Just a quick note to thank Bob Comperini (fly-ul.com) and Aliseo Flying Boats (flying-boat.com) for their links in to PrepareToTest.com. PrepareToTest is one of the few places that provide online practice for the Sport Pilot exam and its been great to see how the number of Sport Pilot subscriptions has been going up and up […]
If you are ever passing through Milwaukee’s General Mitchell International Airport with some time to spare, they have an excellent second hand bookstore with a great section on aviation…. Barbara Cushman Rowel was Galen Rowel’s wife and this book is as much a story about her escape from his shadow as it is about a flight she took from Oakland down and around South America and back.
With an acknowledged weakness for books, particularly books related to flying and especially ones with great photography, it wasn’t a struggle to purchase Jim Wark’s ‘America Flying High’ when I came across a second hand copy in my local bookstore.The inscription on the inside front cover caught my eye first of all:”Nick - Happy Birthday on the occasion of your fifteenth birthday, the world is your oyster”Aunt Jane and Uncle Mike clearly picked a great book to illustrate their point and I was a little sad to see that Nick had already decided to pass on this photographic tour of the nation but his loss was my gain and I spent 15 minutes flicking through the pages and then decided to make the purchase so I could really appreciate its content…. In doing a little research online I came across his website, airphotona.com where it mentions that this year Jim was the first recipient of the Epson Aerial Photographer of the Year.In addition to aviation and photography, he has a background in mining engineering and one of the nice things about the book are the passages of text that he uses introduce each section, describing the social and geological forces at work to shape the landscape.
This is a page showing some rather more artistic representations of aircraft in motion over the United States. The researchers took the real time flight data for a 24 hour period and plotted the positions of the aircraft in flight over the US and coming to and from the US. Visually its a very attractive piece, from an aviation perspective you can see the waves of aircraft coming and going as the time zones roll by - well worth a look.Air Traffic As Seen by the FAAThe following flight pattern visualizations are the result of experiments leading to the project Celestial Mechanics by Scott Hessels and Gabriel Dunne.
One very nice feature for pilots is the ability to directly load data from your Garmin or Magellan GPS into Google Earth for review in full 3D glory, you can even share them with other people…Google Earth is one of the latest developments from Google that allows you to zoom in to any point on the globe and view satellite imagery overlaid onto topographically correct 3D landforms…. What makes you think is that this is the satellite coverage they give away for free, one can only wonder at what is available to the various government users!Anyway, besides being a great way to browse the geography of the world, if you upgrade to Google Earth Plus ($20) you can plug your Garmin or Magellan GPS direcly into the system and download your waypoints, routes and tracks for display in Google Earth.
In reading the site, the formula listed on the AMT Awards page, “Knowledge + Professionalism = Safety” stuck in my mind as being a great way to sum up the approach we should all have towards aviation and the many related safety aspects of the profession.Developed from an accident prevention program in the early 1970’s, the current Aviation Safety Program is a joint program sponsored by the FAA and the Aviation Community that is aimed at addressing this important topic…. There are twenty levels in the Wings program that you can work your way through - with a maximum of one per year that will give most of us something to work on for a while!AMT’s have the Aviation Maintenance Technician Awards.
I had the video camera and the digital camera along to record the event but the camera had some issues so all I have at the moment are some still frames from the video.There were a variety of planes on show but I got there a little late thanks to fighting the traffic and having to carry in a bunch of gear so I missed some of the early performers…. The Red Baron Stearman biplanes did a great 4-plane exhibition of formation flight and aerial artistry, drawing hearts in the sky and some spectacular shots of all four planes in close formation doing loops and immelmans.Of course the Blue Angels were the main act and they certainly didn’t disappoint.
Its that time of year again - the annual pilgrimage to Airventure is almost upon us. As a Wisconsin resident this isn’t quite such a trek for me as for many other people but its a summer fixture that we all look forward to…. They have a interesting dinosaur exhibit sure to grab the attention of young and old alike though I really needed my two-year old son to be on hand to tell me what each dinosaur was as he is the family expert.In reviewing the notam for Oshkosh I came across a very useful FAA site covering current TFRs (Temporary Flight Restrictions) that have a nasty habit of cropping up when you least expect them.
The test prep site is designed to help pilots and AMTs pass their written tests, a vital step on the road to any of the FAA qualifications. However, the tests are only a means to an end and I’m looking forward to using this blog to cover some of the wide variety of topics that aviation opens up and hearing from others similarly afflicted!