We’re halfway to Christmas.
What do you want to find under the tree in six months?
Dare we even hope for the left seat at the pointy end?
Category Archives: Flying
Proof Of Life – June 24th
I am definitely getting too old for this shit. Which in turn bothers me even more than just being tired like this.
It’s a viscious cycle. Or a viscous cycle, could go either way.
One of these might not fix me, but we can’t be sure without trying, right? This was probably Clay Lacy’s – there aren’t a lot of Staggerwings around, and fewer in this color.
Freakin’ GORGEOUS aircraft!
Filed under Flying, Photography
Proof Of Life – June 20th
Routine has its advantages. Knowing what day of the week it is. Knowing what day of the month it is. Knowing what time of day it is.
Take away some weekends, throw in a holiday on a Thursday, have a dental surgeon poking holes in you and tearing things out and drilling things in on a Friday afternoon…
And I’m clueless. I just want to reboot, reset, sleep for about 72 hours and figure out where I’m starting over when I wake up.
Still here. Still one foot in front of another. Enjoy your weekend! Hot rumor is that it’s summer!
I still really need to get Photoshop installed on the new computer so that I can clean up the dust spots…
501′ Overhead
FAA regulations say that over a populated area if you’re not landing or taking off you need to be at least 500 feet high. We had an LAPD helicopter the other day “orbiting” over a spot about two blocks away (never did figure out what the fuss was about) which meant for about 15 minutes, we had him coming back around right overhead every 60 seconds or so. As low as he could get, so, probably about 501 feet overhead.
Here in our neck of the woods in the big city, between fires, crimes, accidents, rescues, and other emergencies, this happens three or four times a year. There are, of course, areas of the city where this happens three or four times a day. Here, not so much. (That’s a good thing!) How often does it happen elsewhere? In Springfield, Vermont in the 1970’s I don’t think I saw a single helicopter anywhere in five years. Your experience is somewhere between those two extremes.
But it’s a good excuse for me to grab the camera and go look at our personal air show.
Sorry about all of the spots – they’re from dust on the sensor of a decades-plus-old camera. Normally I clean up images I post here using Photoshop, but I just realized that I haven’t re-installed it on this new computer after I got it in March. Another task to add to the punch list for finishing up the install.
Filed under Flying, Los Angeles, Photography
Contrail Leftovers
Sunset tonight, a dozen or so clouds glowing pink, criss-crossing the coastal jetway.
But every one of the “clouds” is unnaturally long, thin, in a couple of parallel sets, like an exploded tic-tac-toe grid. And over on the far left, still compact and bright white, is the next line being laid down.
Another 737 laying down a contrail between SFO/OAK/SEA/CGO/TPE/YVR to LAX/BUR/SAN/SNA/PHX. Soon to be a long, straight, puffy, expanding, pink line across the western horizon.
Filed under Flying, Photography, Sunsets
March Texans
On Saturday afternoon there was a familiar buzz from the skies – TEXANS!
Probably a subset of the Condor Squadron out of Van Nuys.
We hear them all of the time since they come out here to practice their formation flying, but this time it was something extra.
They made four passes over something to the south of us, each time hitting the smoke about the time they came over our house.
I’m assuming they were hired to do a set of flybys for some event – a birthday, a memorial service, a retirement party, a wedding reception…
Thanks for the free mini-airshow! We didn’t get an invite to the festivities, whatever and wherever they were, but we enjoyed being buzzed!
And that’s a wrap for March! I had such high hopes, the eternal optimist, and was so disappointed.
April! You’re up!
Filed under Airshows, Flying, Photography
Christmas Tree Flying Again
Several years ago I bought a tree topper for our Christmas tree that had a star and a motorized bit that spun around with an airplane and banner on a wire. Two years ago when I packed it all I did a lousy job, and last year when I assembled the tree I found it to be broken. Being an expert idiot and not just a gifted amateur, I just packed it away again while broken, didn’t order a replacement, and just forgot about the problem until this year, when I found that the house elves had not miraculously repaired it for me. It was too late to order a replacement to get delivered before Christmas, but at least this year I ordered it to come in whenever it could get here so that I would have it for the future.
Today it arrived and got installed, so our Christmas tree is flying again, even if I might not be.
Maybe that will be one of the New Year’s Resolutions that actually gets kept for 2025. Maybe.
Filed under Christmas Lights, Flying, Video
Random Old Photos – November 16th
I am chock o’ block full of flu and COVID vaccines – come at me, virii! (Viruses? Virususses?) I’m loaded for bear!
All of which has absolutely nothing to do with this nice old picture from 2013 of one of the only two flying B-25 bombers. It’s the CAF’s “Fifi”, coming into Camarillo to spend a couple of days with the CAF SoCal Wing. (At the time it was the only flying B-25, but since then “Doc” has started flying as well.)
That’s a LOT of flaps!
Filed under CAF, Flying, Health, Photography
Cloud
For some reason my brain is seeing this as a check mark symbol, even though it’s not quite that right shape at all.
But a check mark is usually an indication that something is correct or has been accomplished on a checklist, and that’s not quite the situation in so many respects, so I guess a shape that’s not quite right is appropriate.
Whatever. It’s just a pretty, wispy, fluff of a small cloud that I thought was interesting. Not seen in this picture, and the thing that drew my eye to it to begin with while I was retrieving trash barrels, were the couple of hawks riding the thermals around and through and above and below. It would be wonderful to be able to do that and daydreaming about the possibility got my train of thought at the time off on a tangent.
Being bound to the ground and everything on it is starting to get old. I need to fly again.
Filed under Flying, Photography
Find The 747
The sky was almost stupidly blue and cloud-free, except for one broad north-south band that had to be at a different temperature or moisture content or something, since little puffy clouds where there and as jets went through it the left little contrails.
As is not uncommon, there was a rumble and yet another cargo 747 was headed from LAX to Asia. It may have been 11,000+ feet up, but the deep almost subsonic thrum of those four big engines is pretty easy to identify.
(Image from FlightRadar24 app)
I moved a bit so that I could see it through the trees. Can you find it overhead to our north?
This will be one of the things that I miss at the Forever Home, wherever that might be. In Apple Valley and Hesperia there are a couple of small airports, and one of the houses I’m really interested in lies just a half-mile or so from the end of one of the runways, but we won’t see any big jet traffic like this, more like the light, private aircraft that go in and out of Whiteman, where I learned to fly in Pacoima.
Filed under Flying, Forever Home, Photography, Weather
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 