Category Archives: Flying

Flying “the long cross county” 1, 2, 3 times…

Only the federal government could come up with a requirement for a 300 nautical mile flight with a landing at least 250 miles from where you started. If you fly out 250 and turn around and fly 50 you’ve flown 300 miles, but are still 200 miles from home. What do you do for the other 200 miles? Hmmm.

I’d like to fly part time as a retirement career. I’m doing the training to prepare for that.

The “long cross country” flight I mentioned above is part of ten hours of required solo aeronautical experience for a multi-engine commercial pilot – which is what I’m trying to become. These ten hours must also include five hours at night and ten night landings at an airport with a control tower.

It’s been a surprisingly convoluted process, but the ten hours are done. I have four of the ten night landings done. Last night, after the third try I finished the long trip.

Flight plan to Apalachicola, FL – where I didn’t make it!

Back in the fall after work one day I launched towards an airport on the Florida gulf coast. Note “after work.” Everything took longer than expected. I would be arriving at my destination after fuel service stopped. Way after. I was getting tired. If I was this tired before finishing the first half of the trip, it was going to be a really bad idea to try to find avgas and turn around and fly back. What to do?

I chose to land at Tallahassee and spend the night. It’s OK to do the trip across a couple days. So, gas in the morning, fly south, land, turn around and fly back. Uh, not so fast. A huge tropical storm was moving in from the Gulf. Not only was I not going to be able to fly south, if I didn’t fly directly home I’d be stuck in the storm for a few days. So, home I went with no credit for the long cross country. It did count for solo flying, night flight, and a night landing, so not a total loss.

I was confident the emergency gear extension would work.

Try number two was two weeks ago. This time I went north. I planned a trip to fly to North Carolina in the afternoon, eat some BBQ, and fly back at night. It was an absolutely gorgeous afternoon. The flight went great. I could see the airport in the distance. I slowed down and began to plan a descent. Lowered the landing gear. Pop! Nothing happened but the circuit breaker popped. After some troubleshooting I chose to fly home – the weather was great and I had plenty of gas. I was confident the emergency gear extension would work.

Manual gear extension eventually worked fine. I was happy to land. It was a night landing, but no control tower, so “no credit” for that. Because I didn’t land elsewhere, despite flying over 500 nautical miles, the flight counts only as “local” and not “cross country.” Not a total loss as at least it counted for total time and night time.

Third time’s the charm, right? I launched for North Carolina right on time, repeating the previous trip. Tail winds were better at 3,000 feet than higher, so I stayed low until I got tired of the bumps. Climbed to 5,500. Beautiful. I had a 27-knot tail wind and once in a while a ground speed hitting 180 knots. (I knew in the back of my mind the trip home would be against a head wind, but the wind dies down after sunset, right?)

Ellis Airport, KOAJ, airport diagram, with my location marked.

The landing gear came down fine. I landed, borrowed a car, and had a BBQ sandwich. Shortly after sunset I launched for home. Slow. Excruciatingly slow. In an airplane that can cruise at 140 I once had a ground speed of just 99 knots. 99 knots… Ground speed hovered around 100-102 for most of the flight, but slowly increased to 107. I slowed to 100 knots indicated as I hit 10 miles from home base. Ground speed went to 68 knots. Yikes. I’m paying $310/hour to fly an airplane that can do almost three miles a minute but only doing barely a third of that.

I need to go take the knowledge test, fly the last six night landings at a controlled field, and prep for the checkride. It’s slowly coming together. 🙂

Several More books…

I VERY MUCH LIKE reading as an indoor pastime, enjoying both fiction and non-fiction. It’s good to have a mix of the two. My reading interests overlapped my dad’s in many ways, so we would often exchange books. I inherited several hundred of his books. Some, Civil War history for example, were donated so others could enjoy them. A few went to my kids. The others I’ve been reading myself, then donating. (Museum links go to the respective museum; book links go to Amazon.)

Recently Melissa and I visited the National Museum of the Mighty Eighth Air Force in Savannah. At the entrance I saw a poster for Journalist/Historian Andrew Nagorski’s new book 1941, The Year Germany lost the War. Actually, the poster was about his upcoming visit to discuss the book in a few weeks. We bought three books between us.

When we went to Savannah I was reading David McCullough’s book John Adams. This was from my dad’s collection. It was a fascinating book to read. I learned a lot about the era and the people that combined to form the United States. I’ve read several of McCullough’s books, and this one is as good as the rest. I’ve read maybe three or four books about this era in the last few years, and really enjoyed them. Politics was, perhaps, just as contentious then as now, though without social media!

In addition to Andrew Nagorski’s book above, I bought Double Cross: the True Story of the D-Day Spies by Ben MacIntyre. I have been reading books about the World War II era since reading William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich as a 12-year old and Albert Speer’s Inside the Third Reich a couple years later. What I’ve noticed in the past 15-20 years is that I really enjoy reading the exploits of the actual people involved rather than looking at maps showing grand strategy – maybe grand strategy got boring after 20 years.

The British captured every German spy who landed there. Many of them were willing to serve the British government as double agents. Others in various countries volunteered to spy on the Germans on behalf of the British. Double Cross describes the background and motivation of many of several of these men and women, as well as their wartime exploits, and what they did postwar if they survived. The elaborate XX (“Double Cross”) system very effectively mislead the German intelligence community, preventing them from understanding the true nature of the Normandy Invasion until it was too late to stop it.

Nagorski’s 1941 was a great read. He weaves a story from the historical timelines of the various belligerent nations, then inserts anecdotes and details about decision makers and experts large and small. I really enjoyed the insight into the thought processes of those involved. For example, German generals and industrialists told Hitler “we need time to get ready.” Instead of waiting, Hitler responds “then I’ll attack before the enemy has time to get ready.” Great reading if you have an interest in this time period or how it impacted the next 50 years.

1941 had only just been out a couple weeks when I bought it. Hence the scheduled presentation I mentioned above. I decided, on rather short notice, to take the day off and attend the book discussion. Very glad I did! Now I have an autographed copy of the book.

Autographed copy of Andrew Nagorski’s book – this won’t be donated.

Brief insightful segue… I enjoy reading. A lot. But, I had become rather overwhelmed with quantities of books and nowhere to hold them. Other than expensive railroad reference books, I realized one day that most books I had would never be read again. “Read and store” is too expensive to sustain. What to do? I’ve since given hundreds, perhaps several hundred, books to the local libraries and Goodwill. “Read and donate” isn’t much cheaper than “read and store” if I’m honest. For authors who have been publishing for a while, but I’ve just discovered, I now buy many books used from Amazon – often from Goodwill! For new books from authors I like, I simply pre-order them from Amazon and read them when they arrive. In both cases the books are donated for others to enjoy.

In both cases the books are donated for others to enjoy.

Now, back to talking about what I’ve been reading. I was recently at the Beechcraft Heritage Museum in Tullahoma, TN. A book I saw there was John Bruning’s “Indestructible: One Man’s Rescue Mission That Changed the Course of WWII.” It turned out to be a bio about Paul “Pappy” Gunn’s life during World War II and the parallel story of his wife and four kids in a Japanese prison camp in the Philippines. I knew Gunn was the inventor of the B-25 gunship, but didn’t know anything else. This book reads like a suspense novel. It’s a great story of ingenuity, commitment to service, and a man’s love for his family. The book is really well written and avoids arcane technical jargon that would make it difficult for non-pilots/non-historians to enjoy.

Transitioning from non-fiction to fiction and skipping two books that will get their own page, I read Daniel Silva’s newest Gabriel Allon story The New Girl: A Novel in one full day. Great story will all Silva’s usual twists and turns, starting with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabian turning to Israeli intelligence for help. I’ve ready all the Allon books in order since the first one. This is a series I enjoyed sharing with my dad – suspend reality for a little bit and just enjoy a good spy novel!