Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2019 i Flying

This month, we welcome a new editor to Flying. Julie Boatman, who some of you undoubtedly already know from her past freelance stories for us or perhaps recall from her days as an editor with AOPA Pilot magazine, joins the team as our new associate editor. Julie is a longtime pilot who earned her private, commercial, instrument and CFI tickets by the time she graduated from college at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Since then, she has made her career in aviation, first as a flight instructor and then as an editor at Jeppesen before joining the editorial staff at AOPA. After that assignment, she became manager of Cessna Pilot Centers at Cessna Aircraft and then returned to Jeppesen under Boeing Flight Services as manager of the Aviation Training…

One of the happy byproducts of a life largely spent flying, riding, sailing and exploring all over North America and beyond is that I have a great many friends scattered to every corner of the country and, indeed, the globe. Sometimes this means going years without seeing people, staying in contact by phone or social media, but it makes the eventual reunion that much more enjoyable. Meeting up with a beloved old friend after a long absence feels as comfortable as putting on a favorite pair of jeans rediscovered at the bottom of a drawer on the first chilly day of fall. That’s exactly how it feels tonight as Dawn and I reconnect with our dear friends Sylvia and Hugh Grandstaff after a three-year interlude. We certainly could not have…

A couple of years ago, I restored a 17th-century barn in upstate New York. I acted as the general contractor. I was working from home, writing a screenplay, and figured I would keep costs down by not hiring a GC. And I did. The screenplay, though, did not get written. Between researching and buying materials, supplies and fixtures and hiring subcontractors (plumbers, electricians, builders and masons), it turns out being a GC is a full-time job. While I am not sure it was worth the money saved, I don’t regret it one bit. I got to see that barn transform into my new office, ostensibly where, one day, I will do all that writing I’m supposed to do. We’ll see. In general aviation, there is no such thing as a…

We’ve got new carpet around here. After 20 years, it must have been time to refresh the place. Though, to tell you the truth, the old carpet looked fine to me. This exercise meant removing everything from shelves and surfaces in the room I call my study—a misnomer for certain, as no studying ever takes place within its confines. When the new carpet was installed, I had to admit it looked better. This may be why men frustrate women. Restocking the bookshelves in a more organized fashion than the previous 20 years of randomness allowed for a sentimental review of several airplanes. I was in love with each of them in sequence, and they each came with training manuals and handwritten notes in big binders. Now they are arranged chronologically—or…

SATISFACTION I bet you’ll get a lot of emails about Sam Weigel’s article “Grains of Time” [June]. Some will probably say he was a bit pretentious for perhaps suggesting we all join the Jimmy Buffet lifestyle of piracy on the seven seas. While reading the story, I felt that at first—and then I realized that he was only trying to point out that time is fleeting. The advice he offered helped me in a way he probably wouldn’t expect. I have a private pilot’s license and own a Cessna 172. I have had this nagging feeling that it’s just not good enough. I need a glass cockpit, a faster plane, an IFR ticket and thousands of hours, or I am not a real pilot. I contemplated selling the airplane and…

In December 1996, a pilot and his companion checked out a Beech T-34 Mentor from the flying club at the Memphis Naval Air Station in Millington, Tennessee. They departed at about 4:15 in the afternoon on a 300-nautical-mile trip to Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. By the time they approached the Gulf Coast, it was dark. Several witnesses reported seeing the airplane—or at least its navigation and anti-collision lights—flying westbound “oscillating both vertically and laterally” and then “rotating about the longitudinal axis” before pitching nose-down. The pitch of the engine sound was heard rising, then there was a sound like an explosion, followed by that of an impact with the ground. The pilot had not been in contact with any ground station, but Houston ATC radar recorded a target that was…

Our United States government, in a fit of misguided zeal, defaced the sacred Black Hills of South Dakota with the likenesses of four politicians—one of them remembered today, among other things, as the inspiration of a plush toy. And yet, those stone faces are there forever—which is a long, long time. Another instance of violent destruction, more than 1,000 nm to the southwest but close to all our hearts, was the demolition of a fly-in “motel” known as the Happy Bottom Riding Club in the California desert. How are these two perfidies connected? By Florence Lowe “Pancho” Barnes. The Riding Club—its official name, the Rancho Ore Verde Fly-In Dude Ranch—was the local pub of Muroc Air Force Base (now known to us as Edwards), and Pancho was its Falstaff—its comic…

Between an inherent tendency to procrastinate, an expectation of lowering prices and a faint hope that the 2020 deadline would—like an affordable substitute for leaded avgas—quietly recede into the indefinite future, I did nothing about ADS-B Out until late this past year. By then, it appeared that the deadline was inexorable and the hoped-for $49.95 solution was not at hand. I began to consult Google for help. Airplane ownership is incompatible with my job description of ink-stained wretch. Only because I built my airplane myself—having designed it on the backs of used sheets of paper and equipping it with an engine, instruments and avionics from another era (my airspeed indicator once graced a DC-4)—do I have an airplane at all. Thus, frugality was of the essence. A vast and world-altering…

He could have been a 10-year-old kid. He was certainly acting like one. We were at the Helicopter Association International annual convention, and John was sitting in a helicopter pretending to fly it. He gradually became aware that someone had been standing beside him, waiting for him to come out of his fantasy. “I am so sorry,” John said. “I just realized you’ve been waiting to get into the helicopter.” “No,” the patient man said. “I’ve been waiting to talk to you.” The person waiting had recently used our courses in his studying to learn to fly, and he wanted to explain that we had helped him with something that meant the world to him. As the conversation progressed, John began to realize that this very expressive, personable man was…

The first Sunday of this past May, Moraine Airpark celebrated the 60th anniversary of its annual “Sunday Funday”—the unofficial start of the flying season. Our Midwest spring has been monotonously wet, gray and cool, so Sunday morning’s less than-ideal-ceilings and visibilities were no surprise… or deterrent. It was VFR “enough” with better weather in Dayton, Ohio, and my friend Joe and I were hungry. So we launched in the Cessna 180 before EAA Chapter 48 shut down the pancakes-and-sausage line. Sure enough, the sun broke through about 10 miles south of Dayton, and we were keeping a sharp lookout. I hadn’t been here since my FAA days, but “Sunday Funday” was a sort of prelude to Oshkosh, Wisconsin—lots of traffic converging on a not-overly-long runway, and pilots of all skill…