BoldUlysses.com

1. This is bad. This is very bad. I received a catalog in the mail from Sporty’s Pilot Shop, the big retailer that caters to pilots. I now want about 90% of the items in this catalog. Leather flight jacket? Sure. Cross-country nav log kneeboard? Yup. Active noise-canceling headset? Uh huh. AOPA leatherman? You bet. I don’t have any materialistic leanings at all except for things that pertain to cars…and now planes. Just when I thought I was over the car product weakness, when I thought I could safely walk into an auto parts store without wanting to buy 75% of the things on the shelves–this starts up. *sigh*

2. I am eating a slice of leftover marbled chocolate cake. Mr. Hahn’s birthday was Monday, so a few of us decided last Saturday that we’d bring some birthday trappings to class Monday morning. I bought the cake and the candles, Jon brought the milk and David scared up the utensils and plates. I think he appreciated it. I lit the candles, started the birthday song and the guys followed in what must have been the most on-key rendition I think I’ve ever heard. I wonder if the 12 of us could start a glee club?

3. The weather’s been amazingly clear, so this weekend I’m finally going stargazing. The moon was new yesterday so viewing should be top-notch if the skies stay clear. Mars in particular is supposed to be very prominent. Some church folks and I are going down to “my” little airport in Mocksville and staking out the middle of the runway on Saturday evening. I’ve been told it gets pretty dark out there, so the telescope should have no issues picking up the planets and nebulae and stellar miscellanea.

4. Flew to the practice area and back all by myself yesterday. The practice area is a ~50 square mile region of sky north of the airport in which we practice maneuvers and air work. Talk about being alone in the wide open sky–there’s nothing quite like being by yourself in the airplane at 3500 feet on a crystal-clear day. I admired the foliage, did a couple of stalls and some slow flight before finding my way back to the airport. There are two water towers (east and west) that serve as handy landmarks for visual navigation. I flew back to the east water tower while descending to about 2000 feet before overflying the airport to check the winds so I knew which direction to land on the runway (it makes a big difference). I couldn’t quite see the windsock, but the ripples on the lake were a giveaway that the winds were out of the south. I was hoping they weren’t, since it meant that I had to land runway 20, coming over the 50-foot trees before fighting a stiff crosswind to set the plane down. The landing wasn’t pretty (kind of a clunker) but I got it on the ground okay. Landings are kind of like the punctuation mark on the end of the sentence that is the flight–they can color the after-impression of the flight a disproportionate degree given that the crucial part of a landing only lasts about 30 seconds. So the rest of the flight was spot-on, but I still didn’t feel that great about it on account of the landing. More practice…

5. We learned to use this doodad in class this morning. It’s a flight computer (rather unfortunately nicknamed the “whiz wheel”)–essentially a slide rule turned into a disk and tweaked so that a wealth of relevant information can be found during flight in a few seconds–if you know what you’re doing. It wasn’t intuitive to any of us and there was much head-scratching from the class and frustration on the part of Mr. Hahn, to whom it’s just second nature. We agreed that he now knows the feeling of abject disbelief our generation gets when we try to explain computer functions and processes, completely intuitive to us, to someone of his generation. Computational devices from his era aren’t natural to folks who’ve never used a slide rule before. So he got a little payback this morning. But in the end, most of us figured it out.