Awesome! How did he manage to overcome dizzying feelings from cross-winds in an open-air cockpit? When I fly a sailplane, beside tailspins and free-falls (controlled of course) it's the crosswinds that can make me feel dizzy, especially when I approach a runway with an angle over 40 degrees left or right to the runway direction to compensate for cross-wind. And there is also the open-air pressure "fun" with quickly changing cockpit winds, especially over large water bodies and mountains.
I suspect the queasy feeling you feel on approach is from (intentionally and necessarily) uncoordinated flight, not from the airflow across the cockpit.
In normal flight, you fly coordinated; the airplane is flying "straight and level" through the airmass; the total force vector on the pilot and the inner ear is straight down the spine and everything feels normal.
To address a crosswind taking you off course, you simply turn ("crab") into the wind, but the airplane stays coordinated and you sum the aircraft airspeed vector with the airmass vector and adjust until your ground track is taking you where you want to go, even though the nose of the airplane isn't pointing straight along the ground track. This still feels "normal" though it can look odd in a strong wind and at low altitude.
In a crosswind landing, you can't allow the nose to be off the ground track[1]. Otherwise, you'll impose a large sideload on the landing gear. So, you transition to uncoordinated (slipping) flight, where you dip a wing into the crosswind to keep the ground track aligned with the desired track. At the same time, you use opposite rudder to align the nose with the ground track (which is aligned with the runway on approach).
In this condition, the force vector on the pilot is not straight down. (The turn coordinator "ball" will be displaced into the crosswind; that ball operates purely on force, so the pilot [and pax] feel the force vector pulling them to one side, but they know they aren't moving with respect to the airplane and this confusion is very disconcerting to some.)
Long way to explain: in a long cross-country flight, the airplane is coordinated for 99.9+% of the flight and so most of the source of "dizziness" from crosswinds is no factor.
[1]-many transport aircraft have gear that is tolerant of crabbed landings. Almost no light aircraft do. There's a limit to how much slip a large engined transport aircraft with underwing engines can tolerate before the engine nacelle will scrape the ground, so designers of those airplanes have had to allow for crabbed touchdowns in strong crosswinds.
It's a twin engine airplane (you need a multi-engine rating on a regular pilot's license to fly it). Not really an ultralight, despite appearances. The engines alone are half the cost.
It makes more sense when you read its history (which is closely related to its name): it was originally built specifically from air photography for the National Geographic Society, for a Ndoki expedition (in northern congo).
Explains the pricey two-engine option (when you're flying above the badlands or rainforest you'd like to keep going if an engine gives up), and the completely open cabin and wings sitting well behind both seats were probably an interesting structural challenge. The frame is essentially unique, there's no other in that specialised segment.
From the article: Some of the farms boasted a single oil derrick, pumping out a few barrels a day. “Not enough to live on,” Webster observed, “but a good extra income.”
I don't know about you... but I could probably live on a few barrels a day. A barrel is $60 bucks today. Around 5 barrels a day, everyday, is a 100k annual income.
These farmers would not own the well. They would typically be leasing the mineral rights to a company who takes the risk to drill, maintain the well and sell the result, if any. Standard rates for the mineral rights owners would be around 3/16 of net proceeds. And oftentimes the mineral rights are severely fractionated among family members as ownership gets passed down and split up from generation to generation.
Are surprisingly low for a well-engineered setup. You can run many pump jacks off a single-cylinder engine (a dozen or more in some arrangements). If you have two jacks that counterbalance each other, your only loss is friction. You can even run the engine on the natural gas that comes out too (which would normally just be flared off).
At many regional airports, it's either free for small planes or very cheap. For example, my airport of Charlottesville, VA charges nothing for planes under 7,000 lb ("LNDG FEE ONLY FOR ACFT OVER 7000 LBS."):
pkorzeniewski> Why there're so many abbrevations? Is there a technical reason for it or is it just a convention among pilots?
It's a [frustrating] convention among pilot data services. METARs, TAFs, FDs, etc are all coded. Many of these systems date back 30+ years, when telecom equipment and data transmission was much more limited and expensive.
After a short while, it's relatively transparent to decode the abbreviated weather and other items that we use a lot. And of course, anyone who is remotely fluent in English can decode the minimal abbreviations in the quoted text.
It's also somewhat easier to scan certain reports (TAFs and Winds Aloft forecasts) as the abbreviations tend to keep the data in a visually scannable almost tabular form, so you can easily see when conditions are becoming more/less favorable.
If it were free/cheap to update all the systems that generate and all the systems that process, interpret, archive, and/or retransmit that data, there's no reason to keep the abbreviation culture. It's far from free, so inertia will keep it the way it is for a long time.
PS: I don't know why that comment is dead. It seems a perfectly reasonable question and your account isn't banned...
Probably for the same reason Digital Video is filled with acronyms. Medical notes also have the same pattern.
Basically, specialized fields have their own vocabulary that evolved super fast relative to the evolution of the English language. It would be very cumbersome to use the full terms when trying to communicate.
At any rate, the original hyperlink to the world wide web page for this article has beautiful joint photographic expert group pictures—or perhaps were they portable network graphics, I didn't check the hyperterxt markup language to verify. And the cascading style sheet layout is quite clever to present these pictures. ;)
in addition to the free or cheap parking ($5 for a tie down), sometimes smaller airports even have courtesy car or two that you can take around town if you are just visiting for the day.
There are only 600k private pilots in the US? Dang, that's a small group of people I'm thinking I should join. Growing up flying with my dad, off-and-on, I had no idea the numbers were so small.
Newer planes will cost more per hour, but glass is definitely the way to go. Shop around, each shop is going to offer different pricing based on what their costs are, and the aircraft time is the most expensive component (followed by fuel, then instructor time).
Disclaimer: I hold a private ticket, and 10 years later still haven't found time to get my instrument or multi-engine. Life happens!
You can use airnav.com to find small airports near you and make a visit and ask for recommendations on who to talk to about getting a demo flight. They're usually 30 min or so and run about $100. You'll find out pretty quickly if this is for you or not.
Airplane people are either very helpful or old curmudgeons; but mostly the former. Most are really happy to help someone get started. General aviation can use all the help it can get.
I recently did a round-the-state Colorado road trip and can highly recommend it to anybody interested in a huge variety of gobsmacking beautiful scenery. From ancient cliff-fortress ruins in the SouthWest of the state to Rocky Mountain National Park in the North.
Great Sand Dunes National Park (shown here in the pictures) is an absolutely amazing place to go. Totally out of the way, but so worth the drive and the amazing hike across the dunes.
The experience can be a bit magnified if you come from a coastal area, the air on some of the peaks (like Pike's Peak) is so thin that, until you acclimate, walking more than a little bit results in a queer dizzy feeling that makes the whole experience even more fun.
Come prepared though, a pretty large part of the state is so low in population density it's hard to even get mobile phone service. So plan your routes carefully, bring maps and have an independent GPS device that doesn't require data service for route planning.
Is there a library for this style of webpage, or is everyone reinventing the wheel for this stuff? Love the design and feel of reading stories this way.
