Just 5 Minutes
With nothing else to do because I STILL don’t know when the Navajo I’m supposed to take to Bangkok will be ready, I’ve been going over the route I’m taking. With the trip being delayed so long I’m running up against the start of skydiving season, although the 6 inches of snow we got overnight gives me a few more days. Either way when I finally get the Navajo in the air I’m going to be trying to get to Thailand as fast as I can. The problem is that it will be very difficult to do more than 2 legs a day due to the fact that I’ll be going east and losing an hour or two every day due to the time change.
A typical day goes something like this:
Get up early and grab a taxi to the airport, no breakfast because nothing is open yet. Try to get in the air before sunrise but but because of delays in paying landing and parking fees , checking weather and filing a flight plan you’re at least an hour late. 7:00am local.
Fly 4-5 hours, land and try to get fuel, check weather, pay fees’ and file flight plan as fast as possible, which can be as little as 1 hour in the US and Canada and as long as 4 in Europe, middle east and Asia. Land at 12:00-1:00 local. Back in the air around 3:00pm.
Fly 4-5 more hours. By the time you land the local time is between 8:00-10:00 pm and you still have to fuel up for the next day’s flight get a taxi to some hotel, grab a quick dinner and get some sleep.
That’s a worst case scenario, at some airports I can get in the air very early but still not much before 6:00 am. Do this for 8 days in a row and you will start to get just a little bit tired, especially flying into the rising sun first thing in the morning. The crushing desire for just a few minutes of sleep can very powerful and dangerous. “But why don’t you just take a day off and rest up?” Non-ferry pilots ask. Because we get paid to fly not sleep. Hotels, food and other costs dictate that you keep going, no matter what. Over the years I’ve struggled to stay awake by singing, pinching my inner thigh, shadow boxing and doing isometrics. But sometimes if you could just get a few minutes of sleep it would make all the difference in the world. The problem is keeping your cat nap to just a few minutes and not a few hours. I can usually close my eyes for a minute or two and wake myself up but it’s always scary. I know of pilots who have fallen asleep and not woken up for hours. In the old days I tried putting my watch inside my headset with its alarm set for 5 minutes but it wasn’t loud enough. I sometimes tune in one of the radios to the automated airport frequency and crank up the volume hoping that when I get close enough to receive the signal it will wake me up, not a great option. Yesterday I hit upon what I think will be my salvation. I have a Bose noise cancelling headset that not only does a great job of filtering out airplane noise but also has a headphone port that allows me to plug in my iPod and listen to great quality music while I’m flying. When I was thinking about the problem I realized that I could also plug in my iPad to the headset and use the alarm clock app set to as little as 1 minute to wake me up. I tried it out at home and the alarm comes through loud and clear. I could set it for 5 minutes, wake up and check the engine instruments, hit the snooze button and catch a few more zz’s. I almost can’t wait to be really tired on my next trip
Does Santa Have Avgas?
No I’m not half way to Bangkok like I’m supposed to be. More delays on the Navajo trip have me sitting in a holding pattern here in Wisconsin. When dealing with airplane owners who want you to deliver their new plane to them the communication goes one of two ways;
“When are you going to get my plane here? I need it NOW! NOW! NOW!” Or “I know I told you that it would be ready to go on the 25th but the FAA hasn’t released it yet, the new props aren’t on yet, we need a new seat belt and we decided to have it painted while it’s here in the U.S. Sorry you made all those planes and put your life on hold but I’m sure you didn’t have anything better to do.”
Guess which one I’m dealing with now. So with time on my hands I’ve been packing and playing video games going over survival gear and maps and I ran across this map in my trip package.
It’s not often a map I’m using on a cross country has the North Pole on it. HO HO HO.
Please Don’t Mind The Mess
Sorry about the mess at the top, my wife is working on a new look for the blog and so far it’s a work in progress, kind of like road construction.
I’m Only “Kind Of” Stupid
As I mentioned even though I’ve made over 13,000 skydives I’ve yet to make a BASE jump. It’s not that I’m scared, I’M NOT SCARED OF ANYTHING! I just don’t have access to anything to anything I consider high enough to jump off of. For non-skydivers that statement might seem wrong. “Kerry, I think you mean anything low enough to jump from.” No dear reader I do not, and I’ll thank you not to question me in the future. I know what I’m talking about. Skydivers know that the higher you are the safer you are because it’s the ground, or cliff, that kills you so STAY AWAY! A jump site that’s really high allows the jumper to fly away from the cliff and open his parachute safely without the risk of an off heading opening flying him back into the cliff with predictable results. No need to talk about the guys who try and see how low they can open, that’s just Darwin at work. If you look at the statistics BASE jumping is an extremely dangerous sport, but if you take out the jumpers who jump from low objects it’s not as bad, still dangerous but not crazy stupid dangerous. When a non-skydiver looks over the edge of the 800 foot New River Gorge, a popular BASE site, they say “Oh my God, look how high it is!” A skydiver say’s “Oh my God, look how low it is!”
All I’m really looking for is the rush of jumping off of a cliff, not the sight of the ground coming up to smite me. That’s why when I finally make a BASE jump it’s going to be from something so high that it’s almost like a skydive. Someplace like this.
Mt. Thor on Baffin Island.
Someday.
If You’re Gonna Be Stupid, Ya Better Be Tough
A few days ago I posted a video of three wingsuiters doing some “amazing” close proximity flying. I put the word amazing in quotes because one man’s amazing is another man’s freaking nuts. It’s a crazy video to watch with the pilots flying extremely close to the ground and the skiers they were filming with. Now I’ve wanted to fly my wingsuit close to the ground or cliffs for a long time and watching videos like that really gets my heart pumping. Ripping along at 80 mph with my face just inches from the ground would crazy fun, I mean I’ve literally had dreams like that for years. What can I say? I’m not normal. But even though I live what most people would call a very dangerous and risky life I do know that some things are just a little too dangerous. That’s why I don’t BASE jump, so far. If I ever do start BASE jumping it will be from someplace really high like the 3,500 foot fjords in Norway or the 4010 foot drop of Mt. Thor in Baffin Island, and even though it would be fun to fly next to the rocks I’ll just jump and track away from the wall and open my parachute, so it would be, you know, safe.
Yesterday the three jumpers in the video jumped out of a helicopter in Switzerland and were playing “follow the leader” We’re not sure exactly what happened yet but it appears that they got too low and couldn’t recover. Two of them died and the third is in critical condition. Here are two screen shots from the video that show then flying just inches from the snow. Sure hope it was fun, cause you’re done.
Daily Time Waster
A pretty good video of Fulcrum drivers having a good time playing in their MiG-29s. Still funny to see military fighter pilots with GoPro mounts on their helmets.
Plane Porn
