Soaring the Great Basin ASH26E Video

I'm in Hawaii getting ready to fly to Denver, Colorado tonight. Walked the beach for a while, tried to go paddle an outrigger but after waiting for over an hour there were no other customers so returned to the hotel to get some rest before going to work. They offered to round up some friends to go paddling but I didn't want to put them through the trouble. People in Hawaii are great.

Walking in the warm air here made me think of last summer in the great basin. So here's a short video of flying the ASH26E out of Tonopah. The clouds last summer were really high as they looked well above when leveling out at 17,000 feet to cruise.

After School

I'm in Kansas City on a layover after finishing ground and simulator school in Denver. We fly with an instructor for our first couple of trips until we both feel comfortable with the way I'm flying the airplane. The physical part of flying a new airplane is something that we pick up fast, in this part of the airline business we all have a lot of experience.

The most time consuming issues are working with customers, fellow employees (i.e. flight attendants, customer service, maintenance), air traffic control, and the weather. It seems like there's always something going on as there are a lot of rules to be followed. In spite of the many problems our employees have had they are still very professional and great to work with.

Training was very intense and it feels great to be done and having life return to normal, if an airline pilots life can be called normal. It'll be nice to spend some time at home with my wife Pam and our three dogs.

Today we fly to Denver then Seattle. I'm really looking forward to our Honolulu trip next week. I really love Hawaii, maybe a little biased as that's where my high school is. The people are friendly, the food is great, the weather can't be beat. How can you do better than that?

Dreaming of Soaring

In the middle of work and school, I've been tormented by the sight of beautiful high based cloud streets perfect for long glider flights. It's difficult to concentrate on the tasks at hand with such distractions.

Sometimes you get lots of clouds in Central Nevada, the 302 glide computer (top middle) is showing 16,133 feet msl, this weather is common here, this summer the bases were usually much higher than on this day. On this 760 km flight, the distance to Tonopah is showing 61.2 nautical miles to the southeast. This shot was taken while flying slow under this cloud to climb a bit just before speeding up for the jump to the next cloud.

Can't complain too much had a great summer.