|Navlog|

Hopefully not to be read while flying!

So Jason Schaaappert (this is the sing-song way he says his name on YouTube) of MzeroA.com has put together a list of books for General Aviation pilots:

1. Stick and Rudder
2. Pass Your Private Pilot Checkride
3. Flight of Passage
4. Say Again Please
5. Making Perfect Landings In Light Airplanes
6. The Student Pilot Flight Manual
7. You Can Be A Pilot! Answers to 25 Questions About Learning To Fly
8. Flying Carpet: The Soul of An Airplane
9. Controlling Pilot Error: Situational Awareness
10. Logging Flight Time

I agree with Stick and Rudder and with Say Again, Please. The others are so-so. My next post will have my list of what I think should be read certainly by every student pilot.

Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL.

A rather disappoint college if you wanted to study Aeronautical Engineering seeing as they didn’t have such a department. For some reason, they did have a department of Ocean Engineering. Why, I have no idea! It’s not like the school was less than a mile from the Atlantic ocean or anything and that it had the actual word ‘Atlantic’ in its name. Whatever.

So I didn’t end up studying my first love and so, I never got to fulfill a childhood dream: designing, building, and flying an aircraft of my own design. Maybe I’d have been this guy, Dave Rose:

That’s a machine he calls the RP-4. Jeff Wise writes up a pretty entertaining article in Popular Mechanics about him and others who fly aircraft of their own designs. The RP-4 is being built to either kill Dave Rose or catapult him into aviation glory for the fastest piston-power aircraft (something around 529mph)

Twitter has its uses, apart from the obvious ones of escaping reality, 140 characters at a time.

Karlene Petitt (Twitter: @KarlenePettit) is a sweet “gal” who currently flies an Airbus A330 (spit) as a Second Officer. She shares easily and well the technicalities of flying these “heavies,” including the Boeing 747. Her blog’s got some great information about real-world flying, including a nifty new medical section in which a doctor answers questions about keeping in fit shape.

I asked her about using the autothrottles on final for speed control and blow me down, she said she didn’t use the autothrottles on final unless she was performing an autoland. WTF? Really? Well then, all of us desktop pilots have to change the way we do things then! If reality is what we want—and we do, don’t we?—it seems handling those throttles manually is the way.

I’m now trying to find out from her how she knows which setting (i.e. position) on the throttles give her the speed commanded by the Flight Director—at least, I hope it’s the speed commanded by the Flight Director. My bloated desktop pilot heart won’t handle yet another myth-busting bit of news.

I last flew as “pilot in command” many years ago, almost more than a decade. So why do I have a domain named navlog.net and why do I want to keep posting to the blog even though I’ve nothing to report, so to speak?

I’m going to keep it simple: flying is my dream, one I’ve had since I was three years old. To stop dreaming because I ran out of money and time would be an admittance of failure and I don’t fail. I do sometimes stumble—sometimes badly—but I don’t fail.

So I will continue posting to the blog because it keeps me in touch with aviation. It keeps reminding me that there’s no such thing as “too late,” and that there are guys who’ve gotten their certificates many, many decades after they last flew.

It is the same reason why I fire up Microsoft Flight Simulator every once-in-a-while. It’s the reason I’m still a member of the AOPA and get and read Flight Training magazine. It’s the reason why I have a large collection of aviation themed books and why I’ll continue to buy those which catch my fancy.

It’s the reason why I keep this blog.

Another abandoned blog. Sigh.

Well, I hope to be back.

Soon.