Category: Revelation

Are you a pilot who blogs, or a blogger who flies?

I got an email today from “IFR Pilot” (who also signs off as Darrell) cc’ed to a bunch of other pilot-bloggers proposing that we all have a fly-in and get to know each other. After a few massively cc’ed exchanges where people seemed enthusiastic about the idea, I set up a mailing list so that other pilot-bloggers could find this list and sign up. If you are in that category, you can sign up at this link.

A lot of the people on “IFR Pilot”‘s list were people I’d never heard of, so I can see I’m going to be adding a whole bunch of new blogs to my RSS reader.

So how’d I do? (Aviation edition)

For 2006 I set myself a few goals for my flying. If I recall correctly, it was

  • Fly 50 hours this year.
  • Do some airwork and get more proficient at smooth flight, especially the use of the rudder.
  • Start work towards a Commercial or Float Plane rating.

Well, it didn’t quite work out that way. I only got 37.9 hours flying time (25.3 complex), although I would have been 5 or so hours closer to my goal if the Lance hadn’t been broken on the day we departed for Oshkosh, and maybe another 3 hours if we’d been able to fly to Albany on Thanksgiving weekend. Oh well. That’s still up for the 20-25 hours I normally put in a year. I also didn’t do much airwork, mostly cross country. So I still finding myself having to look at the ball and putting in rudder as an afterthought rather than feeling what needs be put in. However, I did get training in the Garmin 530, and I think I’m getting more precise in my approaches and IFR en-route flying. I also had a little adventure with ice avoidance and negotiating with ATC for what I needed on my way home from Pinckneyville. So while I didn’t meet my goals, I think I had a pretty satisfying flying year.

I’m not sure if I’m going to get to Oshkosh this year – this is our 10th anniversary and I think I’m going to be spending my vacation time on a cruise or something. So I probably won’t be heading down to Florida for Jack Brown’s Seaplane Base or up to Parry Sound for Georgian Bay Airways for a float rating either.

So my goals for this year remain

  • Become a more proficient yoke and rudder pilot.
  • Continue to fly more than I have been in the past.

Today’s interesting discovery

My navaid.com web site uses a tiny bit of Ajax in order to refresh a portion of a page showing how many waypoints have been generated so far, when you’re generating a database. A couple of people reported that it wasn’t working right with IE 7. I discovered that IE 7 has attempted to implement the XMLHttpRequest the same as standards compliant browsers (Firefox, Opera, Safari), and that was my first thought. I upgrade IE on my Windows box to IE 7 and tested it, and sure enough it didn’t work right, and turning off the option that says “Enable native XMLHttpRequest support” did make it work right.

But I can’t expect every user of my site to turn off this option, so I went searching for a better answer. And I discovered something else – IE is fanatical about caching pages, no matter what the web server tells you about the age of the page. So I added the following line to my page’s javascript:

this.req.setRequestHeader(‘If-Modified-Since’,
‘Sat, 1 Jan 2000 00:00:00 GMT’);

and that seems to have fixed it. Unfortunately, because IE is so fanatical about caching stuff, I’m betting that a bunch of my users won’t see the changed net.js until they’ve already decided it doesn’t work.