GEOFA'S BLOG

Our southern trip went like clockwork-although the clock started a day later than planned. Weather below minimums caused a one day delay-well worth the cavu weather we had the next four days..

The mountains just before Knoxville:

  We landed at Knoxville downtown island airport-one of the neatest airports I have ever landed at. We have video of the landing I hope to post soon...

The next day-on to Tullahoma, Tennessee to see the Beechcraft museum. Taxied right up to the entrance..

I like this shot of the first Staggerwing with our Baron in the background...

Then on to Gulf Shores, Alabama with this tough view outside our hotel balcony..

A day at the Pensacola Naval Aviator museum where I made 3 successful carrier landings on the Tomcat simulator-one normal, one in fog, and one at night-can anyone say 29 years of flight simming showed up?

Dinner at the throwed roll restaurant in Foley, Alabama (Lambert's)...

and a look at Gulf Shores on takeoff the next day..

A four day trip-1600 nautical miles, and lots of fun and adventure. Flying is the greatest!!!

I have the week off-so time to do some flying and get to the warmer south!

Here is the plan-fly to Knoxville island airport-see the airport-visit friends/family. Next day go to Tullahoma, Tennessee to see the Beech museum. Next day to Gulf Shores, Alabama for some beach, fun, and a visit to the Pensacola air museum. Then back home with a stop in Nashville-perhaps an overnight. We are already a day late-the weather in Knoxville today was skanky with low ceilings and visibility so we decided to wait a day for better-and the forecast looks very good! About 1600 nm. and 9 hours of flying total.....

To fly again! (myself). Although I've been up as safety pilot a number of times for friends, I have been unable able to fly since October due to an arm injury-no use of right arm is what the Dr. said. (I am glad I got my last remaining US continental state to land in on that flight with a flight to Iowa before this happened).

I was concerned with how my flying might deteriorate in that time. Turns out that the use of flight sims on my home computer kept me completely sharp-thank god for those. I was quite amazed how little if any "rust" was there-again how lucky we are to have these sims. With a complete mock up of my plane in fsx and xplane it is pretty easy to stay sharp.

Immediately after takeoff today both alternator warning came on, the radios became scratchy, and the load meters dropped to zero. I dropped the gear-contacted the tower and told them we needed to return and that they might lose communications with us. Again, thanks to practicing such on my desktop simulator it was all a non event. I landed-tried switching regulators-and that seemed to do the trick. After switching back and forth a couple times we got the bum one to work also. We took off again-but now the heater was not working-not fun in the 17 degrees here. I decided to do 2 approaches at FNT so I could get legal with my 3 landings, before landing and getting up under the landing gear to reset the breaker. Meantime, (probably because of the cold in the cockpit) FNT could not hear me at all on the radios-using the copilot headset-push to talk switch took care of this. After landing in FNT, pulling up to the FBO with frozen toes, resetting the circuit breaker on the heater-everything worked great! Obviously, I am not the only one that does not like 17 degree temps!

In any case-it was an interesting way to get back into flying after a break-and a tribute to how flight simulators can help keep one sharp in such down times. Now...what trip to plan next????

I have been using the electronic logbook-Logbook Pro for quite a while to backup my paper one-and its' add in program Route Browser.

Route Browser is really cool as it plots all your real world flights on a map, and spits out all kinds of data like how many US States you have landed in etc . (I have now landed in all Continental 48-Alaska and Hawaii to go).

There was an upgrade to Route Browser about a year ago- I got it but really didn't look very deeply into it.  I finally discovered it will import every Real World flight you have ever taken into Google, sort it by aircraft type and N number, and sort all of the routes you have taken. You merely click on one of the routes-and then fly it again in real time in Google earth! Simply amazing! (It does have me flying to Chile on one flight-that was the one to Meigs Field, Chicago and since it doesn't exist anymore I guess Chile was the closest match-:)

Every flight I have taken since 1989:

Takeoff from Chester, Rogers (o05) from a few years ago:

Crossing the back side of the Teton's into Jackson Hole-then on to Pierre, South Dakota:

Lol-just had to post this.