Pilot Mike’s Weblog

The March 2008 issue of Flying (p39) had a story which caught my eye. It was an article by Jay Hopkins, who was describing the resources available to pilots to do home based study when life gets in the way of getting in the cockpit.

While Mr. Hopkins was describing resources the AOPA Air Safety Foundation has made available to pilots, he mentioned an entry in the section called “Real Pilot Stories” about a pilot who discovered he had a snake in the cockpit. The idea made my skin crawl — I hate snakes almost more than the idea of FAA User Fees — so I had to take go take a look.

In this two minute video recap, pilot Monty Coles talks about what went though his head as a small head peared at him though a hole in his instrument panel during an routine instrument scan; yes he was airborne. Yikes!

Real Pilot Stories, Snake in the Airplane

I am throwing around the idea of including some type of audio stream of local ATC radio traffic on this site and I would like to gage the interest level. My home is very close to Johnson County Executive Airport (KOJC) and I have good reception of the Kansas City TRACON transmitter for the south side (118.9 MHz). Would streaming audio of local ATC traffic be of interest to any readers here?

Let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment, or sending me an email from the About Me tab at the top of the page.

Update 03-29-2008: I got a couple of emails and a comment posted that there was some interest. Without much work, I am now providing the feeder site for KOJC at LiveATC.net. The guys there are doing the final checkout on the stream before it gets listed, but if you want a preview, here is the link.

Last Thursday, a Boeing 777 crashed while on final approach at London’s Heathrow Airport. The initial report from the UK’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB), indicates the plane did not respond after the pilots pushed the throttles forward for more power. The aircraft landed about 1000 feet short of Runway 27L. 152 people were on board and 13 people were injured.

How is it that a US$200 million airplane does not respond when the throttles are pushed forward? This plane, and many others like it, — including some newer GA piston powered aircraft — utilize computer software to control all aspects of engine operation. This system is called Full Authority Digital Engine Control (FADEC). Read more about FADEC after the jump…

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The family and I took a trip up to Omaha on Thanksgiving Day in the Diamond DA40XL. Weather was forecasted to be good, however, there was some warmer air aloft and I had some concerns of visibility due to the recent snow fall to our north (colder ground temperatures). The issue was that the Blair airport had no published instrument approaches. We decided to proceed with the flight as visibility was good (10+ miles), there were no icing concerns, and if we could not get VFR into Blaire, we’d go to Omaha International as our alternate. We’d also watch the XM Weather close on the flight up to see if the weather closed in on us en-route.

Read all the details after the jump.
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A lot of you have been emailing me and are interested in my Robinson R22 cost calculations that I mentioned in this post. I came up with this spreadsheet (posted as a JPEG file below) after looking at lots of new and used Robinson R22s and concluded that if you have the appropriate cash flow, it can be cheaper to buy a new Robinson R22 for initial helicopter training and fly it for 5 years vs renting. I’d welcome your comments on my cost estimations.

Find out all the details after the jump.

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