Sunday, July 16, 2006

Welcome to LogShare

I came across this site tonight while browsing the web. It is a free on-line flight logger. It seems like a great way to keep a backup of your paper log. I will post a further review once I have used it for a while.

Saturday, July 15, 2006

Cash or finance?

Cash or finance - AOPA Forums

Check out the the thread above on the AOPA forum. Has a good discussion about buying a plane for cash or borrowing. A pretty interesting read.

Thursday, July 13, 2006

Google Earth Blog: Go Flying - Flight Tracklogs for Google Earth

After seeing how cool the small sectional maps on the Winging IT blog. I emailed the author to ask how he does it. I got a real quick response that pointed me here. It is an addon to Google Earth that some very kind pilot wrote. This link started my exploration of Google Earth and in doing so found another really cool add on for use by pilots. It allows you to upload you GPS flight tracks to Google Earth. I haven't tried it yet but looks very cool. Check out the post here or by clicking on the link at the top of my post

Lesson #23: Soft Field Take Off and Landing


Why is air-conditioning so expensive in Airplanes? That is more of a rhetorical question but man has it been hot here the ChicagoLand area. Before I talk about my lesson let me rant for a little bit. It has been my experience that Flight Schools and scheduling are terrible. Case in point I had the plane scheduled at 6:00pm which I verified before I drove to the airport. Now when I get to the airport the owner of the flight school says that one of the other instructors thinks he has the plane at the same time. I think to my self "too bad check the schedule" but instead I hear the the other instructor is "willing" to delay his lesson and hour. This measn that my two hour lesson is now only going to be one hour. This did not make me too happy. We have an online schedule, how hard is it two check the schedule and why should I rearrange for your screw up. Anyway RANT OVER. I spent today's lesson learning soft field take off and landing. If you have been reading my blog you will know I haven't flown in a while so I was ready to be a bit rusty when I went up today. Tom and I took of from Palwaukee and he asked to to perform this one as a soft field take off and he re-explained what the procedures were. The soft field takeoff doesn't seem to be too hard on paper but rolling down the runway with the yoke in my chest will take some getting used to. From PWK we flew Campbell where I spent the remaining 30 min performing soft field landings. As a whole my lesson today sucked. I was sweating something fierce, I was rusty and as a result I didn't even have one good soft field landing. I am going to need a lot or work in this area of my training. Hopefully these techniques will get easier with time. I am however, looking forward to my next lesson which will be my first night flights.

Mother Nature Hates Me

I may look like I have stopped posting, or stopped flying. Well I did, but only because I haven't flown in like two weeks for multiple reasons. My flight school has has a lot of maintence squawks that seem to take the A&P forever to fix. Also the weather has been so not nice to me. For example I was scheduled to fly last night at 9pm to work on my night flight stuff. My wife was even going to ride along. The weather in downtown Chicago looks terrible, clouds at about 600ft. So I call my CFI. He tells me that is is perfect out my PWK. I verify this my checking the latest METAR from PWK. So my wife and I drive the 20 miles out to the airport burning 3.46 a gallon gas :(. When we get there a huge fog bank is rolling in and put PWK smack dab in IFR condidtions. I am scheduled to fly again tonight and will hopefully be doing my first dual x-Country.