Everything I used to bore people on newsgroups and mailing lists with, now in one inconvenient place.
Pilots say that a good landing is one where you and most of the passengers walk away unscathed, and a great one is one where you can use the plane again afterwards. This is merely a good landing.
Initial reports are that they sucked in a flock of geese.
If you want to see what happened to one of our club’s planes when it hit a couple of geese click here.
If I had a few extra million dollars and a Boeing 707 to spare, I’d like to live like that.
I haven’t been doing much updating of this blog, mostly because I’ve been busy fixing up Maddy’s blog. Good thing she never got around to changing her password after I set it up for her. I had been putting updates on her blog because she’s been incommunicado – as people reach her on the phone or go visit her, they email me some status information and I put it on the blog for the benefit of all her friends. But because she’s been in the hospital and extremely fatigued, my posts were basically overwhelming what is, after all, her story. So thanks to the wonderful extensibility of MT, I’ve made a separate category for my posts, made the main page only show her category, and put a side bar entry showing my most recent posts.
It was remarkably easy. The only hard part was that because my blog and her blog are on the same site, if I wanted to look at my “Main Index” template while editing hers, I had to use two browsers, because two windows on the same browser couldn’t be logged in as different users. Fortunately I was working on my Mac, so I had both Mozilla and Safari, two excellent and standards compliant browsers at my disposal.
I’m currently without an aviation medical. If you want all the gory details as to why, you can read
this entry in my old journal, and you can read why it’s taking so long at this other entry.
In order to not just sit around on my ass having all my skills atrophy, I decided to check out in our club’s Lance. The club requires a 10 hour checkout, today I did 1.5 hours.
It was a lot of fun. The plane is big and heavy and a bit of a wallowy pig if you let it get slow, but at 90 knots on a standard landing pattern or 120 knots on an ILS, and it is steady as a rock and lands smoothly. It’s touchy on the throttle and propellor controls. But it’s fast and carries a ton literally – it’s got a max gross takeoff weight of 3600lbs and an empty weight of 1241. I’m looking forward to taking some long trips in it.
I was disappointed in the Standing Stones river sculpture when I got back to it today. The river has risen, and it look like many of the stones have been swept away. I took some pictures of what was left, but it’s a pale imitation of what there was last month. I guess I’ve got to stop forgetting my camera.