Celebration

It’s been a long, hard road for a lot of people over the last year or two. I guess I don’t need to mention that unemployment numbers are unlike anything most of us have seen in our lifetime, but I did anyway.

I’ve sat and commiserated with a good number of unemployed people over the past year, a truly shocking number of them highly educated and until recently, with very successful careers. CFO’s, CPA’s, IT guys, directors and managers of all sorts, many of them have begun to get extremely discouraged and frustrated, wondering when they will start drawing a regular paycheck again.

But last night I was able to celebrate the wonderfully unexpected success of one of those people, a corporate jet pilot, re-entering the workforce and best of all, as a contract corporate jet pilot. As you might imagine, those positions are not easy to find these days, given the current political view toward corporate owned jets. And to add to the wonder, I think my pilot friend wouldn’t argue with me if we simply said that he has a LOT of hours in his logbook.

So to quickly get to the point of this rambling post, I would like to offer my friend the most heartfelt congratulations, wishing him blue skies and tailwinds always. Fly safe, Tom.

AlphaTrainer 3D

Here is a video I’ve edited and narrated for a buddy of mine. He’s a corporate pilot who’s developed a small bit of educational software that is used in conjunction with the fantastic flight simulator, X-Plane. Although this video gives you a good idea of what the software is all about, more detailed information about the plug-in can be found at alphatrainer.com.

Space Pilot

From the Los Angeles Times: “Robert M. White was a 38-year-old U.S. Air Force major and record-setting test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base in 1962 when he joined the elite ranks of America’s four astronauts.

But Mercury astronauts Alan Shepard, Virgil Grissom, John Glenn and Scott Carpenter went into space seated atop ballistic missiles and returned in capsules that parachuted onto the ocean.

White did it as the pilot of a rocket-powered X-15 research airplane, flying nearly 60 miles above the Earth’s surface and completing a conventional landing on Rogers Dry Lake at Edwards Air Force Base.

His out-of-this-world adventure earned him the distinction of being the first pilot to earn a winged astronaut rating by piloting an airplane in space.”

Photo credit: NASA

The Jetpack Is Here

Finally.

And you won’t need a pilot’s license to fly one either, just a few lessons. But that’s not the problem in my household since I informed my wife that I was going to learn how to fly, the issue is more about convincing her to buy me one.

With a range of just over 30 miles at 63 miles per hour, this could make for a nifty commute that would even make you look forward to Monday mornings.

This Day in Flight

Stephen W. Thompson (March 20, 1894 — October 9, 1977) was an American aviator of World War I, and the first person in the U.S. Military to shoot down an enemy aircraft, on February 5, 1918.

This Day in Flight

Sputnik 7 -This was the first Soviet attempt at a Venus probe. The probe was successfully launched into Earth orbit with a SL-6/A-2-e (Molniya 8K78) launcher. The launch payload consisted of an Earth orbiting launch platform (Tyazheliy Sputnik 4) and the Venera probe. The fourth stage (a Blok L Zond rocket) was supposed to launch the Venera probe towards a landing on Venus after one Earth orbit but ignition failed, probably due to a fault in the power supply to the guidance system.

This Day in Flight

The ESSA-1 satellite provided cloud-cover photography to the US’s National Meteorological Center for the purpose of preparing operational weather analysis and forecasts. The spacecraft was designed and configured exactly the same as NIMBUS-1. The total weight of the spacecraft was 912 pounds. The spacecraft was an 18-sided polygon, 42 inches in diameter, 22 inches high and weighed 305 pounds. The craft was made of aluminum alloy and stainless steel then covered with 9100 solar cells. The solar cells served to charge the 63 nickel-cadmium batteries.
The two cameras were mounted 180-degrees opposite each other along the side of the cylindrical craft. The “cartwheel” configuration of the TIROS 9 was selected as the orbital configuration of the operational series of ESSA satellites. Therefore, a camera could be pointed at some point on Earth every time the satellite rotated along its axis. The spacecraft operating system was the same as on the TIROS 9. The craft was placed in its planned Sun-synchronous 98-degree inclination retrograde orbit. The satellite spin axis was rotated using the magnetic attitude control system into an alignment perpendicular to the orbital plane and tangent to the Earth’s surface. ESSA-1 was able to view the weather of each area of the globe, photographing a given area at the exact same local time each day.

ESSA — NASA Science

This Date in Flight

The Space Shuttle Columbia accident occurred on February 1, 2003, when the Space Shuttle Columbia re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere, with the loss of all seven crew members, shortly before it was scheduled to conclude its 28th mission. The disaster was set in motion when a frozen piece of foam dislodged from the main propellant tank during launch, striking the left wing and damaging the leading edge. That damage allowed the heat from re-entry to enter the interior space of the wing and destroy the internal structure. Amazingly, a video recording of a portion of the re-entry, shot by the astronauts themselves, survives.

Chopper Brushes

Here are a few aircraft and helicopter Photoshop brushes I’ve made from some U.S Government DOD EPS images. I hope you find them useful.

iPhone E6B

Even though I’m not flying currently due to economic conditions, I may have to get this pilot gadget just for the sake of the cool interface the developers implemented. For the uninitiated ground-pounder, it’s a pilot’s flight calculator that takes the place of a unique and surprisingly fun to use, circular slide rule called an E6B.

The interface of this iPhone PFMA is modeled to have the same look and feel of a Flight Management System (FMS) that you might find in a commercial aircraft. When you consider that the metal version costs about $25.00, and a student grade cardboard E6B costs about $12.00, you can’t ask for a better bargain than $6.00. John Ewing over at Aviation Mentor gives it a very favorable recommendation and that’s enough for me.