival suit for 8 hours or so it also has the interesting side effect of making your clothes smell exactly like a combination of wet dog and hockey bag. So to make himself more comfortable, and to allow him to get a few more days out of that pair of jeans he’s wearing, a ferry pilot has a few options.
1. Fly with the suit fully on but un-zipped. Not too risky because all you have to do is zip it up before ditching. This is the method of rookie ferry pilots and really fat guys who can barely get the suit on while standing on the ramp because it’s still hot and uncomfortable and it’s also really difficult to fly an airplane that way. Ever tried to change radio frequencies while wearing oven mitts?
2. Wear the suit pulled down to your waist. Slightly more risky because in the event of a sudden emergency a pilot might have his hands full controlling the plane while simultaneously getting his suit pulled up over his shoulders at the same time but for most pilots it’s doable.
3. Have the suit un-rolled on the pilot’s seat and just sit on it. This is pretty risky because performing the cockpit yoga required to squeeze yourself into a tight rubber suit in a tiny cockpit while getting everything you need to get done in a ditching situation, controlling the airplane, fixing your position, screaming for help on the radio, panicking, (don’t forget panicking) can be difficult. But not impossible, especially if you have enough time. And by time I mean altitude. Whenever I fly over the ocean at altitudes higher than 10,000 feet the first thing I do is strip off that damn rubber suit and sit on it because even if the engine stops making noise I’ve got over 20 minutes before splash down and it only takes me 2 seconds to get it back on. How do I know it only takes me 2 seconds you ask? Because the engine skipped a couple of beats while I was smack dab over the middle of the Atlantic ocean on only my second ferry flight ever. I don’t actually remember putting the suit on. All I know is that one second I was flying along fat dumb and happy and the next I was fully encased in orange neoprene, staring at the engine gauges and praying. Panic does have its uses.
4. Leave the suit in the back seat. Really risky because of all the reasons I listed in option 3 plus you have to reach behind you, dig out the bag the suit comes in, take the suit out of said bag, unroll the suit get on the seat under you, and then try to do the yoga trick of getting a rubber suit on over your clothes in a tiny cockpit. Although it would seem that only a moron would leave the suit in the bag and in the back seat, and I have seen such morons, I sometimes do it myself but only if I’m flying a cabin class aircraft that I can stand up in like a King Air or a Grand Caravan and even then only if I have a co-pilot to fly the plane while I get ready to ditch.
The nest thing to think about is what you’re going to wear under the survival suit. Most pilots I talk to don’t think about this at all. their thinking is that because the suit makes them hot in the cockpit it should do just fine in the water or life raft. That thinking is true to some extent. If you’re only in the water for a short time you should be fine, even in vary cold water. But what if you have to wait for hours or days for rescue? When I did my training in the cold water off Iceland we were in the water for only 30-45 minutes and I was already getting cold, especially my feet. When I fly over cold water I wear a good quality base layer of long underwear in addition to the rest of my cold weather gear and always at least have a second pair of good socks to put on before climbing into the suit. This extra layer would also come in handy if you’re forced down on land in the winter and a post crash fire prevents you from grabbing additional clothing to help keep you from freezing to death. Something to consider when flying over northern Canada or Greenland’s ice cap in January.
OK, so there you are, safe and sound in your 10 man life raft and snug as a bug in your gumby suit. Guess what? you’re not out of the woods yet.
Ocean survival course in Iceland.
No need for a life jacket if you’re wearing a Gumby suit.
I’m Gumby, Dammit!
That’s My Boy
As you all know I’ve things slide for a few months so I’m going to try and catch up.this spring number one son’s skydiving career really took off. (sorry) He came out to the drop zone almost every day and quickly built up a reputation as a good skydiver and better yet a great kid to hang out with. After getting his A license his next challenge was to get his coach rating. A coach rating allows you to just mp with and teach students that have been cleared to jump solo by the free fall instructors but do not yet have their license. The problem was Connor needed 100 jumps to be eligible to take the rating course and by the time the annual course started he only had…well, let’s just say less. That’s where being the drop zone owner came in handy. I was sure that the boy would make a fantastic coach so I pulled the evaluator aside and told him to give my son the rating or I’d fire him. OK, I didn’t quite do that but I did get him in the course early and he rocked it. Connor spent the rest of the summer teaching students and jumping for fun. Well, it was mostly fun, except for his first malfunction.
It happened while I was on the same airplane taking a tandem student for his first jump. The free fall was over and the two of us were flying the parachute back to the landing area. I happened to look down and saw an all yellow reserve canopy so I knew someone had had a malfunction. I located the rest of the skydivers and came up on son short so I was pretty sure that it had been Connor who’d had the cutaway. I pointed the emergency canopy to my student and told him what it was. He was dually impressed, even more so when I told him that the jumper with the malfunction was my son. What had happened was when Connor opened his parachute it developed line twists, that’s what we call it when the lines get all twisted up, hence the name. Unable to kick himself out of the twists and spiraling towards the ground Connor had no choice but to pull his cut away handle and pull his reserve. Now Connor is a fast learner and has been around skydiving his whole life o he knew how hard it is to find a parachute after you cut it away, particularly if it landed in the corn, where his brand new canopy was heading, so he did what any heads up skydiver would do, he followed it down and landed in the corn next to it. At least that was his plan.
There are a few mistakes a skydiver can make when cutting away from a malfunction.
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Panic: or should I say. PANIC!!!!!
You should be opening your main parachute by at least 2500 feet( if you have a “D” or “Master” license) this should give you at least 10 seconds to deal with anything unusual or problematic. That is plenty of time to cutaway your malfunctioning main and open your reserver canopy with plenty of extra feet to spare. Remember any extra altitude below an open reserve is just wasted!
Connor was open under his spinning main canopy by 3000 feet. He tried to fix it for a few seconds (with a few choice words thrown in for good measure) before pulling his handles, just like I taught him.
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Pulling your reserve handle before cutting away the malfunctioning main:
If you do this you dump your reserve into the malfunction which is what we call BAD. Connor didn’t do this incredibly stupid thing so he got to move on to…
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Dropping your handles:
When you pull the cutaway and reserve handles they come completely free, and if you drop them gravity takes over and they have a tendency to go down. This can be a problem when you are still a few thousand feet in the air because they are impossible to find and cost about $175 or more. Each. I’m sorry to report that Connor dropped his reserve handle, but seeing I dropped my reserve handle on my first cutaway I’ll give him some slack. (still disappointed though)
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Not following or at least keeping an eye on your gear:
When you cutaway a malfunctioning parachute it also goes down and seeing it can cost up to $3000 you really want to keep track of where it lands. Ideally if you can you land next to it so as to avoid many hours searching the corn but failing that you should at least have an idea of where to look. Connor’s only cost $500 but he did a good job and circled it under his reserve planning to land right next to it, just like to pro’s do. But he screwed it up, which leads to the next thing you can do wrong when cutting away from a malfunction.
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Landing next to your gear but screwing it up:
Ideally you land next to your gear, gather it up, walk out to the road and wait for a ride. But that’s hard to do if you screw up the landing and hurt yourself. Landing next to your gear is a pretty bad ass thing to do. But if your skills at landing in some random location on the spur of the moment don’t match your balls things can get painful. Luckily all that Connor did was to get a little slow and stall his reserve canopy just before landing. Oh wait, that was the stupid part. The lucky part was that he did it over thick tall corn. Which leads me to the last mistake you can do when cutting away from a malfunction.
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Screwing up on video:
Now I’ll admit that the boy did a pretty good job on his first major malfunction. Hey, He jumped out of a plane at 14,000 feet, did a shit hot skydive, had a spinning malfunction, dealt with it, landed next to his gear, and walked out to the road with it with a smile on his face. Unfortunately we still get to critique his landing.
The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated
OK, OK, I’ll start posting again. Sorry for the long gap (Holy crap, my last post was in July!) but I’ve been busy. OK, maybe busy isn’t the best word, I guess LAZY would be more accurate. In my defense I really did have an incredibly busy skydiving season this summer. After two years of the worst weather I’ve ever seen we finally got a summer of nothing but sunshine and light winds, perfect for the jumping out of planes thing. The biggest problem was once I got behind in my posting about all the things I wanted to tell you all about there was no way I could catch up after working 15 hour days 7 days a week. But we’ve shut down the drop zone for the year and my excuses are running out so stand by for an avalanche of stories of the last six months. Maybe avalanche isn’t the best word either if past history is any judge.
The Road To Singapore Day 3, 4,
Day 3.
I don’t know what it is about the morning of a day I don’t have to fly but I always feel like shit when I wake up. I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that if I don’t have to get up early and fly I tend to stay out a bit later working on public relations. After dinner last night Stuart, Jack and I headed of to go visit the blind and read to the poor but somehow we ended up at a bar, I hate when that happens. Well, one thing led to another and before we knew it we were playing pool with the locals who had recognized me from Dangerous Flights, (if you don’t know what that is you must live under a rock, or have a life.) Anyway I’m a pretty big deal in Goose Bay and that means autographs and photos with my fans, which is hard work, which makes a third rate reality TV star thirsty, which leads to a fuzzy head the next morning. Where was I? Oh yes day 3. Anyway we managed to get in touch with a mechanic who fixed our flat tire with the spare tube Stuart was smart enough to bring along. He actually has the plane filled with spare parts which is smart because getting parts in remote areas can be a challenge. I’d love to say day 3 was filled with more exciting adventures but that pretty much covers it.
Day 4.
We arrived at the Goose Bay airport all raring to go to Narsarsuaq Greenland only to get a weather report that wan’t all that hot. The charts showed a low pressure system off the coast that was forecast to give us low clouds and strong winds in Greenland. That’s usually considered a bad thing when trying to get into Narsarsuaq due to it being nestled deep in a fjord surrounded by steep mountains. Strong winds create severe turbulence and low clouds could prevent you from making it in at all. Also a bad thing when there is no where else to go. There was another flight crew there trying get to the same place and we bounced ideas off each other for a while before deciding that it was just too dangerous to make an attempt at Greenland. To make matters worse it looked like that low pressure system was going to make flying to Greenland and then on to Iceland very difficult due to the thick clouds that would undoubtedly contain a moderate to severe icing hazard. As nice as Goose Bay is none of us wanted to be stuck there for the next week so we saddled up and headed north to Frobishure Bay and the equally lovely town of Iqaluit on Baffin island. Our evil plan from there was to fly across the Davis Straight to Sonderstrom and follow the Arctic circle across to Iceland thus avoiding the crappy weather. That was our plan anyway. When we landed in Iqaluit (Ill a qwat) I saw a good looking blond pilot of the female variety in a rather warm looking flight suit stepping out of a Twin Otter with “BRITISH SURVAY” stenciled on the side. It turns out she works for the company that flies the Twin Otters that haul around and supply the British scientists that study the Antartctic so of course I asked her if they needed any pilots. “Always” She said. That made suspicious. “Why is that?” “Because it’s a six month contract in Antarctica and that gets kind of long.” She had a point but I think I’d love flying a Twin Otter on skis in Antarctica, maybe not for six months, but still………..I had her write down the necessary information for applying for the job……………………. Don’t tell my wife.
I have a TON of great photos to post but the WIFI has been really poor the last few so please stay tuned.
