FedEx 727 on Low Flyby preparing to land.
The University of Alaska successfully brokered a deal that resulted in FedEx donating the first of two retired 727 freighters to their aviation technology department. The first 727 landed at Merril field in Anchorage, and the second one will head to Fairbanks.
For more photos and more on the story click here.
I have had a fantastic time doing my Private Pilot training at John Wayne Airport. I have to thank my instructors at OCFC and at Royal Aviation. I’m looking forward to getting back into the air again. My primary motivation now is to finish the rest of my training as cheaply as possible. This means that I am changing airports, airplanes, instructors, and now I am headed toward finishing with the Pacific Coast Flyers flying club at KCRQ – Palomar Airport in Carlsbad, CA.
Before I show up, I am going to have to start to memorize the V-speeds and operating limitations of my next training aircraft. I anticipate being able to fly their Cessna 150, which means that I’m going to head on over to PilotMall.com and order Cessna 150 Aircraft Information Manual for the 1970 Cessna 150-K. I’m glad I found their manuals there because under my new flying ACAP (as cheaply as possible), policy – their price is definitely more affordable for these manuals. I spent nearly $50 for the 172 K version of the manual at some other aviation website.
I am thrilled that I was able to get so much experience flying out of John Wayne. Landing next to commercial airlines, and avoiding wake turbulence are valuable skills. The John Wayne traffic pattern has specialized operating procedures. The downside to flying there is that just about everything is more expensive. Fuel, for example can be more than $1 per gallon more than at the nearby Riverside airport.
I’m looking forward to joining a flying club, and possibly also participating in the civil air patrol chapter of Orange County. The flying club offers a ton of opportunities to go on trips with other pilots and fly a wide variety of aircraft.
This is an amazing story about an undiscovered (until recently) WWII fighter plane…
Crashed WWII P-40 Discovered in the Desert
Read the article on the British Newspaper Website ->
Somewhere over the North Atlantic, faced with several potential hours of boredom and tedium, a 747 FO just so happened to have a camera has he passed under this MD-11 rig in his own, going at a slightly faster clip.
An air traffic controller in the bay area has an extremely detailed homebuilt 737 simulator in his garage. It includes a cockpit reclaimed from a Lufthansa 737. He said that 90% of the 737 systems in his simulator are operational, and he has invested over $300k over the years in making the simulator as realistic as possible. This puts my Microsoft Flight Simulator rig to shame.
My first solo started as a normal flight, where my instructor and I first went around the pattern 3 times. My instructor had me then drop him off at taxiway Juliet between 19L and the taxi way Charlie. The tower approved that, and he sat, awkwardly in the grass among the jets pushing back from the John Wayne B Concourse, and the General Aviation traffic taxiing past on Charlie.
Unlike some, my solo flight was no surprise. I first completed several prerequisite steps including taking a presolo written test, and doing something around 70 touch and goes with this instructor at this airport. We planned this being my solo flight before I started the engine that day. I have heard stories of the “surprise solo” but this was not one of those, and I am not even sure that such a thing happens anymore.
This can just ruin your day. Watch out for spooling jet engines, folks.
Girl blown by jet
What’s a better job than aerial photography? I can’t think of many, especially here in Southern California. I know that when I get my commercial license, that aerial photography will be pretty high on my to do list, especially if I can recruit someone to take the photos while I do the flying.
Pilots have their own language. When all heck breaks out, they say, “Now, it’s interesting.”
On this day, flying with Air Force veteran and commercial aerial photographer Fred Emmert, the worst it gets is “ugly.”
With Ron Smeets as pilot, the single-engine Cessna drops down and banks sharply. Its red and white fuselage is at such an angle that when I look out my side window there is only ground – and the feeling of spinning straight down.
Read the whole story by David Whiting at the OC Register ->
Of course this happened in Australia, a place where the wildlife lurks behind every bush waiting to destroy humanity…
CANBERRA, Australia—An Australian pilot said he was forced to make a harrowing landing reminiscent of a Hollywood thriller after a snake popped out from behind his dashboard and slithered across his leg during a solo cargo flight.
Braden Blennerhassett—unsure whether the snake was venomous—said Thursday that his heart raced as he tried to keep his hands still while maneuvering the plane back to the northern city of Darwin. The snake popped its head out from behind the instrument panel several times, Blennerhassett said, and then the ordeal worsened when the animal crawled across his leg during the approach to the airport.
Read more: Pilot turns back after snake pops out of dashboard – The Denver Post http://www.denverpost.com/watercooler/ci_20330612/pilot-turns-back-after-snake-pops-out-dashboard#ixzz1rB0eTUr9
Read The Denver Post’s Terms of Use of its content: http://www.denverpost.com/termsofuse
A complex aircraft has flaps, retractable landing gear, and an adjustable pitch propeller. Believe it or not, I have used a Groupon more than once to get a flying lesson at a flying school that I would not otherwise have visited. As a result, I have had the opportunity to fly a complex Cessna 172 as well as a Garmin G1000 Glass Cockpit equipped Cessna 172. When I came home from a demo flight with Orange County Flight Center, I explained to my wife that I had just flown a plane with retractable landing gear, but she was astonished after she asked “Don’t they all have those?” Good stuff. Since I have done all of my primary training in either a C-152 or some flavor of a C-172, everything I have flown has had flaps. The only complexity that adds is remembering to extend flaps at the appropriate speed, and remembering to retract flaps for touch and goes and go-arounds for a landing.
With the 172RG, I get an introduction to the awesome GUMPS mnemonic checklist as follows:
G - Gas - (Not Gear as you may think) – Have the tank selector on Both or the fullest tank
U – Undercarriage – This refers to gear – down and locked
M - Mixture – Set for landing
P - Prop – High RPM
S - Seatbelts – Fastened
Although I have been using the King Schools Private Pilot video course to supplement all of the reading I did with both the Airplane Flying Handbook and The Pilot’s Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge, after my flight at Orange County Flight Center, the instructor told me about the Cessna Pilot Training which is an updated private pilot course specific to newer Cessna 162 and 172 aircraft and it also covers the Garmin G300 Glass Panel as well as the G1000. I’ll be headed up again soon, but for now I am going to stay away from complex aircraft so I can just focus on finishing my Private Pilot with the simplest requirements possible.
It has been a goal of mine to go flying in my old hometown for a long time. I knew that I wanted to fly with a flight school at KBJC, Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport (Formerly Jeffco Airport) in Broomfield, CO.
I found McAir Aviation, they have a fantastic modern fleet of training aircraft. We took up a Cessna 172S with a G1000 glass cockpit. This was highly advanced and almost like a culture shock for me. Previously, my only exposure to a glass cockpit 172, was with an Aspen Glass setup partial panel while flying in Kona Hawaii.
The preflight on this modern Cessna was a bit different, from having 5 fuel sumps on each wing, to checking and verifying the availability GPS satellites. This is also my first time in a Cessna 172 that had fuel injection and a TCAS warning system.
The day in Denver was cold, but clear with light winds up to 5 knots. We departed and climbed to 6,500′ MSL. Once we were cleared for our south departure, we turned straight south and followed Wadsworth Blvd down to the Green Mountain/Littleton area. There we practiced some steep turns and slow flight before continuing on to Centennial Airport (KAPA). In the Centennial traffic pattern, I was able to do some touch and goes to knock the dust off of my skills and keep my landings and pattern work sharp. We then turned back north and flew over Downtown Denver and Mile High Stadium.
My instructor had a commendable amount of patience as he walked me through the ins and outs of flight planning. I sat mostly stumped trying to remember high school algebra that was dusty as hell somewhere in the back of my head. Since I just passed the private pilot written exam, I knew that some of the calculation problems like finding the estimated time en-route, were going to be a problem for me. The issue was that I didn’t know what the formulas were, nor where to get the necessary data to plugin to the formulas, had I known what they were.
Here is what I did know:
I knew where were were headed, from KSNA (Orange County, John Wayne) to KCMA (Camarillo – an airport north of LA near some outlet mall).
I knew that we were going to take basically the same route as our last flight which was to Santa Monica airport, except this time we would fly over Santa Monica instead of landing there.
I knew how to plot that course on the map and measure the distance to all of the important waypoints, including the transition through bravo airspace over LAX.
I knew how to convert my true headings to magnetic headings and correct for magnetic variation to find magnetic course.
I knew how to find all of the frequencies of where we were, where we needed to go, and basically who we would be talking to the whole time.
Here is what I didn’t know:
How to calculate top of climb and fuel burn
How to calculate estimated time en route (I knew I needed true airspeed, but was foggy on where to get the wind and wind triangle info)
How to correctly and manually interpolate the data from performance charts in the pilot’s operating handbook to precise figures.
The interpolation tripped me up more than I anticipated because my high school algebra is embarrassingly rusty. So because of that and the time it took for other critical info to make it’s way into my Homer Simpson-like skull, the weather changed for the worse by the time we finished the flight planning process. So it was time to check the weather again. We could look outside and see quite a bit of haze/marine layer developing from over the ocean again. John Wayne typically has marine layer issues in the AM because the airport is only about 5nm from the shoreline of Newport Beach.
Our flight planning ended around 2:45 pm, and my instructor declared the weather “barely legal”. He folded up the IFR approach charts for himself to do the IFR approach just in case our VFR weather changed and pushed us below minimums from “barely legal” to “fully illegal”.
With that, we went out to preflight the aircraft. Today we were flying N5364K which is one of my favorite training aircraft at Royal Aviation because it doesn’t have any negative quirks that bother me. One of the other 172′s has a harder left turning tendency, not only during low speeds and climb, but practically during all phases of flight, so it requires a couple notches of rudder trim correction.
Anyhow, during preflight, I called up John Wayne clearance and got a VFR clearance for a “Mesa Local” which is John Wayne speak that tells them we want to go northwest towards the coast. The controller gave us the clearance with a heading of 220 and told us to contact ground. Preflight was totally normal, so we started the engine, tested the brakes, called ground just before leaving our parking area and ground told us to taxi to the tower run-up area. We completed run-up and called Riverside flight service station to open the flight plan that we filed back in the office. The guy at the FSS opened the flight plan and told us once again just how marginal the weather was. We thanked him, contacted ground to taxi for departure. Ground told us to continue our taxi on Bravo, and to take Kilo to hold short of 19R, which we did. We then contacted the tower freq for 19R and they let us go ahead and use the “big runway” 19R for departure.
Lights, camera, action, and we started our ground roll. I pulled back on the yoke and kept my eye on the airspeed to keep us at Vx – or 76 knots. We took our 220 heading provided by clearance and flew that until we got to the shoreline south of Huntington Beach. We then turned north to head for the Emmy and Eva oil platforms.
Just over the oil platforms, we reached our cruising altitude of 4,500′ which is required for us to transition over LAX using the VFR special flight rules corridor. Right at the edge of Long Beach Harbor, we made a minor 10 degree heading change and headed for the Santa Monica VOR. Because the skies were so cloudy, we had few visual references for position reporting. After about 12 minutes, we reached the Santa Monica VOR and continued northwest to reach the 101 freeway. After we crossed over the 101 freeway and could see VNY Van Nuys airport off to our 2 o’clock position it was time to head directly to Camarillo – also known as the town of the outlet malls.
We reached the top of decent over an area called conejo grade – which is a steep downhill road through the mountains north of Thousand Oaks. Since we had a Beech Baron closing from behind at a high rate of speed, the Camarillo controller had us sidestep to allow the Baron to land first.
We landed and taxied back for takeoff. Just after we took off, the clouds moved in really cramping our VFR style. We made it back over LAX and through the special flight rules corridor with a solid layer of clouds below us. We were still ‘barely legal’ VFR and didn’t have a good visual on nearby reporting points.
Once we were inbound over Long Beach harbor, we started our descent, and contacted SoCal Approach. They handed us off to John Wayne tower who gave us a right downwind for runway 19R. After landing on the big runway we taxied back to parking. It was a great cross country, and a really good day to see what the weather limits look like both on the ground and in the air. I can’t wait to get back up again.
One of my best purchases in my student pilot career has definitely been my iPad. I have been studying for my private pilot written exam with the Study Buddy app released by Sporty’s. The Private Pilot version is $10 and has 700+ questions to review to prepare for the Private Pilot Written exam. I started slowly by just doing the first few modules, then I jumped into the deep end of the pool and went through all 700 questions in “learning mode”. Learning mode essentially trains you what questions you answered incorrectly, and explains why they are incorrect then it also shows you the correct answer and explains why it is correct. After about 1 week of hard core review, I can now pass the simulated tests with scores consistently in the 80%s. I also know what material I need to review and where my weaknesses are.
I told my instructor about my progress and yesterday he indorsed my logbook to go and take the Private Pilot written test – which I am going to do right after I get back from Vegas next week.
Having previously taken flying lessons in 2005, and not completing the training, I firmly believe that there are 2 things that more or less prevent people from getting all the way through their training (most of the time). I think that not getting a medical soon enough after beginning training is one of them. People who take demo flights and then a few more lessons then wash out, don’t bother to get the medical, and thus never remove that obstruction from their progress. I think the second obstacle most people who fail to complete private pilot training is taking and passing the written exam. It is an obstacle, but by comparison, I doubt that many people give up after a failed oral exam or checkride, though there are those that do. By virtue of the fact that it costs so much monetarily to reach the point of taking the checkride, most would likely just want to try again if they fail. With soloing, cross country flying, night flying, all of those are challenges that most student pilots look forward to, though perhaps with some trepidation, those challenges still seem much more sexy than taking a multiple choice test.
In July, The 1940 Terminal Air Museum at Houston Hobby Airport held their annual drawing to win a raffle plane. Unlike Sporty’s drawing, or the one for AOPA, I actually thought that there may be a decent chance with this one since they (the museum folks who run the drawing) promise to only sell a maximum of 2500 tickets. I think I first learned about this drawing while I was helping the people at Flying.com with some social media stuff a year or so ago. Strangely, I found the raffle plane on Twitter, and started to follow the account for the raffle plane. Since tickets were only $50, I of course had to buy at least one. So sure enough, I sent away for the raffle ticket and it showed up a few days later. I threw it into my desk and nearly forgot about with the exception of the once per month fantasy about how life would be awesome with my own plane.
Pictured above is the next raffle plane, for which you can currently purchase tickets. I’ll buy another ticket again this year, and if I don’t win, I can just look at all of the aircraft for sale on Flying.com and continue to fantasize.
The photo in this post is courtesy of The 1940 Terminal Air Museum
