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Boy Scout

I leave for Florida next week, I hope, still no visa for India or conformation that the plane is ready yet…but I digress.  It’s time to start getting my survival kit together.  Getting ready for a 10,000 mile cross country is challenging, I have to be prepared to go down in the north woods of Canada, still winter in the great white north, the north Atlantic, Greenland’s Ice cap, the Mediterranean, (not so bad off the coast of Greece), the empty quarter of Saudi Arabia, (largest sand desert in the world) The gulf of Oman,(at least the water’s warm) then finally the deep jungle of Burma. Piece of cake.  At least I found this helpful information from the FAA.

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Yes, I do have a ball of string, gotta be prepared ya know.

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Ferry Flight Pic Of The Day

Here’s a picture of me flying a Phenom 100 in Australia for an episode in season one of Dangerous Flights.  I go to do all of the flying that day because the captain wasn’t able to fly formation with the camera ship.  Now in his defense the camera ship was a helicopter and therefore unsafe who’s top speed was just above the stall speed of the Phenom.  Still it was probably my most fun day of flying ever.

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Truth

1. When a flight is proceeding incredibly well, something was forgotten. – Robert Livingston, “Flying The Aeronca”

2. Just remember, if you crash because of weather, your funeral will be held on a sunny day. – Layton A. Bennett

3. Never fly the ‘A’ model of anything. – Ed Thompson

4. When a prang seems inevitable, endeavor to strike the softest, cheapest object in the vicinity, as slowly and gently as possible. – Advice given to RAF pilots during W.W.II.

5. The Cub is the safest airplane in the world; it can just barely kill you. – Attributed to Max Stanley, Northrop test pilot

6. A pilot who doesn’t have any fear probably isn’t flying his plane to its maximum. – Jon McBride, astronaut

7. If you’re faced with a forced landing, fly the thing as far into the crash as possible. – Bob Hoover

8. If an airplane is still in one piece, don’t cheat on it; Ride the bastard down. – Ernest K. Gann, advice from the ‘old pelican’

9. Though I Fly Through the Valley of Death I Shall Fear No Evil For I Am 80,000 Feet and Climbing. – Sign over the entrance to the SR-71 operating location on Kadena

10. You’ve never been lost until you’ve been lost at Mach 3. – Paul F. Crickmore

11. Never fly in the same cockpit with someone braver than you. – Richard Herman, Jr., ‘Firebreak’

12. There is no reason to fly through a thunderstorm in peacetime. – Sign over squadron ops desk at Davis-Monthan AFB, AZ, 1970. (It was still there in 1972.)

13.The three best things in life are a good landing, a good orgasm, and a good bowel movement. The night carrier landing is one of the few opportunities in life to experience all three at the same time. – Author Unknown

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Gravity Check

 Being lazy to day, OK not lazy just trying to get my taxes done before my Bangkok trip.  So for now here’s a skydiving video that was all the rage a few years ago.  It does a good job of showing most of the aspects of skydiving that us jumpers get excited about.  Enjoy! (If you have an hour to kill)

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Kerry Of Araiba?

I have a confession to make.  Sometimes when I’m supposed to be working I take a well deserved break and wander around the internet for hours at a time a few minutes doing, you know, research.  This morning I got an email from my good friend Andrew Bruce up  at Far North Aviation in Wick Scotland who I’d asked for advise in planning my upcoming trip to Bangkok.  One of the legs I was asking about was the stop in Jordan.  The last time I was through there I landed and spent the night in Amman.  It was an OK place to stop for the night but my route to Crete the next day would take me over Israel and even though I’d been trying for 3 days I was unable to get an overflight permit.  So not wanting to meet an F-16 with the star of David on its wings I was forced to fly around Israel then back up to Egypt.  Quite the pain in the ass and expensive.

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I was looking at trying once again to get overflight permission for Israel or even land there, because I have a friend in Tel Aviv but Andrew suggested that I stop in Aquaba instead because the fuel is cheap, sort of.  So after hard 5 minutes of slaving away on Google Earth looking at the new route I decided I deserved a break and started surfing the internet.  One of the first things I came across was a story about Lawrence of Arabia’s secret camp being found.  “That’s cool” I thought, and as I scrolled down the page I came across a map that showed where the camp was located.  Notice any similarities?

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It looks like I’m going to be flying right over the camp when I leave Aqaba going to Kuwait.  I think I see a desert buzz job in my future.

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Stalls Kill

We lost another jump plane full of skydivers this weekend.  A Cessna 206 in Australia crashed the other day killing the pilot and two tandem instructors and their students.   Same old tragic story.  Loss of power on takeoff.  Pilot attempts the impossible turn.  Stall.  Spin.  Crash.  Everyone dead.  This scenario happens time and time again and it drives me absolutely batshit crazy!   I train jump pilots every year and the one thing I focus most on is how to crash.  some pilots like to call it a forced landing but lets call a spade a spade.  If you lose power, land off the airport and bend the aircraft it’s a crash.  If you and all your passengers walk away it’s a good crash.  If everyone dies, not so much.  Every pilot knows if the airspeed gets too slow the plane stops flying, that’s not good.  The problem is that too many pilots just can’t accept the fact that sometimes they are in a no-win situation and no matter what they do they are going to crash.  I can see it like I was there in the cockpit with them.  BANG! out of nowhere the engine quits.  You were in the climb out with the nose high and your airspeed immediately starts dropping like like a turd from a tall moose as your heart rate goes the other way.  You frantically look around the cockpit trying to spot something obviously wrong, something you could fix, something that could get you out of this situation.  But there’s nothing wrong, nothing to fix.  Look up, find a place to land.  But what’s in front of you isn’t a runway, it’s trees, buildings, a school, a golf course, (no, it’s never a golf course) Doesn’t matter it’s not a runway and you’ve never not landed on a runway.  TURN AROUND! THE RUNWAY’S BEHIND YOU!  You bank hard and head back to the runway.  HOW DID I GET SO LOW?   AND HOW DID MY AIRSPEED GET SO LOW?  You look at the runway out the side window….too far away……here comes the ground……PULL UP!  Here come the trees, PULL UP! every time I’ve pulled back on the yoke the plane has climbed.  Over the hundreds or thousands of hours I’ve spent flying every time I’ve pulled back on the yoke the plane has climbed.  Its become as natural a reaction as breathing.  Don’t come up short of the runway, PULL UP!  But it doesn’t work that way.  The thousands of times you’ve pulled  back on the yoke a running engine and excess airspeed has pulled you higher into the sky.  But not this time.  This time you’re a poor excuse for a glider.  And there’s no airspeed left.  And airspeed is life.  The stall horn shrieks, the pre-stall buffet gets worse, but you can’t bring yourself to lower the nose, if you do that you’ll never make the runway, you’ll crash, and that’s something you just can’t accept…won’t accept.  So you do the only thing you can think of to keep from crashing, you pull back more.  The end is quick.

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Choices, Choices

The task for the day is to figure out the route for my ferry trip from Florida to Bangkok.  It’s a hard job because every stop outside of the US entails hundreds of dollars in landing fees so I have to figure out how to make each leg as close to the Navajo’s 1000 range as possible.  It’s also hard because sometimes their are two different airports that are about the same distance and I just get to choose based on where I want to land.  My question of the day is from Augsburg Germany I can either go to Istanbul, Turkey before heading to Jordan or I can go to Corfu, Greece.  Now I’ve never been to Turkey and have always wanted to see what Istanbul is like but I have been to Corfu and it’s one of the most beautiful places on earth and a favorite stop of mine that I haven’t seen in years.  Hmmm, what to do, what to do.  I know let’s take a vote, where do you all think I should go?

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