Cockpit Chronicles: A three legged turn

See why we had to add a stop in San Juan on this St. Thomas turn over Easter. Ran into Barack Obama down there as well--kind of. And how did I persuade the captain to give me the third leg? Well, you'll just have to find out here.

Photoshop Express Album

2008 Cockpit Photos

Just messing around with the new online photo sharing and editing sight, Photoshop Express from Adobe. It's free and very full featured. Give it a try. It requires the somewhat new Flash 9 plugin. If it doesn't load, you'll know you don't have that plugin yet.

Cockpit Chronicles: A view from the office window

Sometimes I forget how nice it is to fly over land. There's just SO much to take pictures of as this two day trip to L.A. reminded me. I had a chance to fly with a great guy, Bill, and talk small planes all the way across the country. Bill has an amphibious biplane (well, FOUR of them, actually) that he flies from his back yard. And Gadling is going forward with the Plane Answers column where I attempt to answer actual questions each week. Let's see how that goes. I'm sure the questions won't be like this one I got this week:

Great i enjoyed reading this blog am looking forward to a small
answer....
I am a production test pilot of a tranport aircraft.In one of the
tests today the aircraft viciously rolls to the left with aileron &
rudder trim neutral.Full left trimmer the roll is reduced but then u
run out of trim.We checked the aileron posotions all ok...as per
specifications....flaps were not used.Balnce tab in the aircraft is
fixed.Any thing why is it causing or what can be done...i am thinking
of gtg the CG checked...but
Any wise comments please shoot

Yikes. Anyone care to guess what could be wrong? I responded with the possibility of an inop fuel gauge causing an out of balance condition, but he says that's been ruled out. He responds:

Plane is AN-32 ( Russian ) asked i liked the blog so tht why not try.....no fuel imbalance problem checked already anything else come to ur mind

So I'm asking you guys now. Any ideas?

Time lapse photography

This could be my next project.  Has anyone done much of this?  What still camera are you using?

Top Gear: Air/Car Racing at it's best

I just LOVE the British TV show Top Gear. It's one of my favorite things to watch, not really because of the car aspect, but the fantastic writing and hosts. The photography is amazing as well. Take a look at this video:

Learning to fly...

My favorite web personality, Veronica Belmont of Mahalo Daily shows you what's involved in a $100 1-hour introduction flight.  If you've ever thought about learning to fly, why not try it out at your local airport. She did:

To find the local flight school in your area that offers this $100 intro flight, go to www.beapilot.com

Note that the $12,000 figure is for American Flyers, which is a high end U.S. school. My local airport charges half that price for 55 hours toward your Private.

Cockpit Chronicles: How pilots stay proficient

I just got back from training last week.  It's such a nice feeling to get that over with.  Here are all the details of the week in Dallas.

On another note, Nielson has just come out with it's Blog ratings for February and Gadling was ranked as the #1 in growth and #3 overall!  I was blown away.  Here's a NYT story on the results. I think "Cockpit Chronicles" has a good home!

Is Pan Am finally dead?

Occasionally I get to write a news item on Gadling. I just couldn't pass this one up. You can't imagine a more pilot bashing, union busting, corner cutting airline than the 'new' Pan Am, or Boston and Maine Airways as they're called now. Or were.

Twitter

I'm going to start using Twitter more.  In fact, I'll 'twitter' my training experience while I'm down in Dallas.  Join the free service here and follow along.  Be sure to add me.  Just do a search for veryjr and add RuthannOC (frequent contributor here) while you're at it.  Class starts at 12:30 today.  International regulations is the subject of the day.

Cockpit Chronicles: Taken for a ride in Panama City

The response over at Gadling has been fun to see.

Here's the next trip, released here a bit early.  It goes "live" tomorrow at 9 a.m. eastern time.

We had a great time visiting the Panama Canal, and I managed to learn a lot about the history of that "eighth wonder of the world."