We went out to Olive Branch Airport (KOLV) today to see Michael Combs on one of his stops in his epic cross-country journey. You can read more about his mission at http://www.flighths.com/ . It’s really great to see someone going out to try and inspire people.
A couple weeks back I found this article on AOPA‘s site. Apparently, it’s been announced for over 2 years, but I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t heard about it. I’m no longer an active pilot, but I read every aviation magazine I can get ahold of. I’m surprised I don’t remember seeing this mentioned anywhere. So, I popped over to the FAA’s website, registered, updated my records, and ordered a new certificate. The new plastic card arrived yesterday. It’s a pretty nice card.
We went to see the Memphis in May 2007: Sunset Symphony on Saturday evening. We didn’t know exactly what to expect, but I had heard about a mini airshow going to be going on. That really drew me in. Neat event. The mini airshow was quite small, but topped off with a wonderful performance by Skip Stewart. I’ve seen him perform before and, honestly, the dude is nuts. There is a fine fine line between someone that is really really good and someone that is insane. I think he tips toward the insane side. I’ve read that he lost his FAA performance waiver for a while over a particular maneuver, so I’m not the only one. They reinstated him, though, so maybe I’m just too conservative. After the airshow was the Memphis Symphony performing many general public friendly pieces. We didn’t really see that from where we camped out. We could hear it, though. This was followed by the Temptations, which was certainly a crowd pleaser. Then for the closing act, the Memphis Symphony played the 1812 Overture with fireworks in place of the cannons. Then after that was a beautiful fireworks display. It started off kind of slow, but was really well done overall. It was huge. I’d say it’s the best fireworks display I’ve ever seen. Very cool.
I found this cool video the other day while looking for Aero Commander stuff. This is a perfect example of how amazing a pilot Bob Hoover was. I realize that the Twin Commander is an amazing flying machine, but I think Bob Hoover could have made many a machine dance like this and make it look just as easy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acevFbpMXtM
It’s been pretty busy since my last post. There is a lot going on.
First thing is the weather. It has been a Dr. Jekel and Mr. Hyde thing. We had a pretty cold streak that lasted about a week (cold enough I actually turned the heater on) followed by a heat wave. It hit 70F-something today. It’s December; it’s not supposed to be that hot. I’ve turned the A/C back on.
Kitty is losing some weight. I’ve put her on a restricted diet with Shinta gone and when she came back she said Kitty looked skinnier. I’m not starving her by any means, but we’ve cut back from giving her food at every meow to something much more structured and regulated. When she gets down to “healthy” we’ll increase the flow a bit. I bought a bag of the “light” food too, so hopefully we can up the volume enough that she doesn’t feel as hungry. We’ll see how it turns out.
I’ve been out to the airport 3 weekends in a row now. It’s kinda nice just sitting there watching the planes and listening to the traffic on the scanner. I’m gonna be real used to radio traffic again when I start back flying. Heck I might even get to know “the guys” fairly well by then too. It’s cool to have such an active little airport so close to home.
With Shinta gone, I had to occupy my time more than normal. I decided to go ahead and try listening to a podcast I’d seen postings about, but just never gotten around to listening to. It’s BSD Talk (http://bsdtalk.blogspot.com/). Somehow, I managed to listen to ALL of them. Yes, an entire year’s worth of podcasts in a little over a week. I’m caught up and loving it. Will does a really great job covering the BSD’s and related things. I find myself checking for more postings daily now.
The TV show season is winding up. We just watched the Survivor ending tonight. It’s cool that Yul won, but really any of the final 4 was fine with me. I’m a little disappointed in the Amazing Race ending. I really didn’t want any of the top 3 teams to win. I’d have liked the Alabama team to win from the 3 that got to the top, but I really wished Kentucky or the Cho brothers had made it. I think the Cho brothers had more of a chance, but they shouldn’t have played so stupidly. It’s one thing to help the other teams in the “six pack”, but to constantly draw themselves down in order to help the others was just dumb (in my opinion). Oh well, it could have just been how the producers edited things. I’m looking forward to the Amazing Race All Stars coming next year. I’m starting to wonder when Stargate is going to pick up again.
I took a couple of work buddies shooting. Introduced them to “the dark side”. It’ll be interesting to see if they want to go again. I think they enjoyed it. It’s hard not to enjoy blasting 5.56 down range. No recoil, lots of noise, and an evil looking toy.
I finally added a slide show to my photo gallery. It’s certainly not the most full featured slide show. It’s not pretty, very intuitive, or even that elegant, but it functions without javascript. That’s a big deal to me right now. Maybe when I code some sort of AJAX solution, but not right now. Right now I want it all done in a way that supports a wide set of browsers without the need for javascript. I’m about ready to write the captions parser, but I may wait and redo the entire back end first to make it a bit more of a media asset manager with web browser accessibility, than just a dedicated photo gallery. We’ll see.
Work seems to be kind of winding up for the year. Looks like there are a lot of people disappearing for vacations and our last release of the year out the door. Time to start working on some infrastructure changes for next year.
Well, my holster came in Friday, and so I tried my first weekend of ‘packing’. As I’ve been told, it’s a little work to get used to, but I’m just barely starting to get to the point where I go for a while without noticing ‘it’ there. I decided to just go for it and didn’t tiptoe. First day out, I went to dinner, clothes shopping (trying out pants, no less), and electronics shopping. There wasn’t a single sign of anybody staring at me funny (well, any more than some people tend to anyway). I picked up a radio scanner to start listening to aviation traffic and just as I was walking in the Radio Shack I started to wonder if the shoplifting-prevention-scanner-things would go off based on a large chunk of metal. Not a peep.
Sunday turned out even better. I was a little more used to things, so I gave it another go. Went to the airport (didn’t pack in the airport, that’s what the car safe is for). I tried out the new scanner sitting out on their picnic table by the FBO. I also picked up a FAR/AIM and Memphis sectional to start studying up for getting my license current again next Spring. There was a decent bit of activity despite the cold. The helicopter guys apparently were teaching a student. That was kind of neat to watch. I think I even saw an auto-rotation. I’m not a 100% sure, because there was a Cessna 172 nearby that was taxing on out making enough noise I couldn’t tell if the helicopter’s engine was at idle. It did come down quick, and it struck me as more of an auto-rotation than a normal landing. It was a bit too much fun just sitting there than I should probably admit. No warbirds this time; several Cessna 172′s, a couple Piper Cherokee’s, a Super Decathlon, a Cessna 208, and that helicopter (Eurocopter maybe). I might do it again next weekend. The scanner worked really well.
After all these years, I finally got around to getting the negative scanned. I’ve posted them up. For all those that thought I was pulling their leg here’s the proof. These are from December (I forget the exact date) 2000 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Actually, it may technically be Henderson, Nevada, but I don’t know where the exact boundaries are.
http://www.boontheekul.org/dustin/photogallery/?folder=Misc/Sky_Diving_December_2000
We went by Downtown Aviation today. I finally looked up how to get to the airport. If you look at a map it’s obviously very close, but one previous outing didn’t find it. So, we took a look as we were out anyway. Neat place. It’s about 3 miles away in a beautiful location. We talked to someone from the flight school and got some good information. Looks like that’s where I’ll go when I get back to flying again. They’ve got a nice fleet of mostly new aircraft. I was excited. In doing a walk around it turns out that there are some WWII birds based there (the Hawker Sea Fury was buzzing around), and even the WMCTV 5 chopper is based there. Being in such close proximity to all the hospitals, apparently they medical helicopters are frequent visitors. One came in for some gas while we were there. I’m getting excited to fly again.
So, we went to the air show in Little Rock (well, technically Jacksonville, but it was at “Little Rock Air Force Base”) on Saturday. You know it’s a sign of things to come when you don’t even set your alarm correctly. The plan was to get up at 5:30am and be ready to hit the road at 6:30am so we could get there a little after the gates opened. I actually woke up around 5am, but stayed in bed waiting for my alarm to go off. After a while I start to wonder, because I saw the faint light of daylight coming through the window. I check the time and it’s just past 6am. So much for my alarm. As we’re getting ready it goes off. I had set it for 6:30am, not 5:30am. We rush to get ready to go, which means we’ll forget something. Camera? Check. Cash? Check. Extra Battery? Check. Ear Plugs? Check. Directions? Check. Okay, we must be ready to go. Then, out of habit, we get on I-40 East instead of West.
After we get turned back around it’s smooth sailing–until an hour later when I remember that we forgot our folding chairs. When we get to the exit for the show, things are working fairly well. The police are manually directing traffic instead of letting the street lights get things backed up. We enter the base’s main entrance in a very long line of cars. As we come up through one of several points where armed soldiers are directing traffic we get randomly selected to go through the security check line. That was pretty painless, actually. It just feels funny seeing uniformed soldiers with M4′s, M9′s, and German Shepards going through cars.
After that, we just follow the huge line of cars down the road. I don’t know how big Air Force bases tend to be, but this one felt pretty large to me. Most of the driving down the “entrance” felt like normal roads with few signs of being a military installation. Eventually we get to the parking area, which is actually just a very large section of tarmac roped and blockaded off for parking. It was quite organized.
We got parked, hydrated, suited up (still a little cold) and headed toward the entrance. They had security screening there with metal detectors (not really set very high) and bag searches. That went quickly. And then we were inside. Notice nothing about tickets? There were none. That was a pleasant surprise. Programs were handed out for free too. Not that the schedule was accurate, but it was a good gesture, and the programs were of very good quality otherwise.
The static displays were outstanding. Directly by the entrance was a C-5 Galaxy from Altus (there were several aircraft from Oklahoma Air Force bases) setup almost like a gateway in that you could choose to walk right through it. The static displays consisted mainly of current Air Force aircraft, but there were several from the Navy, Marines, Army, Coast Guard, and private groups. The military aircraft were a very nice cross section of currently deployed machines. I was particularly happy to see the F-22 (I had never see one in person), the F-117, and the B-52. Being the “Home of the Herk” (C-130′s), they had several varations of the C-130 on display and to me it was educating. It marks the first time I had seen the J model with the new engines and props. It is quite odd looking to me, but the benefits sound quite good. I noticed that the V-22 wasn’t there. The website for the show indicated it would be. I didn’t see any UAV’s either. An interesting aircraft I saw was the AN-26 with the question mark on the tail. I take it that it’s a private carrier, because it had nearly no markings. A google on the N number shows it’s owned by a “SRX Transcontinental Inc.” since June 2005 from the Russian Air Force for $72,500 (which seems insanely cheap to me). This one makes me feel funny. Probably best not to ask too many questions about it as it’s supposedly the only AN-26 in U.S. registration.
The show portion of the show was pretty good too. I have a general preference for high performance prop planes doing extreme aerobatics, so the show was a little lacking to me (only 2 such acts). Seeing the Red Baron team do their thing is impressive. They really have some amazing skills to do what they do, but it just doesn’t get my heart pumping like watching the late Eric Beard do some pretty gyroscopic stuff in his Yak-54. The two acts that fell into this category were quite good. I forget their names right now, but the one in the pink SU-26 was an outstanding performer. I just assume he didn’t have the low level waiver, because it seemed like he was so far back from the line (both up and away). The quality of the routine was outstanding, but it just felt less engaging due to the distance. The pilot in the Pitts was certainly more engaging with a lower and closer act. He really got my attention. The Canadian CF-18 demo was good. The Viper West demo was alright (fairly routine). The F-15 demo was interesting. I don’t recall seeing that one before. The E-2 was interesting simply in how low they flew it in 90 degree banks. The C-130 cargo and troop drops were cool in the scope of their demo. The flights were huge and were so cool to watch. Shockwave was okay. It felt rushed, because I’ve seen him do longer acts at other shows. The “other” F-16 demo was good. The heritage flight was good. I really loved the F-86 — it was beautiful. Fat Albert’s JATO launch was the same as before. The Blue Angels were flawless yet again. They truly are a precision demonstration team. If only I had a chair for the 6.5 hours of flying.
Pics are up:
http://www.boontheekul.org/dustin/photogallery/?folder=Events/Airshows/Air_Power_Arkansas_2006
Just a note to any aviation fans in the region, the Little Rock AFB Airshow is this coming weekend. Hopefully, I’ll be able to make it. It’s about a 2 hour drive each way, which will make for a long day, but it’s all about the big picture. From what I see listed on the website I may need some more memory sticks.
