Balancing Flying with Family editorial If you are a family man or woman, you need to balance your flying activities with your home-life. Certainly every situation is different so many of these points won’t apply. If your whole family is into flying, you are probably in the best possible position and the envy of many…
Old Flight Bag: A glimpse into a flying life My aunt was good friends with a Doctor in Alaska during her days living up there. He passed away a few years ago and the family wanted me to have his old flight bag. It was in storage at my parent’s house for a year and…
Happy Thanksgiving! Thanksgiving means something different to everyone. I think for pilots it has a special meaning. As aviators we get to experience something few mortals will ever know; the patchwork of our fragile Earth from above, the beauty of a sunrise from altitude, the playfulness of fair-weather cumulus clouds – all from…
Reflections of a flight Short Flight from iflyblog.com on Vimeo. For fun I mounted my camera under the wing of the RV-8 and shot this footage on a short flight from Buckeye Executive airport to The Ohio State Airport last week. Most of the flight is sped up 800x to shorten the video. The interesting…
My First Flight My first time to slip the surly bonds of earth occurred at Lawton, Oklahoma. I was 14 years old. The vehicle, a Piper Arrow IV. The pilot, Jim Huddleston. In my early teens I made the decision that I would be a pilot. The only nuance was I had never flow in…
A horse of a different color One of things I enjoy, outside of flying, is horseback riding. After a recent ride it occurred to me that there are some fascinating parallels between these two very different disciplines. Starting with the basics; the flight controls are similar in that you use both your hands and your…
Short Sortie: A Normal Flight in the RV-8 Since the last time I flew the -8 was four weeks ago, I was looking for any excuse to go flying yesterday. My home airport doesn’t have fuel so I have to go to other airports to top-off. So the mission today was to top-off the fuel…
My Ride in a T-34 In High School I pumped gas to pay for my flying. It turned out to be a great opportunity to be a paid airport bum; I met all sorts of people and learned a ton. One of the neat things that happened was meeting Col J. Paul Tidwell, a retired…
Father and Son First Solo This came across the Twitter feed and I couldn’t resist the urge to put it up on my blog. Father and son Michael and Gregory B. both solo’d a C-172 on the same day in Kissimmee, FL. According to Sun State Aviation’s Facebook page, this occurred on Wednesday, Oct 31st, 2012…
How To Fly a Taildragger: 201 We pick up where we left off in 101 and venture into more of the nuances of conventional gear aircraft. If you haven’t read How To Fly a Taildragger: 101 go there first. One area not mentioned in 101 was how gyroscope precession, spiraling slipstream, p-factor and torque effect a…