In three months, I’ll fly from Frankfurt to Jacksonville to start a great flying adventure together with Jason Schappert, the editor of www.m0a.com. We launched the Flying Across America project to promote General Aviation. We will fly from Florida to California and back in Jason’s Cessna 150 to meet as many aviation enthusiasts as possible and preach for positive values associated with General Aviation: solidarity and friendship, self-development, service to the community, and fun.

Our route is already defined, we’ll keep south of the Rocky Mountains, and stop at airports where we found friends and local support. We also want to show that aviation is not reserved to the affluent, and that it’s a great community. We do our best to get some media coverage, and several fellow bloggers already posted about us, like Dan, from www.av8rdan.com. The guys from mytransponder.com and Friends Of Aviation also support our project, together with other patrons and partners. We need all possible support to turn our flight into a great event, from help with funding to media relays and local supporters.

If you live close to our route and want to help, don’t hesitate to contact me via this blog of via our contact page.

We fund ourselves as much as we can, but we’re also selling t-shirts, mousepads and glassware from our online store. You can also support us directly by buying miles from our website. Any extra cent will be donated to aviation related charities, and we hope to donate a lot. We plan a book, and may be a DVD. And naturally, we’ll post a lot on our blog.

So far, we’ve enough funds for the flight from Florida to California, and my flight ticket to Jacksonville and back is paid for. We’ve been invited overnight at different places and this will reduce the costs, but we still need more support. We need your help to spread the word, and make possible for us to reach a wider audience, so don’t hesitate to talk about this project around you. Join us to make General Aviation a bit better!

There are tons of good aviation blogs out there, I read lots of them and continue discover new ones. But today I’d like to know which ones you read and like.

There are two rules for this month’s poll:

1. You can’t vote for plasticpilot.net – We already know you like it, don’t we ?
2. If you’re an aviation blogger yourself, you can’t vote for your own blog. Link to it is fine, but voting for oneself is a bit too… selfish.

So, let us know which other aviation blog you like!

Open the door
At first, the crew members will do all what they can to prevent you to do that. This could be painful. And if you ever achieve it, there’s a lot of cold air out there, at lower pressure. You will be sucked out of the aircraft and deep-frozen before realizing you’ll be dying.

Leave your shoes in the toilet
As a general rule, getting off your shoes is not a good thing to do. Doing that in the toilet is even worse. If you do it anyway and someone asks you, make sure you answer does not contain the word “bomb”. Some guys spent days at FBI premises for saying that as a “joke”.

Get drunk
Getting drunk on board is not a bad idea by itself, but what you could do after that could be really really bad for you. If a flight attendant says “no” when you ask for a drink, you’d better to accept it as the good answer. Flights get frequently diverted because of unruly passengers, and you don’t want to be one of them.

Engage into inappropriate activities, particularly with flight attendants
Do you really think flights attendants don’t see when passengers play nasty games, be in in the toilets (anyway, good luck, except if you’re a very little person), or on their seats. Flight attendants themselves have other things to do, and remember, they travel in groups.

Look at “Airplane!” (a.k.a. Kentucky Fried Airplane)
I’m a big fan of Airplane! There are so many levels of jokes in this movie that it’s always a great pleasure to see it again and again. I was never lucky enough to look at it on board though. May be I should do that on my next flight… Hummm.

Countdown loudly
This could really scare your fellow passengers, which would in turn not be good for you. Since a couple of years, passengers no longer hesitate to “neutralize” one of them. Sometimes in quite violent ways. Putting your heads on your ears when you reach “zero” would certainly make things worse.

To get an IFR rating in the JAA world (read most of Europe), a pilot must know:

• How many atomic clock are on board a GPS sattelite
• The topic of each of the 18 annexes of the ICAO convention, per number
• How many lines are painted on the runway to materialize the threshold, as a function of the runway’s width
• The frequency range of each possible navaid, even things like glide-slope that are not visible in the cockpit
• Which ICAO document is known as “Procedures for Air Navigation Services – Air Traffic Management”: Doc 8168, Doc 1234, Doc 4444 or Doc 7333
• Which section of the AIP contains the the detailed characteristics of an airport’s runway
• What does a 9 mean in the field H of a SNOWTAM

I could continue this list almost endlessly, the one meter long bookshelf holding my IFR theory books is kind of a treasure chest for such useless information. The funny thing is that the theory syllabus is extremely vast, but the examination is always based on a relatively limited set of multiple choice questions. These questions are naturally kept “secret” by the examination authorities, but strangely many flight schools seem to know them. Passing the written test is the biggest hurdle in getting an Instrument Rating in Europe, it lasts much longer than the practical training.

Before taking the practical, in flight examination, the Instrument Rating Examiner can ask the candidate pilot a couple of theory questions, but this is usually much more oriented towards “real life” flying, and does not last for long. Nothing compared to the oral exam that US pilots have to go through, which typically lasts for two hours, in front of a real person, not a computer or a form with check-boxes… Any guess which version I do prefer ? And what about you ?

I feel just like a yogurt with a passed expiry date. Earlier this week, my medical certificate expired. As I don’t have flying plans in Europe this year – mostly because of the Flying Across America project – and because my medical examiner is still in Geneva, I decided to let it expire. According to the Swiss interpretation of the JARs, changing medical examiner requires a transfer of the file, and a serious argumentation. Living in Germany is certainly one. When I discussed with fellow pilots here about that, I learned that the German interpretation is a bit different, pilots can go to any examiner they want for renewing their medical certificate.

Even if Switzerland and Germany both apply the JARs, they do it in slightly different ways, and this is also true regarding the medical certification. The German interpretation is very strict, for example every loss of blood must be reported to the medical examiner. Cut your finger with a knife while cooking, and you can’t fly until your examiner re-declares you as fit. The same thing applies to any stay in a hospital lasting for more than 6 hours (not clear if waiting times are included). In this context, I was not sure I wanted to transfer my medical certificate and my license to Germany. Each JAR country has its own license register, and it is theoretically possible to have a medical certificate and a license issued by different countries. Typically, my MEP / IR rating was passed with a German examiner, but was issued by Switzerland.

So even if nothing changed since last Tuesday for me, physically speaking, I can’t legally exercise my flying privileges anymore. As long as I had a valid medical certificate, it was my duty as pilot to decide if I was fit for flying or not. Having a medical certificate does not mean I was always fit, but that I could make this call. Now, even if I feel fit, I’m simply not allowed to fly as pilot in command anymore. Just like yogurts turn from healthy to toxic at midnight (local time) on their expiry date, all my flying privileges vanished this week. So are the rules, and I respect them. I really hope to resume my flying in JAR-land in 2011, and this will start with a new medical examination.

There are many ways to classify airports: controlled or uncontrolled (for US readers, towered or non-towered ), with grass or concrete runway, with or without commercial or airline traffic. I learned to fly on the grass runway of a controlled airport with international traffic (read Geneva, Switzerland, LSGG) and I sometimes feel a bit uncomfortable when I fly to an airport without ATC. This runway is rather short, but well maintained, so soft and short field operations are no issues to me.

As always, my questions for this month are simple: how do you like your airports ? Small, remote grass strips or large concrete runway with lot of jet traffic ? With or without air traffic control ? Or something in between ?

With single and multiple engine land and IFR ratings, I consider myself a lucky pilot. There are however much more that I could do and would like to achieve in the coming decades…

Tail wheel, particularly in a SuperCub
Some pilots say that real aircraft are tail wheel. I flew a couple of times in a Piper SuperCub, but only as passenger. What a thrill! Take-off distance, rate of climb, visibility… really an extraordinary aircraft to flying. The challenge of tail wheel take-off and landing would be a new experience, just as taxiing a tail wheel aircraft is.

Mountain rating
This is a Swiss national rating, making possible to land aircraft with skis on glaciers. This is not an easy rating to get, as it requires 250 mountain landings with an instructor, half of them during winter time. The new skills required are advanced understanding of mountain winds, the ability to recognize the quality of snow, and naturally to land on places with lot of slope.

Floats
On the other side of the temperature scale for water, having a sea rating would be a blast. This is almost non-existent in Europe, so this would be the occasion to go to Canada again. Learning to land on lakes there. Then, why not going to Australia and land near the Great Barrier Reef, but this time as pilot, and not as passenger like during our honeymoon.

Aerobatics
I’m not a fan of extreme attitudes. Practicing stalls and steep turns puts me under stress. But I know that the best way to overcome this stress is to go, at least once, flying aerobatics. Getting the rating would be one more step, which could definitely make me feel better under higher than normal G-loads.

Turbine
Piston engines are great, turbo compressed ones are better, and turbine engines comes on top! Jet engines will probably remain out of my financial reach forever, but I’d like to get a turbine rating once. TMB, Pilatus, or Cessna Caravan would be great… and flying a King Air is a dream, which is probably not totally impossible. At least a couple of times, even if I don’t use this rating after getting it. Turbine means higher altitude, more power, pressurization, and serious weather IFR…

Formation flying
This is not formally a rating, but it’s something I’d like to practice, but not without proper training. Flying meters away from a couple of other aircraft, learning to fly with the required accuracy, and making aviation a team sport.

These are nice projects, and I hope to make some come true… What about your flying projects?

Passengers always take the same kind of photographs. I can’t really blame them, I do the same when I’m the one holding the camera. I already posted about this trend when I found two very similar pictures of propeller spinner, made by two different passengers on different days.

Another very common type of picture is the over or under wing shot, through the side window. Such pictures give a nice perspective of the wing in front of the landscape. The wing’s presence also proves that the picture has been taken from an aircraft and not from a sightseeing point.

The following seven pictures are the perfect illustration of the kind of photographs I’m talking about. By the way, can you identify these seven aircraft ?

The cockpit in the picture below is the one of HB-HFI, an AS-202 Bravo. This type is the basic trainer in which I learned to fly. I took my introductory flight, on the 17th of August 2001 in a Bravo, flew 23 hours until my first solo hours until my first solo, on the 12th of June 2002, and passed my passed earned my private pilot license  on the 5th of November 2002. Looking at my all time statistics, the Bravo is still my secondly most flown type, after the Piper Saratoga, with a total of 82h45.

After getting my PPL, I rapidly “upgraded” to the Piper Archer family, and then other complex, high-performance single engine aircraft for to get my instrument rating, and I did not fly the Bravo that much. Then came the FADEC Challenge – one year during which I flew FADEC aircraft only – excluding the Bravo and other aircraft of my flying activities for one year.

Even after all this time, I know the Bravo’s cockpit layout by heart, and can find any knob switch or button with my eyes closed. Pilots have special relationships to each aircraft they fly, and the very first one is certainly even more special…

I have only one bad memory associated with the Bravo. One very good flight instructor got killed in an accident in a Bravo – the very one shown in the picture above – during a CPL training flight. I knew him because he used to work at the school where I trained for my instrument rating. I remember his classes and great simulator sessions. Definitely a big loss for aviation.

Now, I’m not flying Geneva anymore, and the Bravos vanished from the fleet of the Aero-Club there. The Bravo has been out of production for decades, and it’s not exactly a modern aircraft, making maintenance complex and operation expensive.

This is the first time in my pilot’s life that an aircraft type becomes unavailable, so to speak. It’s certainly still possible to find some Bravos for rent, but it will be harder and harder. Time goes by, and it’s time for me to say good by to the Bravo. I’ll never forget.

I learned to fly in the AS-202 Bravo, an aircraft fitted with a central stick. Then I flew a lot of Piper aircraft and a Bonanza, both fitted with yokes. When I started to fly the DA40 and then the DA42, I came back to central sticks, and I tested the side-stick once in the Cirrus SR-22. Personally, I prefer aircraft with yokes than sticks, for two reasons: the central stick makes hard to use a large size knee board and I never know where to put my right hand when flying with a stick. Yokes also offer the possibility to mount a chart clip on them, which is really good for IFR departure or approach charts.

So my questions for this month are simple: do you fly sitck or yoke aircraft, or both ? And what do you find good or bad in each ?