Walking on the Moon

I’ve finally written up a pilot’s eye view of our trip to Asheville and Frisco this year.  Enjoy.

Rod and I have been arguing about how bad climate change might be for humanity in the near term. Thankfully Warren Ellis has linked to Jamais Cascio’s perspective on the “how bad could it be” issue.  (Though I think he means “climate change” when he writes “global warming.”)
Rod, take note. :-)

In addition to his SL reportage and comics work, Warren Ellis is all the political commentator you’ll ever need:

• Hillary
  
• McCain
  
• Vilsack
• Giuliani

Nothing about Obama, yet, though….

Warren Ellis is now writing a regular column for Reuters about Second Life. Well worth your time if you care about SL at all. He announced it a while ago and his first column came out today.

Reviews of The Rise of American Democracy, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, and Brainiac are up on BBC. How’s that for a selection.

As you may have seen form Brenda’s blog, we’re weathered in again in Midland, TX.

Go/No go decisions are really the hardest part of trips like this one. We spent yesterday hanging out in Frisco as a sizable cold front blew through Dallas – thunderstorms, tornadoes, the whole nine yards – and today was looking pretty good. The McKinney to Midland leg went pretty well, though we did have a solid, awful, 30-40 knot headwind the whole way, just like last time I flew this direction at this time of year.

We grabbed lunch and I set out to brief the (fairly short) hop to El Paso. Hurm. Icing airmet. And those headwinds. And there aren’t a lot of good choices for alternates out here in the middle of nowhere. I looked and thought a while and decided to stay put. These are always hard decisions to make, because I’m always worried that I’m being too conservative. I’ve made a conscious decision to fight that urge so I made the decision firmly and we decided to stop for the day.
This was a hard decsions to make because I do want to get home. Midland itself looked good, and much less threatening than the printed weather; maybe the El Paso situation was similarly overblown. But If it is as bad as it’s written, that would be a dangerous flight for the Archer, and if it’s worse, it would be a disaster.
However, I’m not beating myself up about the decision any more, because while we were waiting for a cab, I talked to a pilot who had come back after trying to get to El Paso and encountering ice en route. You have to make a fair number of these decisions, and usually there’s nothing more said on a no-go. it’s nice to hear I read the information correctly. Whew.

Not too much to say about Sunday’s exploits. I taxied miserably at ELP, getting redirected twice, but flew OK out to Midland and then on to McKinney. The controller at McKinney basically tried to tuck me in ahead of a seminole with a night short approach. I made the short approach, but didn’t quite get off fast enough to get the seminole in behind me. I think it was overaggressive sequencing, but I was still hoping to make it work. :-(

Anyway, we’re in Frisco and hanging out with Brenda’s family.

As Brenda mentioned, she and I are off on a cross country to see our families in Texas and North Carolina. It’s always interesting to take on the elements in a Piper Archer.

Fighting the elements is usually best done in advance. Earlier in the week, I didn’t like the way the weather was shaping up and moved our route south. Originally the plan was to fly through northern Arizona and wind up in Santa Fe for the night. Watching the weather this week, it looked like those areas would be having some weather (and they are), so I’m typing this in El Paso, TX. I like to be out of the weather’s way. We’ll see if I’m still out of its way tomorrow. :-)

I also got to see a black hole today. If you’re a pilot, you know that landing on an isolated runway at night without surrounding lights for reference can lead to the black hole illusion. The effect is that one can come in much lower than one intends with the result of hitting terrain or stalling. Flying into El Paso tonight (IFR) I was vectored to 26R for landing. As I’m on approach, I realize that I’m looking at the very definition of a black hole: no lights but runway markings, no VASI, no PAPI, no ILS. And the wind’s behind me. So I look at my altimeter and it reads lower than I’d guessed I was – not terrifyingly low or anything – but lower than I thought.
Now, I think it’s within my abilities to land on such a runway. But I’ve already hand flown more than 6 hours today, I’m at an unfamiliar airport, and it’s a sizable international airport. I can hear Southwest jets landing and taking off over on runway 4 oriented appropriately with the wind and I know it’s got an ILS and a PAPI. I think lots of people just land where they’re told, but I (cancelled IFR and) went around on 26R and requested runway 4. The result was a nice uneventful landing and a longer taxi.

I’m pretty sure a fair number of people just take the original landing clearance – and that the landing is usually without incident – but I’m pretty happy with myself for taking the better runway.

Yep, I spent part of my Thanksgiving tending to a few grap bugs that have come in over the past couple months.  The result is the 1.40 release available from the usual place.  Consult the CHANGES file for the details of the bugs fixed.  FreeBSD port to come.

I took a new guy at ISI, John Hickey, flying this week, because he was vaguely interested and I love to take people up. Another good thing is that when I take new people up something fun usually happens. This trip was no exception.

On departure we got ordered on and then off the runway as things got tight and then an IFR release came through. Not a problem for me, but it wasn’t the kind of smooth, orderly operations that you like to show a new GA passenger. John took it all in stride, but it wouldn’t have been fun for a nervous flyer, I expect.
It was a clear day, but pretty hazy in the basin itself. We took my usual tour of the basin, down towards Torrance and Long Beach, up past Anaheim and Fullerton, out as far as Chino and then back past Santa Monica. We did get to pick out a few sights through the haze – I’m grousing more than I should, the view was pretty good – and then headed out to Camarillo.

Camarillo’s usually a good choice for new flyers who like airplanes. The airport has such an active pilot community with so many experimentals and a strong CAF presence that there’s usually something interesting to see. Boy did they not disappoint today. Just getting in things were busy enough that I had to fly a modified entry – basically an overhead entry for beginners – while a flight of Lancairs departed. But the ramp was the real treat.

It’s not every day you come across a mirror-polished P-51 Mustang sitting on the flight line, even at CMA. I don’t really know where the pilot was coming from or going to, but he was going in that brilliant piece of aviation art. We spend more than a couple minutes gawking at it and taking pictures. Times like these I’m happy that I carry a camera in my flight bag!

After lunch we cruised over to the CAF hangar and had the run of the place for $5. Not to be outdone, the CAF had a spectacularly restored Corsair on the ramp that another transient pilot had parked there while he did whatever brought him to Camarillo. We got to both get a close up view of the Corsair and to hear the restoration folks chat about the details of the restoration. I never tire of hearing skilled restorers pick over a beautiful plane like this one.

The trip back was pretty boring, though we did get a nice view of the Getty Villa. If John attracts planes like that I’ll have to drag him around more often.