Category Archives: Flying

April 16, 2017 · 22:38

The Next Two Weeks

If you’re local and you’re interested in some interesting and unique aircraft, you’ll have some great opportunities to see some gems in the next two weeks.

If you’re me and you’re still trying to get your annual audit and corporate tax returns done on top of having two major events going on at Camarillo Airport (CMA), you’ll have some great opportunities to have a nervous breakdown in the next two weeks. Consider this a heads up that there may be multiple days when a couple of pictures might be all I’ve got time or energy for. The good news is that they could be really good pictures!

Fifi is the CAF’s B-29. She visited us for a week two years ago and she’ll be back for a week starting tomorrow (weather permitting, of course).

Two years ago I spent every day of that week out in Camarillo, not just to see Fifi but to help out with all of the activity that will be surrounding her visit. With a (great!) day job now (and that audit etc) that won’t be an option. Which probably means that something like every other day I’ll be going out to the hangar after work in the evening.

The following weekend, April 28-29, there’s an AOPA Fly-in at CMA. Again, I won’t be able to be out there on Friday, but the rest of the weekend will be spent out there.

Oh, and did I mention that this weekend I’ll be running a 5K and going to the Angels’ game in Anaheim, as well as seeing my daughter and sister(s) and family?

“No pressure – no diamonds”

Yeah, that’s it. If I make it to May with the audit done, my blood pressure under control, and my sanity intact (or at least not any worse off than it is now) it will be time for a vacation. Which I won’t get until August.

It’s gonna be a slice!

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Filed under Airshows, CAF, Flying, Paul

April 8, 2017 · 22:52

Big Round Engines As Art

At air shows & around warbirds you’ll hear references to “the sound of round.”

Consider them as “industrial art” as well.

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April 4, 2017 · 23:36

Eight Years

The “Four-Four” mnemonic (as in April 4th) has a special meaning for me for the past eight years.

I have no idea who took the picture – some random stranger who happened to be in the right place at the right time. There was no one else around and I really, really needed the picture to be taken. I remember seeing someone walking by and I shoved my point-&-shoot camera at him and asked if he would take the picture. He did and walked away.

I was a bit discombobulated and excited – I had just passed my FAA Private Pilot practical exam (otherwise known as a “checkride”) and was now a full-fledged private pilot, single-engine, land. That’s my certificate that I’m holding.

I had been certain that I had failed the test. There were a couple of things that I didn’t do too well, and one particular thing I thought that I had bungled. (He cut the engine on me and asked where I would land. I started off on whether or not I could make it back to Whiteman, Van Nuys was too far away, there were multiple freeways around to choose from, a number of golf courses up in Santa Clarita… He pointed out, politely, that we were almost directly over Agua Dulce Airport and I should probably be aware of that sort of thing.)

We landed, I taxied in and shut down the engine. He got out and started to do paperwork while I pushed the plane back into its parking space and tied it down. He came back over to me and I asked what was next, expecting to be told I needed to work on A, B, C, etc and then I could take the test again. Instead, he said he was going to start filling out my private pilot paperwork inside, when I was done locking up the plane I needed to come in and sign it.

April 4, 2009. It was a very good day.

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March 30, 2017 · 23:07

Sunset + Airport + Moon + Contrail

That about sums it up!

 

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Filed under Astronomy, Flying, Photography

March 24, 2017 · 23:34

Off At A Con

I’ll have to tell you more about it tomorrow or Sunday. I flew up to San Jose this evening and saw the most AMAZING sunset between two layers of clouds.

 

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Filed under Flying, Photography, Travel, Weather

March 5, 2017 · 22:51

PBJ Video – Really, Really!

I wish I could upload the full HD version of this. The current generations of iPhones are just freaking awesome in the quality they have. They run rings around what the network studios were using just fifteen years ago – and cost a couple hundred bucks and you carry them in your pocket instead of costing a couple hundred thousand bucks and needing to have them mounted on wheels with two people to move them.

But I digress.

The full video is 1.634 GB, which is about 20% of the disk space I have available on WordPress. I know that I’ll eventually have to expand my disk space, and expand the expense, but by that time it will be a toss-up on whether to stay on the WordPress.com site or to get my own in-house server and install a WordPress system. Either way, I was sort of betting on that happening in five or six years, not five or six months – which is what will happen if I make a habit of uploading full nine-minute HD videos.

I guess if anyone wants to see it badly enough, let me know and we can figure out a way for you to send a memory stick for me to use to send it back to you by snail mail. Or something.

In the meantime, QuickTime is very good about taking 1.634 GB, full resolution, HD videos and converting them to slightly less spectacular quality videos. It defaults to spitting out three versions, the first of which is for a “cell phone”. I don’t know what kind of cell phone they’re talking about but while it’s only a 5.6 MB file it’s also a teeny-tiny image that looks truly shitty on an iPhone, let alone an iPad or a desktop. QuickTime will also automatically generate an “iPhone” version which is moderately compressed, so it gets cut down to 62 MB. That’s way better than 1,633 MB!

The third version is a “desktop” version, weighing in at 94 MB, which I can live with. It’s not half bad, I hope you enjoy it.

A couple of things to note:

  1. Yes, it really is that freaking loud. That’s why the ground crew uses hand signals to communicate with the pilots.
  2. At about the 2:35 mark you’ll hear the engines “sputter” or “miss” for a half second. This isn’t a problem, it’s a routine test of the redundant magnetos that provide the ignition spark. As the pilot switches from “both” to “left,”, then to “right,” there’s a miss but it’s normal. Before flight, you want to make sure that both of them work independently if one fails.
  3. No, the propellers aren’t stopping or going really slow or running backwards. It’s just the “wagon wheel effect” where the rate of the RPM on the engine gets near, at, or a bit over some multiple of the frame rate of the camera.
  4. At the 4:30 mark you’ll see a Ventura County fire & rescue helicopter coming in on the left. Their hangar is the one you can just see on the far right, off in the distance. It’s really quite impressive to see that big Huey variant take off and land.
  5. A lot of the time we spend after the get the engines started is waiting for our turn to get on the taxiway. It was a nice day and there were a lot of other small planes tooling around. This also adds a delay once we get to the runway and have to wait our turn behind all of the planes landing and taking off in front of us. At about the 8:40 mark you can see, as Dan said, there are better than a half-dozen other plaens out there waiting their turn.

Enjoy! And if you’re interested and want to take a ride with us – I know a bunch of guys who can make that happen!

 

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Filed under CAF, Flying, Video

March 4, 2017 · 23:31

PBJ Video – To Come

I shot a nice piece of video today on my cellphone as our PBJ was starting its engines, warming up, and taxiing out for some training flights today.

But it’s about ten minutes long and uncompressed it’s huge and would take hours to upload and I got home from the hangar at least two hours later than I expected to and then got to watching the “M*A*S*H” marathon on cable so I didn’t have time to edit or compress it… All of which is to say, here’s a still and I’ll try to get it done for tomorrow.

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In other news of absolutely no note, my big blue mom-mobile of a family van hit another minor milestone today and is now closing in on a major one.

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That’s a lot of miles! 200,000 – here we come!

 

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February 11, 2017 · 23:07

Convective Activity

After a morning of low clouds and a bit of drizzle, it cleared out nicely at Camarillo Airport. To the north of in a band from Santa Barbara east across Ohai, Santa Paula, Santa Clarita, and down into the San Fernando Valley, the unstable air got heated, rose, started condensing into clouds, which in turn released energy, which in turn caused more condensation and clouds, which…

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Nice flying at CMA – but don’t fly to the north or east in that little plane!

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Santa Paula Airport (KSPZ) was over under this thunderstorm, which pretty much just parked there for several hours. NOT a good day to be flying in to or out of KSPZ!

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Just before sunset, with the sun at our back setting in a clear blue sky while it was still raining over Santa Paula, physics and the optical properties of water droplets in the atmosphere took their natural course.

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Someone was nice enough to leave our F6F-5 Hellcat sitting out there to look gorgeous in the sunset light along with that colorful optical illusion.

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December 1, 2016 · 23:38

PT-19 Innerds

If you have hung around here, you’ve seen pictures before of our PT-19 trainer.IMG_7523 croppedI even got to fly in her once.File Oct 24, 20 58 39Now she’s down for maintenance. Those of you who have only flown in modern airliners only know of planes that are build like flying tanks. These older planes were highly reliable (they’re still flying after 80 years or more) but they were built to be light and not particularly tanklike.file-dec-01-23-10-55-smallThe wings come off for servicing, which is not a big deal. But as you can see here…file-dec-01-23-13-03-small…the body of the plane is just a structure of tubing.file-dec-01-23-19-45-smallAs much fun as it might be to sit in that seat and go flying like this…file-dec-01-23-20-22-small…most people are more comfortable with the fabric skin back on the outside after the maintenance is done.file-dec-01-23-20-42-smallIt’s probably a little bit more aerodynamic like that.file-dec-01-23-21-08-smallBut when you’re sitting in there flying for the first time, you realize that this is no 747. Despite that, she flys like a beauty! One of these days I hope to fly her as a pilot and not just a passenger.

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November 21, 2016 · 23:30

I Want To Be That Bird

Dramatic post-storm skies are dramatic – especially in this desert paradise.

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I was thinking that I would love to be up there playing among those clouds. I would probably have to settle for a small plane, or maybe an ultralight. Perhaps a powered parachute. But what I would really love is to be a bird, just drifting on the currents, coasting, spinning, diving, climbing…

It was only after I got home tonight I saw the bird near the middle of the photo.

I’m glad someone got to enjoy those thermals!

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