Insane crop dusting

Wow, just... wow. Those are some awesome stick and rudder skills!

h/t - Matthew at Gulf Hotel Whiskey

Merry Christmas!

I would like to once again wish all the readers of this blog a very Merry Christmas and best wishes during this holiday season. It's worth mentioning that this is my 200th post - all of you help push me to continue writing. Your comments and readership are much appreciated.

This has been a tough holiday for me personally due to unexpectedly losing my stepfather just last week. Friends and family are what make it possible to keep smiling during hard times. I'm thankful for the many friends I have met via both this blog and my love of aviation.

On a much more lighthearted note, I recently came across a video that brought a smile to my face. You may know of my ire for the TSA and this touches on that topic. Hopefully you will enjoy this aviation-related holiday humor as well!

Paths of Flight

Found this video while browsing online this afternoon. Such an incredible job was done editing the individual captures into a continuous composite! It's interesting to see just how precise airliners fly their approaches. Enjoy!

Skywriting with a GPS logger

Lynol Amero posted this on EAA's Oshkosh365 Forums yesterday. He planned and flew a route in his Ercoupe to spell out "Merry Christmas" and captured the result with his GPS logger. I just think this is incredibly cool and wanted to share it with you all. The amount of time spent planning and precise flying required to do this in one pass is remarkable!


Per his post on the forum:

I didn't know how I would accomplish it at first, so I penned it out as frilly and loopy as I thought I thought could fly it. It had to be big enough so I could make some pretty quick turns, but doable at lower speeds in the Ercoupe. I had to figure out how big to make it. So, I just started out creating a flight plan adding way points in the AvMap GPS, spelling out the letters. I kept the spacing far enough apart that I thought it would work.

Click here to access an interactive version of the GPS track.

Baby, it's cold outside

This always tends to be the time of year where my flying takes a nosedive. Figuratively, of course - nosedives in the air are generally a bad thing. It's all of about 10 degrees out right now and the highs have been in the low 20s. Downright balmy, eh?


If you're a frequent visitor you have probably noticed that I've been on a product review kick lately. It's a good way to keep fresh content on the blog when I'm unable to actually take to the sky. Hopefully you have enjoyed some of those posts and, as always, any constructive criticism is appreciated.

Another reason for my lack of flying (and posting, over the past two weeks) is that I've been swamped both at work and home. I was supposed to go to Japan yesterday but that trip was canceled literally 12 hours before I was to board a Delta flight to Atlanta; I'm now going in January. I have been working my tail off at home to get a lot of holiday tasks complete before the trip - Christmas decorations, cards, shopping, wrapping, and the other usual stuff. Gina and I have also been super busy wedding planning, designing our Save the Date cards, building a website, and the like. In sum, lots going on and little time to fly even when it was really nice out and I wanted to!

It's worth it in the end, but 14 hours spent hanging lights is a long time

Given the fact that things are calming down and I suddenly have a little more free time - at least until I'm in Japan for two weeks next month - I'm hoping to go flying again soon. I would also really like to fly three more Young Eagles by the end of the month to hit 10 for the year. It's getting tight but I still have about three weeks to make that happen.

You may also recall that I asked for reader requests last year - the main request I received was for photos of the USAF Museum. I ended up posting a series of nine photo sets from throughout the museum last winter. It was a great way to keep posting content when the weather kept me on the ground.

So I'm going to ask the question again... is there anything that you, much-appreciated reader, would like to see me write about on here? I love to try and incorporate content that you fine folks are particularly interested in. Comment on this post or send me an email if you have any thoughts or suggestions!