Beautiful day to fly

Wow, what a gorgeous day yesterday.  I'm sorry I didn't have my camera with me.  I was feeling a little out of sorts when I headed to the airport where I had a plane reserved for 17:00.  I decided I was just going to do some takeoffs and landings and call it a day, but when I got in the plane and got airborne it was too nice to cut it that short.  I did a few short field and soft field takeoffs and landings and then I headed northeast to look at the leaves.  It was 27°C, winds 100@05, altimeter 30.38, and smooth as glass. It looks like the colors will peak in the next week around here, but they were still pretty impressive.  This was one of those days when you realize what a privilege it is to be a pilot.

Some other stuff I've seen on the net recently

I haven't had the time or motivation to write much here lately, but did want to post some links to some of the stuff that I've been reading.  This post will be dedicated to the aviation stuff, I may do a similar post for religion and/or politics soon.  I really enjoyed Don Brown's "Say Again?" column that he did for a number of years for AvWeb (thanx to Don for providing the link to the archives).  Don is a retired air traffic controller out of the Atlanta ARTCC (Atlanta Center).  As a new pilot and then a new instrument student and finally as an instrument-rated pilot, I appreciated Don's perspective from the other end of the radio.  Don retired from the FAA in 2006 (I believe), but I recently discovered that he continues to write about the aviation industry in his Get the Flick blog.  Some of what he writes is political, too.  He doesn't have anything good to say about they idea of privatizing ATC (and I have to say I mostly agree with him on that).  Anyway, here are a couple of his recent (or even not-so-recent) posts that you might be interested in.

• Controllers have cure for the energy crisis 
• This is the clearest explanation of the problems with airline delays, to use Don's line "it's the runways, stupid"
• More on the same problem 
• This one is about the FAA's NextGen.  The problems can't all be solved by new technology, it still requires people and we've been losing them on the ATC end of the radio at an alarming rate the last few years due to the FAA's refusal to bargain in good faith with the controllers.
• And this one, points out that now is the time to fix the FAA before it is too late.

Another blog I've  been reading lately is JetWhine.  I loved the picture of the flight crew in this post, he's right it wasn't that long ago that flying (not to say anything of military aviation) was seen as a (primarily) male endeavor.  There was also this note about the new Jeppesen VFR+GPS charts.  I can't wait for these to make it to my part of the country.