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At 02:13 PM 7/17/01 -0700, Georgia Trehey wrote: >As most of you know, I'm fond of Cessnas, and yeah, I like station wagons >too, Greg, but then there's no one plane or car, that can fulfill every >need. Hey, kiddo, I DRIVE a station wagon. (Of course it's an AUDI A4 Avant Quattro wagon with a 2.8 Liter V6 and an engine control chip which isn't quite stock, and will just nudge 160MPH, but it's a station wagon :-) ) And I'll never admit this again, but before my recent adoption of Lynn's pretty masterpiece, one of the airplanes that sorely tempted me was, yes, A CESSNA. Of course, it was a pre-war round-engined Cessna Airmaster, but it *was* a Cessna :-) > the jumpers use Caravans. Do they wear FedEx jumpsuits when they hop out? :-P >To switch subjects for a moment - I am getting to be quite good at >navigating using my eyes, the wheel, plotter, and charts, and telling Jim >what VOR frequencies to use, periodically recalculating the true air >speed, etc. We don't need no stinking GPS! We GPS users don't need no stinking pile of accessories to do the obvious either. (Did my first VOR radial intercept in 15 years two weeks ago, and was surprised to actually nail it. What the heck was so hard about that back when I was a student pilot???? You see, Lynn stuck one a dem ol-fashion' VOR receivers in N99387, so I figgered I'd as well recall how'n to use it.) > Actually, I think GPS is >great, being somewhat of a nerd, and I have used it for mapping in my grad >work. However, as a student pilot, I think it's good for me to learn the >old way of navigating. I'll let you in on a secret: It don't work. Dead reckoning is an evil joke propagated upon the poor amateur navigator by folk that know better. In a slow airplane, the wind blows you all over tarnation and if you can't see your next fix from your last fix you're just this side of lost most of the time. That's why people fly down roads and railroad tracks (which latter are flippin' hard to see from 3000 feet AGL if you pick one as a waypoint rather than a route). >Besides, I am starting to recognize, just by >sight, where I am in our mountains. It might make all the difference some >time as there are (very) few places to make an emergency landing. Well, if you want to be safe, have a good GPS along, and another good GPS in your back pocket. I used to fly with an Airmap 300 as a primary and a Garmin GPS12 as a backup. N99387 came with a GPS III mapper, so now that luxury box is my backup. Along with the VOR. In the local area, if it goes to hell electronically speaking, it's fly to the Delaware river (East or West) and sort it from there. >But, in spite of being able to spot obscure features in our mountains, the >central valley threw me. One flat ag field look a lot like any other. Yep, and you don't really care which one you land in when the motor quits. That's what's so great about flying in Western NJ/Eastern PA. One great big emergency field after another. The other day, as the ceiling came down and the fog got thicker, those South Jersey strawberry fields were quite a comfort down below me :-) >With all that flat land and the chart, though, it seems like it would be >easy to locate the Yolo County Airport, however it took about 15 minutes >longer to find it that it should have. Another great lie: airports are easy to find. Nope. They hide. You learn eventually to learn that they look like a clearing, but they sure are tough to locate. It never gets much better, either. >However, I was mainly interested in getting to ride in a Caravan. I remember back in high school, the girls that would ride with any guy that had a van... :-) > I was certain that wouldn't be the case, as I have a lot of >faith in the plane, but I do understand the policy. Actually the risk is that a jumper will get entangled in or collide with the empennage and disable the aircraft. Throwing things out of planes, be they cargo or humans, entails risk to the airframe. Greg ==^================================================================ EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?aVxiLm.aVzvvT Or send an email To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================
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