Owequitit's flying videos.

[owequitit]

In the second video in the beginning was he practicing stalling? Sounds like the warning siren going off, also when you guys were landing...it that normal?

Yes, he was practicing stalling, which is why the Stall Warning Horn was activating.

And on small airplanes, yes, it is normal to stall right before touchdown, as you are basically trying to bleed off all excess energy in the flare, before touching down. Big airplanes with swept wings, and many larger planes in general do not fly that way. What ends up happening, is that you continuously pitch up (raise the nose) as the aircraft slows, to keep the rate of descent as slow as possible to get a nice smooth touchdown. Eventually, you are going so slow, the wing can't maintain lift anymore, and it "stalls." Touchdown should occur at or just before the point of the stall. Obviously, though, that is just the end of the landing. A good landing actually starts well before the runway.

The reason for that is that as you slow down, the wing produces less lift, and the only way to compensate, without speeding back up is to increase the Angle of Attack, to maintain lift. To visualize "angle of attack", imagine when you are driving down the road, "flying" your hand out the window. The angle of attack is the angle between your hand, and the relative wind, or the direction of airflow. In the case of "flying" your hand in a car, the relative wind, is coming parallel to the ground, from the front of the car. To create more lift with your hand, what do you do? You make that angle bigger, which in turn makes more lift at a given speed, and causes your hand to rise higher. If you keep making the angle bigger and bigger, your hand eventually drops and stops "flying." That is a "stall."

We practice "stalling" the aircraft, because it teaches the student to fly to the limits of the airplane, it preps us on how to recover if the airplane does stall, and it gets us proficient at making the airplane stall, since it can be used quite frequently. Stalls are also most likely to occur in the real world at low altitudes, and are a major component of "spins," which at low altitude, is VERY bad Juju.

Landing an airplane is very much an art form, and a game of kinestetic and visual skill, as well as a lot of finesse. It is EASILY the hardest thing to learn about flying. It would be very much like playing an instrument, racing a car, or playing a sport. Lots of hand eye coordination and task management. It gets REALLY fun when there is a good stiff crosswind. And no two landings are ever the same.

[owequitit]

New cross country vid posted on first page, first post.

[MikeW]

So can you just hop in a plane and pretty much go where ever or do you have to pay per flight, or whats the deal? How's that work?

[owequitit]

So can you just hop in a plane and pretty much go where ever or do you have to pay per flight, or whats the deal? How's that work?

I actually get paid to go. Yes, I know, it is TERRIBLE! My students pay though. And they pay per flight. Generally speaking, you pay after each flight. This is a good system, because you pay the exact cost in the end (versus a deposit that might be too much or not enough to cover the total cost), and a lot of people start training but never finish. The downside is that if you run out of money, you run out of training, whereas with a deposit, you can keep going. Usually.

That was a long week! The following night I went down to Phoenix with the same student at night and it was breathtaking (I knew that, but he didn't). Unfortunately, there was no one there with us to film, and I had to help him and make sure we didn't bust any restrictions or airspace limits, so there is no video of that.

Then the day after that, we headed out to the eastern portion of the state, and the winds were so bad, we had to try about 7 times to get it on the ground. It kept picking up too much airspeed right before we touched down, so we wouldn't have had enough room to land and stop. Finally, we got it in there.

[alb_accord]

shit man. one engine planes are scary..... i am scared of them and i love planes to death.... just a week ago there was a plane that fell on the parking lot of the place where my mom worked. two people died. one was a student the other was the instructor...... i felt so sorry for them.....

i would never never fly a single engine plane.... lol

AZ looks nice from the top.....i have never been there and i would like to visit. i don't mind cactus etc lol

[owequitit]

shit man. one engine planes are scary..... i am scared of them and i love planes to death.... just a week ago there was a plane that fell on the parking lot of the place where my mom worked. two people died. one was a student the other was the instructor...... i felt so sorry for them.....

i would never never fly a single engine plane.... lol

AZ looks nice from the top.....i have never been there and i would like to visit. i don't mind cactus etc lol

That is an unfortunate misconception you have. Single engine airplanes are actually A LOT safer than multi-engine airplanes. When I make this statement, I seperate out airliners, because their rule structure etc, is so much different, they really aren't comparable. In regards to light planes though, the odd are overwhelmingly in favor of single engine airplanes. The fatality rate of multi-engine crashes is something like 4-5x higher than single engine airplanes.

There are serveral reasons for this.

1) two engines = twice as likely to lose an engine. Back in the day, they put two engine on airplanes for a couple of reasons. A) the engines weren't powerful enough to all the work themselves, so the obvious solution was more than one engine. b) In the early days (up to the jet age, and then slightly into it) engines weren't reliable enough to trust them all the way across, say, an ocean. So they put multiples on because it was inevitable that engine failures were routine. The Boeing 377 Stratocruiser, which was the pinnacle of piston engine travel, was known as "the best 3 engine airliner in the world," because engine failures were so common. Obviously, under such circumstances, you would want many engines. Contrast that with the modern 767 or 777, and they have flown MILLIONS of hours with only a handful of engine failures. Most modern engines are extremely reliable. Even piston engines are a lot more reliable than they once were, although, not as reliable as most jet engines.

2) Multi-engine small airplanes are NOT guaranteed to have positive climb performance on 1 engine (meaning that even with the good engine at full power, you might still be landing soon). So if you are operating at a high altitude, or on a hot day, or god forbid both, you are GOING to be landing, the good engine merely delays the inevitable. We have this problem with our multi-engine airplanes during the summer time. We have to be very careful about when we simulate an engine failure, because there are times that if we fail it right after takeoff, we would not be able to make it back to the runway we took off from for landing. Also, if we are at a higher altitude and fail an engine, we are going to be descending to some lower altitude. If there are mountains at or above that altitude, then you are up a creek without a paddle.

3) Statistically speaking, the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of engine failure on a multi-engine airplane causing a fatal accident vs an engine failure on a single engine airplane. Seems counter-intuitive, but it is true. Roughly 50% of the fatalities related to multi-engine accidents are from the airplane landing BEYOND the intended landing site. The other roughly 50% are from it landing short. The problem with a multi-engine airplane that has lost an engine and is GOING to land, is that you are left making an educated crap shoot. You don't want to lose too much altitude, because you can't get it back and won't make your point, but you want to lose enough to make your point, so you don't overshoot, because if you do overshoot, you probably don't have enough altitude or power to get back to where you should be. Talk about walking a tightrope. Throw in an airplane that is easily travelling 100MPH+, and is many many miles away from its ultimate destination, with changing wind conditions, and if you don't have religion, you better find it, because at that point, you will take ANY help you can get. If everything is done right, and the airplane makes it safely to the runway, the odds of a crash go down exponentially. Unfortunately, many don't really end that way.

There is an old joke in aviation:

An airplane loses an engine, and the passenger looks at the pilot, and says "how far can we go on the good engine?"

The pilot replies:

"This engine will be good enough to get us to the scene of the crash."

4) Multi-engine airplanes are significantly more difficult to fly with one engine. Especially, if they are higher powered. You have a lot of limitations to work through, the least of which is NEVER going below the minimum control airspeed. If you do go below that, you no longer have enough control authority to keep the airplane in control, and it is going to roll over, enter a spin and probably either come apart, or crash. Add in systems complexities etc, and everything gets harder still. In fact, how much would it suck if a redundant system, that isn't even there in a single engine airplane caused a crash in a multi-engined airplane? It has happened. More than once.

The fact of the matter is that even though society has recently tried to condition us into thinking the world is just a big hunky-dory peice of pie, the fact is that there is no such thing as zero risk. There is a chance you will die in your sleep. There is a chance you will die when you are awake. The ONLY inevitable thing is that you WILL die.

Aviation is the same way. Everytime you set foot in a plane, there is a chance you aren't coming home alive. The fact that flying is so routine and safe, especially on the airlines, is a monumental testament to the highly trained professionals that make airplanes go every day, day in and day out. It isn't a miracle, and it isn't an accident (pardon the pun). It takes a TREMENDOUS amount of skill, knowledge, effort, coordination, practice, and constant training to make that happen.

I get really pissed off when people refer to pilots as "bus drivers in the sky" because the skills aren't even related. You can't just pull an airplane over is something goes wrong, and you are traveling at much higher speeds, with WAAAAY more stuff that burns (fuel), and doing it with something that can weigh OVER 1 million pounds (yes, you read that right), with several times as many people as a bus. Hell, an A380 can carry over 500 people. That would be like driving 10 busses 500 miles an hour, across an ocean, with a huge gas tank, and nowhere to go.

They aren't even close to comparable.

On the other hand, I guess it is a compliment in some way, because if people truely feel that way, that means that we are doing everything so right, they have no idea what is going on, or is involved, and thus, we are doing what we were trained and paid to do. We are doing our job, so to speak.

It is a double edged sword. But the next time you look at a professional pilot, especially at the commercial airline level, you should appreciate the amount of training they go through, the amount of knowledge, skill, and professionalism they display, and the amount of responsibility they have. Your life is in their hands when you get on a plane after all.

[alb_accord]

hahahah that joke craked me up lmao......

i am one of the people that thought that if one engine went out. the other can keep you up until you got to the destination or shit until you passed the ocean lol...

but yeah you right. i have a lot of respect of pilots... they have an amazing and one of the most dangerous job in the planet.....

i always wanted to fly a plane since i saw Mig 19s and 21s training back home... shit i even promised my self that before i die i will learn how to fly a plane and i will fly a Mig 21 at least once. lol

[JTEK24]

what kind of jets were those in the first video? They look like MIGs maybe.

[owequitit]

hahahah that joke craked me up lmao......

i am one of the people that thought that if one engine went out. the other can keep you up until you got to the destination or shit until you passed the ocean lol...

but yeah you right. i have a lot of respect of pilots... they have an amazing and one of the most dangerous job in the planet.....

i always wanted to fly a plane since i saw Mig 19s and 21s training back home... shit i even promised my self that before i die i will learn how to fly a plane and i will fly a Mig 21 at least once. lol

It depends, on the situation and the airplane. There are a lot of circumstances where the good engine WILL get you to a good place to land. Airliners are required to be able to fly with engines failed, but even then, when you take away 50% of the power, things do change. Even an airliner with tons of thrust that can fly safely on one engine, will have to slow down, and descend to a lower altitude.

But just because there are 2 or more engines, does not give a free pass to safety.

There is a Mig 21 here locally. They went to do aerial photography, and the photo plane flew underneath and crashed. 6 prominent members of the local aviation community were killed. It was tragic. A cool airplane though.

[owequitit]

what kind of jets were those in the first video? They look like MIGs maybe.

They were Aero L-39's. It is a czechoslovakian jet trainer, that can be purchased on the used market.

They are very popular in the states, because they can be had for about $350,000 which is VERY cheap for an aircraft with that kind of performance. Very cool airplanes.

One of them was owned by the largest US Ford dealership, Galpin Ford, and I don't know who the other one belonged to. They fly them quite regularly though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aero_L-39_Albatros

[alifeva]

which one is safer to fly in? A helicopter or an airplane? in your opinion

[owequitit]

new vid to follow in the original posted links.

Round trip from Prescott to Albuquerque to Colorado Springs to Denver. Then return trip from Denver to Santa Fe to Prescott.

[owequitit]

The video is rendering. I will have to see how the quality turns out. It was made with a Canon Powershot A1100 IS, so it isn't exactly a video camera, I just mainly wanted to try it out. The day stuff isn't too bad, but the night stuff was a little too low for the sensor to really capture in super detail. I think at the resolution the video is rendering at it MIGHT turn out OK. We will see in a little bit...

I am debating how to set it up, because the total vid is about 30 minutes. I may just break it into segements and upload/render a bunch of seperate shorter vids. Also, does anybody have any idea how to determine which songs I can get away with uploading to Youtube?

[owequitit]

In the mean time, here are some pics to hold you over.







Sedona by air. Well, just the edge of it.







Level at 11,000. 170 Knots ground speed, or 196 MPH @ 55% power. Unfortunately, due to the headwind coming home, it was closer to 120 Knots or 138 MPH. Still, let's see your average car do that for 12 hours...



The flight crew. Captain Nick, and that other dude.





N574ER enjoying the view of the Rocky Mountains the next day.





The BMW M5 crew car. No, they didn't let us use it.



This is one of the first private jets ever made, and it was SUPER CLEAN. Looked to be in better shape than the Gulfstream sitting behind it. I don't know who it belonged to, but one of the crew was wearing a Mannheim Steamroller jacket.







Pike's Peak framing Colorado Springs.

[owequitit]

Operating on supplemental oxygen. We used 1.5 bottles on this trip. Good thing we had it.













Approach into Santa Fe, New Mexico, with a shot of the awesome FBO building with the fire built. I wanted to sleep on the leather chair next to the fire.