KRDU 201251Z 03009KT 1SM -SN BKN004 OVC012 M03/M06 A2967 RMK AO2 SLP049 P0000 T10281056
KRDU 201051Z 03011KT 1SM -SN BR BKN006 OVC014 M02/M04 A2961 RMK AO2 SLP027 P0003 T10171039
KRDU 201043Z 03011G20KT 1SM -SN BR BKN008 OVC020 M02/M04 A2960 RMK AO2 CIG 005V012 P0003

Standford (KTTA):

KTTA 201242Z AUTO 35011G15KT 1 1/2SM -SN BKN008 OVC012 M02/M03 A2967 RMK AO2 P0001
KTTA 201222Z AUTO 35011G16KT 3SM -SN OVC014 M02/M03 A2966 RMK AO2 P0001
KTTA 201203Z AUTO 36014G19KT 2SM -SN BKN012 OVC020 M01/M03 A2963 RMK AO2 P0001

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If you’ve ever traveled I-95 within 150 or so miles north or south of the North & South Carolina border you’ve seen the billboards…but have you ever experienced it? Experienced the enigmatic South of the Border? Well, after having daydreamed past Pedroland several times over the past several years I had to finally put curiosity to rest and answer the burning question.

Can I go to the top of the towering Sombrero? The answer is a resounding yes. For one US dollar you can ride the urine smelling elevator a little closer to heaven and take in a wonderful view of…highway I-95.

From the all-knowing Wikipedia…

South of the Border was developed by Al Schafer (1914-2001), who founded a beer stand at the location in 1950 and steadily expanded it with Mexican trinkets and numerous kitsch items. He had a great deal of success because of his location, which was immediately across the border from a dry North Carolina county, and grew his small business into what was, by local standards, an economic empire. South of the Border grew to over a square mile, required its own infrastructure, and had its own fire and police departments. Schafer became reclusive, building a large compound of interconnected houses outside the Dillon city limits. At South of the Border, he kept secret apartments hidden in the backs of restaurants and shops.

The entire motif of South of the Border can be described as intentionally camp.

The brim of the Sombrero provides a view of the vastness of Pedroland and the huge number of hotel rooms, the church and the convention center that make up this playground. If anything Pedroland is nice a distraction from the monotonous I-95 and a cheap source of gasoline.

Someday I shall return to South of the Border and shoot this park of wonder in the beautiful morning light (aka, the golden hour), but for now you can view the midday sun blasted photos in this Flickr set.

I’ve never been very successful photographing fireworks. Over exposed, under exposed, blurry, whatever the reason, all my firework photos ended up on the digital cutting-room floor. This summer’s 4th of July fireworks in Pentwater Michigan offered a chance at redemption. With a tripod and a remote trigger, I managed to create a couple keepers mixed in with a few of outtakes.

Pentwater is a small Lake Michigan community and their 4th of July fireworks show is equally as small. At any one time there were no more than two or three mortars bursting in the sky except for the finale. A longer exposure was needed to capture the lower light and also had the benefit of picking up the quickly diminishing sunset. Pentwater is far enough north that a completely pitch black sky would have meant a fireworks show not starting until well after 11:00pm.

Starting with a 5 second exposure, I worked my way up to a more optimal 30 seconds. With a Nikon D70s, a 30 second exposure took sixty to ninety seconds for in-camera processing of the RAW image file, so there wasn’t much time to analyze and adjust. The entire fireworks show was only twenty minutes long.

The only thing I wish I would have tried was zooming all the way out and capturing a broader portrait image.

Click on any image for a larger view and go to Flickr the entire series.

Word around the hanger today is that the Eclipse 500 was certified for Flight Into Known Icing (FIKI), something Eclipse Aviation has been promising for several years. (Read the Aero-News Network article here). The entire production cycle of the Eclipse 500 hasn’t been an easy one, from a slow delivery schedule to a recent price increase.

However, Eclipse Aviation has just recently started taking orders on their new, and smaller, Eclipse 400. The 400 made a surprise appearance at Oshkosh last summer as a concept jet. You have to think that all the lessons learned with 500 will improve production of the 400.

Pretty dang cool looking, if you ask me. (More photos here).

SmugVault is a service that allows you to upload any type of file or document (RAW, PSD, Excel and/or Word) in addition to the current unlimited free uploading/storage of JPGs, PNGs and/or GIFs. Pricing for these new file types is 22 cents per gig per month with a $1 per month recurring charge. Data transfer in is 30 cents per gig. Data transfer out is 51 cents per gig. Like the rest of SmugMug, this service is built on top of Amazon’s S3 Web Service.

The announced came today on SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill’s blog (http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/).

At those prices my 40 gigs of most important RAW images (mostly pics of my feet while sitting on the sofa and my dog) will cost less then $10.00 per month to store with around $12.00 charge for uploading. For an additional $20.00 I can download the entire load…which I hope I’ll ever have a need.

Currently, I export every photo from Lightroom as a JPG and upload to SmugMug, but now I can send along the original RAW image files and sleep a little easier knowing they’re in good hands.

When my father passed away, one of the difficult tasks was sorting through his personal library of books. He had hundreds of volumes covering everything from geology and petroleum exploration (his profession) to space exploration and American history. I kept for myself the books that had the most meaning and took a significant amount of time finding recipients for his more technical manuals. To this day I still receive cards or notes from those recipients letting me know how much they appreciate having my dad’s books in their library.

Recently, a close family friend passed away and, being a pilot, he had collected a small library of aviation books. This time, I am the recipient. Several packages arrive from his incredibility generous wife and this photos is only a few of the titles that are now a part of my library.

Piaggio P.180 Avanti – RDU, North Carolina

Every Thursday AvWeb releases its Pictures of the Week and this week’s winner is a very familiar Taylorcraft camped out at this year’s watered down Sun’n Fun. I don’t think this photo is real, that has to be a painted backdrop.

Congratulations to Suzy for her second (or maybe third) AvWeb photo win. She says she takes a lot of fuzzy, out of focus photos but she must keep those in a shoe box somewhere cause I’ve never seen any of them.

Just a few weeks ago this little plane was sporting skis and cutting a Stem Christie across a frozen lake in the great state of Michigan.

Check Suzy’s Flickr stream here.

I began using Lightroom during the first beta nearly two years ago and have come to depend greatly on it for almost all my raw image post-production. Adobe had made some significant improvements to the first version so I’m looking forward to see what’s in this beta.

At $299 Lightroom is a bit steep, but for editing, color correcting and tagging a large collection of photos I can’t see using anything else. I haven’t had a chance to try out Adobe Bridge so I wouldn’t know how the two compare.

Download the free beta (Windows & MAC) here.

First I want to say Into the Wild writer and director Sean Penn is an incurable douche-bag and I really wish Mr Hand would have done more then just discuss American History with the surf punk.

That aside, Into the Wild is a very good, but not great, adaptation of a wonderful book by Jon Krakauer. Krakauer did an incredible job researching and studying the physical and spiritual path that Christopher Johnson McCandless took from his Emory University graduation all the way across the country to an abandoned school bus on the Stampede Trail near Denali National Park.

I was hoping for a little more spectacular cinematography from this film, especially of America’s last frontier and, more importantly, I didn’t get the same hopeless sense of isolation that came from the book. However, this is a movie worth watching and one of the better films I’ve seen in a while.

With a stirring soundtrack from Eddie Vedder and a heartwarming performance by Hal Holbrook this should be in your Netflix queue, but do yourself a favor and read the book, even if you’ve already seen the movie. Krakauer is a great storyteller and with all of the people he touched along his journey, McCandless’s true story really can’t be told in two an a half hours.

Also read Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, a story about a deadly hike up Mount Everst.

Best quote from the article? Four Floors of Whores. Read on…

Freight dogs famously fly decrepit, “clapped-out,” analog-only hand-me-downs from the passenger airlines, and brushes with the reaper, duly embellished, make for great table rants over pitchers of Watney’s at dog hangouts like the Petroleum Club in Alamaty, Kazakhstan; the Cyclone in Dubai; Sticky Fingers in Hong Kong; and the legendary Four Floors of Whores in Singapore, which, according to the dogs who frequent it, is a model of truth in advertising. It’s an article of faith among freight dogs that George Lucas based Star Wars’ famed cantina scene on the scuzzed-out cargo skippers at Bryson’s Irish Pub, a flyboy Rick’s Café adjacent to Miami International Airport through which generations of pilots have passed in a sort of demented finishing school. “We tend to be the rogues of the airline world,” Tony Baca, a 747 cargo captain, told me recently. “The airline pilot is all prim and proper. We’re not. It’s a whole different culture.”

Read the whole story here.

I found this link on the Ancient Pelican blog, a freight dog himself for seven years.

Through the extraordinary efforts of the Carolina Aviation Museum members and volunteers this Piedmont Airlines DC-3 flies regularly and will be at Oshkosh this summer and a number of other air shows throughout 2008.

Feed readers click here for photo series view.

My previous theme was based on the classic Kubrick WordPress theme and modified (or more like tortured) into the design idea that I held in my pointy, little head. Needless to say, there was a significant amount of less-then-standard CSS holding that theme together.

I took that tortured mutant, made sure that every template had the tags I wanted and then removed every last remnant of CSS. From this blank canvas I reorganized my style sheet and made it more efficient (I hope) and was successful in eliminating the needless one-off CSS objects that had previously haunted this blog. This better, simpler organization will help with any future updates or fixes.

The new design is the fixed three column “Holy Grail” layout. There are a number of iterations of this layout available on the web that I tried but kept coming back to the three column CSS layout create by Antonio Lupettiat at woork.blogspot.com. In fact there is a ton of helpful info at Antonio’s blog from CSS to Ajax. Well worth checking out.

At nearly the same time that I completed this new theme I also installed the first release candidate of WordPress 2.5. The new control panel design is from Jeffrey Zeldman (Happy Cog and A List Apart). Sneak peek here.

A List Apart was another very useful source of ideas for this new theme design. I can remember reading Zeldman’s “blog” way back when the blink tag was still in style. Zeldman and his cronies are the experts when it comes web standards and his blog is a great source of design articles.

It took a few hours of hacking around before I understood how WordPress works. The documentation is great and everything needed for building a theme can be found at the WordPress Codex.

A lot of work for a custom theme when most of my traffic comes from Feedburner or Google Reader…Oh well, maybe my mom will like it.

This stoic looking C-47 (click image for series) resides at the Carolina Aviation Museum and no, the props aren’t spinning, they’re missing. (Complete history of Miss Piggy here)

RSS readers visit the FlightBlog site for the entire photo series.

Diamond had their DA-42 piston twin and Cessna also had a Columbia 400. There was a 3 foot model of the Cirrus Jet and a full mockup of the Spectrum Freedom (I think, or maybe it was the Independence). I was disappointed that the Diamond D-Jet wasn’t present.

But enough of the mockups and models I was there for VLJs.

The first jet I checked out was the Eclipse 500. It was much smaller then I thought, even on a VLJ scale, but a crowd favorite with a long line to climb inside for a look. I only got to poke my head in the cabin door. As you can imagine, the interior of all these VLJs is pretty snug but with all the style of a German sports car. I wish I would have push my way through the crowd to check out the avionics, but I really wanted to see the Citations.

Cessna had their newly acquired Columbia 400 (Cessna purchased the assets of the bankrupt Columbia Aircraft) separating the Citation CJ2+ and the new Citation Mustang. The CJ2+ is spectacular and refined. Tan leather cabin seats, plush carpeting and Collins Pro Line avionics suite. Everything needed to travel in comfort.

The Mustang is Cessna newest jet and one directed at the pilot/owner transitioning from a high performance twin piston or turboprop. It doesn’t have all the cabin refinements of the CJ2+ but it does have the Garmin G1000 avionics suite that is becoming more common in single engine pistons. With more and more GA pilots adopting the G1000 they should feel comfortable sitting at the controls of the Mustang.

I don’t have any exposer to the Garmin G1000 but a Cessna sales rep demonstrated the basics. Everything needed to fly and fly safe is encompassed in two 13 inch primary functional displays, one each for the pilot and co-pilot, and a larger 15 inch multi-functional display in the middle of the panel. The Mustang has a FADEC control system to managing engine performance. This plane has to be a blast to fly.

What was interesting about having all these aircraft together was how small the VLJs look in person. Equally interesting is how large the piston Diamond DA42 and the Columbia 400 look up close.

All I can say is the Citation Mustang is a long way from the Cessna 152 i fly, but maybe not that far.

Links:
Cessna CJ2+
Cessna Mustang
Diamond DA-42
Eclipse 500
Columbia 400

Heavily cropped.

As with any unsolved mystery there is now a fair number of conspiracy theories floating around the internet as to what happened to this experienced aviator. Some of the theories include a staged suicide, a military/Area 51 cover-up and the ubiquitous alien abduction.

I doubt there’s any grand conspiracy just a simple, as of yet, unknown explanation.

The all-knowing Wikipedia has a page dedicated to the disappearance of Steve Fossett and the NTSB has filed a preliminary report.

(That’s winds of 20kts gusting to 36kts).

PS. I’m diggin’ the new weather icons on weatherunderground.com.

I should do a coffee table book.

from YouTube.com

Every plane has its little quirks and issues that, as a pilot, you must adapt to, but no matter how much I romance this particular 152 with flowers or soft landings she does nothing but return a bad attitude (literally and figuratively).

On departure, just as the wheels leave the ground, she shakes and feels like she’s starting to buffet (buffeting is an indication of a pending stall) even though I’m at or above Vy (best rate of climb). Not just once, but every single departure. It’s almost like she’s letting me know she’s the boss and we will be flying on her terms only.

When flying in the pattern, I’ve tried several times to get everything squared for a solid, timely, “on the rails” approach but she always throws a tiff on final and pushes us either below or way, way above the glide slop. I’m left scrambling to either add power, reduce power or invoke a go-around.

After five landings yesterday, despite beautiful weather and 45 minutes remaining in my reservation time, I’d had enough; you don’t choose who you fall in love with and she definitely didn’t fall for me.

I have nothing more to give to this relationship. It’s over…and she can have her Elton John record back, it’s scratched anyway.

It was a long winter this year (at least 5 weeks). It even flurried twice in one week.

I am guilty as charged.

Trimming an aircraft for straight and level flight means that through slight adjustments to a trim-tab on the horizontal stabilizer it is possible to not have to apply any forward or back pressure to the control stick to keep the plane flying level. A plane trimmed correctly will fly exactly at the desired altitude without having to touch the controls, not 100ft below or 100ft above but exactly at the desired altitude.

Being able to trim for hands off flight has its advantages to a VFR pilot as it allows you to better divide your attention between flying, navigating and communicating. Plus you don’t get called out by air traffic control to “please check your altitude.” (That’s never happened to <cough> me <cough>). And trim is paramount to an IFR flight as the pilot workload is far greater then VFR flight, or so I am told. So it is a skill that needs to be mastered and I’m sure is second nature to a more experienced pilot.

Plus, I have heard through the grapevine that my soon-to-be FAA designated examiner likes to ding candidate pilots on their ability, or inability, to trim.

What all this means is that I have to dedicate some flight time to practicing my trim skills. Picking an altitude and indicated airspeed, climbing or descending to that altitude and efficiently adjusting both power and trim to hit that desired airspeed…and altitude.

Rinse and repeat this maneuver for different altitudes and airspeeds until it becomes second nature.

It all can sound a little like drudge work, but it really can be fun. Learning to precisely handle a plane can build confidence and a create a safer pilot…and one that can pass his/her check-ride.

Taken from a Cessna 210 on Christmas Eve.

Hope everyone has a Marry Christmas!

I had several previous attempts at completing this that were derailed due to weather and/or work, however conditions Monday night couldn’t have been better. Winds had been gusty for several days but had already started to diminish with the setting sun.

In the eyes of the FAA, only time logged one hour after sundown and one hour before sunrise can be designated as night flying. Our departure was set for after 6:00pm with clear weather for our entire route.

Monday night’s flight was a 122nm round trip from Sanford (TTA) to Rocky Mount (RWI) that I had flown several times before in daylight so I was interested in what this course would bring at night. In reviewing my selected waypoints from my previous flight plans to Rocky Mount I realized that I would have less ground-based reference points to track our course, as lakes and private landing strips would be of no use at night. The reference points I would have, like radio and cell towers, highways and smaller towns, should be much easier to identify against the dark sky.

My instructor and I departed Sanford at 6:30pm with a northeast departure from the pattern. I trimmed the plane to climb at 70 knots and I went to work calling Raleigh Radio (Flight Watch) to open my flightplan and then quickly contacted RDU Approach to establish flight following as my intended course would take us to the edge of RDU’s class C airspace.

Our cruising altitude would be 5500ft. All aircraft flying west to east fly at odd altitudes (3,000ft, 7,000ft), while aircraft flying east to west cruise at even altitudes (6,000ft, 8,00ft, etc). When flying visual flight rules (VFR) you add another 500 feet, hence our flight level of 5500ft.

The one trouble I had is once we’re at our intended cruise altitude I kind of fumble around getting the plane trimmed for straight and level flight. I oscillated around 5500ft by sometimes as much as 200 feet and this drives my instructor nuts. I did manage to finally get trimmed at 5500ft but I could use some practice doing this faster and more efficiently.

After spending too much time trimming for my cruise altitude, I missed my first way point but was able to recover and find my next two ground-references, both easily visible towers with bright flashing lights. The first is the Apex tower and the second was the three Clayton towers.

After passing downtown Raleigh, RDU Approach passed us to Washington Center’s frequency. While RDU Approach handles traffic in and around the RDU airport, Washington Center handles all other airspace from just south of RDU to north of Washington DC, filling in the gaps between each controlled airport.

Washington Center informed us of a single aircraft heading in our opposite direction 4 miles out, a Cessna Caravan. A pretty quiet evening.

Not long after passing the Clayton towers we spotted both Rocky Mount’s beacon and the beacon of Wilson Industrial airport (W03). The runway at Wilson Industrial is almost perfectly aligned with Rocky Mount’s strip. So if you find Wilson you should be able to find Rocky Mount.

Both airports are non-tower facilities and the runway lights are pilot controlled. To activate the runway lights requires a few clicks on CTAF frequency. The dim residual runway and taxi way lights are easy to miss and we hoped that the beacon we thought was Rocky Mount’s wasn’t Christmas lights or an obnoxious sign for a used car lot.

My instructor and I debate for a moment whether we had over flown our destination even though my flightplan had us coming right on top of Rocky Mount. I requested a frequency change from Washington Center to RWI’s CTAF so I could activate the runway lights and as soon as I click the microphone 5 times Rocky Mount’s runway lights came alive right where I thought the landing strip should be.

With another frequency change to RWI’s AWOS to get a wind and altimeter check and I was set to land on runway 22.

As I set up my approach I couldn’t help but feel that we were dragging our butts just above the treetops. It felt like we were really low. With very little visible ground I was forced to depend on my instruments to ensure we maintained traffic pattern altitude. Turning to final, the VASI (Visual Approach Slope Indicator) had us just a tad high of the glide slope and with a slight reduction of power I brought us in for a very smooth, on the centerline landing just past the runway numbers.

We taxied to the FBO and shut down to make a cellphone call to Raleigh Radio to close our flightplan. Within a few minutes we taxied back to runway 22 and on our way home.

If I had followed exact procedures I would have called Washington Center right after attempting to open our flightplan, but with no response from Raleigh Radio (it happens) I just waited a few minutes and call RDU Approach to request flight following.

I did a much better job of trimming the plane for a cruising altitude of 4500ft; almost no oscillation which give me a better chance of staying ahead of the plane and on target with my waypoints. The Clayton towers were visible right off Rocky Mount and both my instructor and I could relax for just a brief moment to appreciate the serenity and beauty of flying at night.

We flew over downtown Raleigh and the silence radio came to life with a call from a Duke Med helicopter requesting vectors from RDU Approach to Wake Med. I could see his very bright lights off my right wingtip eight or ten miles away. He wouldn’t be a factor for us.

This particular RDU air traffic controller likes to accent the “er” when saying “niner” for the number nine; “Cessna November eight, nine ERRR four three three, radar service activated” was his return when I initially contacted him requesting flight following. When the Duke Med helicopter requested direct vectors to Wake Med he returned with a heading of “one nine ERRR zero.” Kinda funny. I hear him all the time when I listen to LiveACTC.net.

We found the Sanford beacon without any trouble and let RDU Approach know we had the airport insight. He terminated our radar coverage and approved our frequency change to Sanford’s CTAF.

With Sanford’s airspace to ourselves I again experienced the sensation of our butts dragging just above the treetops even though I was just a little above traffic pattern altitude (1300ft). I set up a decent final approach for runway 21 but flared too soon and bumped down a little hard. Still, I maintained the centerline and was safely home.

My night cross-country was over and over maybe a little too quick. Flying at night can be a lot of fun, but also requires and equal amount of preparedness. The biggest difference is the adjustment required by your eyes to the lack of daylight. It takes at least 30 minutes for your eyes to adapt to the darness and it’s import to protect your adjusted vision by using either red, blue or green flashlights in the cabin. The cabin lights in a Cessna 152 are not the best so the more lights you bring with you the better. I could have used a fixed light on my knee-board and maybe one that fastens on my shoulder harness that I could have use to illuminate my section maps. I’ll be more prepared next time.

My instructor is a big proponent of the FAA making night flying a separate endorsement that you would earn after getting your private pilot license. I can say I couldn’t agree with her more. The added burden of darkness is enough to make me want to include a flight instructor, or at least an experienced pilot, with me on my first 15 or 20 hours of night cross-country flying. What we completed tonight was just what is required by the FAA.

All that’s left now is a test and a check ride and I’ll be a pilot.