Posted by mstroud in Flying
Last week I did two flying lessons in the same week. The hope was that this would allow me to retain more of my know-how without sliding backward into regression. Well, it sort of worked.
On the 5th lesson I really blew the take-off roll and the landing was a mess. Too much rudder, then not enough, then a lot more than was needed: that was the take-off until the instructor stepped in and fixed things. On the landing I put the nose right in the middle of the runway, in a crosswind, and found myself on the far left side More >
Posted by mstroud in General
Again today I had to take a flight somewhere for just the day, then return home. And again the wonderful TSA had to find a way to make it miserable. In San Jose they have so few checkpoints that the line to get into the waiting area was out the door. They also had only small paper signs telling people what could or couldn’t be taken on planes, so of course many people missed those signs and then got combatitive at the checkpoints.
On the way back, in Burbank’s airport, for an unknown reason all TSA checkpoints were shut down for More >
Posted by mstroud in Flying
The day started off a little rough, with an early awakening for a conference call, and didn’t really get much better from then on out. Yes, its my birthday, and my mother’s birthday, and now Steve and April’s newest born’s birthday. And sadly, it is also Ben Affleck’s birthday too. That was a real downer to learn about.
I did manage to sneak out of the office a little bit early and get in another flying lesson. This time it was all about not paying attention to the gauges and just “feeling” the plane. Good thing too, as the sky was More >
Posted by mstroud in Flying
Today I had the fourth (I think) flying lesson in Palo Alto. It was a real doozy as it required me to talk to the airport tower as well as setup and land (or attempt to land) the plane.
As expected, it was a minor success bookended by a series of incremental failures. I don’t have any idea what I’m saying to the tower at this point, what the ATIS is saying to me, and I certainly had a lot of mess to deal with on the take-off roll and landing. Tail-dragger aircraft sure are tough to manage.
The instructor said I More >
Posted by mstroud in Flying
I had the great displeasure of flying from Oakland to Seattle this past Friday, just after the new “liquids ban” was put in place for all commercial aviation. This change seems to have completely fubar’d the airports, leaving an overworked air system even more in disarray.
All told, I spent 7 hours in two airports for 5 hours of meetings in a remote office. I would like to say that the face to face time was worth it, but I have to question how useful travel is when things are as painful as they now are at major airports. Kudos
Kudos TSA, More >
Posted by mstroud in Flying
After three tries at it I believe I’m now committed enough create a new category for my newest activity: learning to fly.
This Saturday I flew with an instructor in a Citbabria trainer around the Western SF bay area. According to the instructor, I’m “a natural” and he kept asking me “have you done this before?” These are his words, not mine. Evidently I don’t suck, is what he is saying.
That’s good, because learning to fly takes time and money. And I’d hate to suck at it and not know that until a good chunk of my savings were gone. Luckily, it More >
Posted by mstroud in General
It seems that I keep forgetting that I am a lanky white guy. This week I decided to go to lunch with some of the old NVIDIA co-workers at a local Indian food restaurant. The food was good and I was careful to pick things I knew I could handle. Or so I thought. When
I got back to work things seemed to be heating up just a bit in my stomach. Then, of the course of a few hours, that spicy chicken got into a shouting match with my breakfast and things just went downhill from there. Two days later More >
