Biting The Bullet

Q: What are the two happiest days of a pilot's life?
A: The day he buys his first airplane, and the day he sells it.

I've been saying for years now that sole ownership of a recreational airplane is a money-wasting extravagance for 90% of the pilots out there. Even "affordable" airplanes have fairly high fixed costs, meaning that your very first hour of flight time is 5 to 10 times as expensive as the rental rate for an equivalent aircraft. Renting is more cost-effective than sole ownership for anyone who flies less than, say, 8-10 hours a month - which is virtually everyone I know who flies for fun. A huge portion of the GA fleet doesn't fly more than an hour or two a month. Besides the inefficiency of it, the disuse is hard on the airplanes and their engines, adding to maintenance costs and woes.

Despite all that, most pilots dream of owning their own airplane, and many present owners seem to be continually looking to trade up to something bigger, faster, and yet more expensive. I'm no exception; for years I've made a daily habit of perusing barnstormers.com, particularly looking at 4-place taildraggers. Don't get me wrong, I like belonging to the Yellow Cub Club. I've had a blast flying the Cub, and the flying club arrangement appeals greatly to my thrifty nature. Having a bunch of pilots to share the fixed expenses means that flying clubs are cheaper than renting after only 2 or 3 hours a month, and you generally get better maintenance, more flexible scheduling, the camaraderie of the club, and a measure of the pride of ownership. It's still not quite as good as owning a plane, though. I got a taste of that when I was flying the Cessna 170A. I missed having a plane guaranteed available whenever I felt like going flying, with the flexibility to take it on longer adventures. I missed having four seats, night flying equipment, and a measure of cross-country capability. The Cub is based at Airlake, a 45-minute drive from our house; I missed having a plane at Flying Cloud, only 15 minutes away. And frankly, I kinda wanted a plane of my own merely for the sake of being able to say, "She's mine."

When I talked to Dawn about this, it turned out she feels the same way, even though she loves the Cub as much as I do. Like me, she prefers flying a classic taildragger over a modern spam can. Had there been a local flying club or partnership formed around a 4-place taildragger at FCM, I probably would have gone in that direction; the cost advantage over ownership outweigh the occasional inconveniences. But there are no such clubs in the local area, and I couldn't find anyone looking for a partner, either. So our choices were to continue with the Yellow Cub Club, or buy a plane of our own.

I did some investigation and ran the numbers:

• $25k Airplane, $15k financed at 2.99%/60 months: $280/mo
• Liability & Hull Insurance: $65/mo
• T-Hangar at FCM: $200/mo.
• Annual & Routine Maintenance: $125/mo
• Fuel: $45/hour
• Overhaul Fund: $10/hour

I concluded that my very first hour each month would cost a whopping $725. However, for $1200 a month, I could fly 10 hours at $120 an hour, which is comparable to older C-172 and Piper PA28 rental aircraft in my area. Dawn and I talked and decided that if we had our own airplane 15 minutes from home, we would use it 10 hours a month. We could afford to up our flying budget from $200/mo to $1200/mo. We discussed the fact that an airplane could easily blow the budget above with big, expensive surprises. And then we decided to bite the bullet and go for it. The search began in earnest. First, I wanted to narrow our criteria down a bit and do some research.

Next post: The Search. To be continued....

Three New for the New Year

Good Lord, can you believe that it's already 2015? I can't; time seems to speed up as I get older. Dawn and I are celebrating New Years in Portland with our good friends Brad and Amber. Like myself and a great many of my flying friends, Brad moved from the regional airlines to the majors this year. Also like many of these friends, we started around the same place (instructing together at ADP) and our career paths have sometimes intertwined, at other times gone in very different directions, and yet we advanced to the next level within a month of each other. We agreed that the process of training, IOE, and probation/reserve/commuting made this year seem far shorter than the last few years in which we were senior in our respective positions. In my case, the last two or three months have seen a few other major developments that put me decidedly behind on this blog. I don't want longtime followers to have to wait to read about them in my Flying column, so here they are all at once: Three new developments as 2014 rolls over to 2015.

1. I'm off probation and (almost) back in MSP!

I completed 400 flight hours in the Mad Dog in early December, finishing my probationary period! Practically, this doesn't really mean a great deal, merely that I'm entitled to union representation in case of disciplinary action. The reality is that if you screw up in an especially egregious manner, the airline will attempt to fire you even after you're off probation, and while on probation you still generally have to screw up in an rather egregious manner to get fired. In my case, I don't see myself acting much differently after probation. But it's a milestone nonetheless, and one that allows you to breathe a bit of a sigh of relief that you're not quite so under the microscope; you've essentially been accepted as a permanent part of your new airline. I was allowed to read the probationary pilot reports submitted by the captains I've flown with thus far, and they were all rather complimentary ("He really likes to hand fly!" read one of the latest).

Concurrently, I was finally converted to my new base of MSP for the February bid period. I wrote about being awarded MSP several months ago, but the contract allows the company quite a lot of flexibility in when they actually make the award effective. Because there were so many New York-based Mad Dog FOs attempting to get back to MSP, the company couldn't let us all go at once without severely affecting their New York schedule. So, I had to wait a bit, but a month from now I'll again be driving to work. Nice!

Taken with a non-wifi camera...100% legal, probation or not!

 

Isn't that beautiful!? Oh yeah, the sunset is nice too!

2. There's a new Yellow Cub in the Yellow Cub Club

I've written extensively here and in Flying about my adventures in N77532, the Yellow Cub Club's 1946 Piper J3C Cub. This plane had been in the club since the mid 1970s, the last time it had been recovered - and the use was showing. We were faced with the prospect of being without an airplane for a year or more while we restored 532. The thing is, we're a flying club, not a group of old airplane restorers. The good news was that we've had excellent financial stewardship over the last few years, resulting in very healthy reserve levels. Ultimately we decided that we could afford to sell 532 and then buy a pretty, already-restored Cub. This all happened over a 3-week period in October. Happily, 532 went to a friend of mine, a guy I knew from my last airline who was in my class at my current airline. It's in South Dakota and is being flown by a newly-formed flying club that plans to fly it for a year or two more and then restore it. There's a good chance I'll get to fly 532 again.

The airplane we acquired as 532's replacement is actually older, a 1940 model J3C, but was restored in the mid 1990s and late 2000s. NC28092 is a very pretty bird - one I'd be happy to display at any fly-in. She's also a bit sprightlier than 532 despite only having a 65 hp Continental - perhaps due to lighter construction, perhaps due to less time since overhaul. She cruises quite easily at a solid 80mph. I hope this fine example of the breed makes it to Oshkosh in the next few years, though she probably won't be flown by me for reasons I'll outline below. In fact, I plan to sell my share in the Yellow Cub Club come spring, despite being their new maintenance officer.

 

One of my last times flying N77532, with my father-in-law Tom. I flew 7 family members this late-summer weekend. 

 

NC28092, the new Yellow Cub in the Yellow Cub Club!

 Very nice Cub!

3a. We have a new Piper (dog)!

Dawn and I have been talking about getting a pup for ages but have delayed because of how much we're gone from home. After Dawn's brother's dog gave birth to a litter of 7, we finally decided to just make the adjustments necessary to bring a pooch into our lives. Dawn visited her brother in October and picked out the cutest, calmest, and most loving pup in the litter. Well, the "calm" part was certainly temporary, for shortly after taking him home he started letting out his alter-ego personality that I call "Demon Dog!" Regardless, he's still very cute and loving, and even in his persnickety moods gets a lot of laughs out of us. After a lot of deliberation we decided on calling him Piper, largely Dawn's choice as I was resistant to an aviation-centric name. Once I met him I realized that the name suited him perfectly. It has, however, caused a bit of consternation among our friends because of another addition to our family since the pooch....

Piper at about ten weeks old. It's crazy how much he's grown in the six weeks since this.

 3b. We have a new Piper (airplane)!

This is pretty crazy, I can still barely believe it even as I type it. Dawn and I are airplane owners. Not just 1/12th owners, as we are in the club Cub; sole owners of our very own airplane, a 1953 Piper PA-22/20-160. I'll write more about the process in a separate entry, but we've known for a long time that we would eventually buy an airplane, and this fall decided that the timing was right to start getting serious. I wasn't expecting it to happen so quickly, though; we had really just started looking. This one was exactly what I was looking for and came at a very good price. A friend, fellow aviation writer, and airline pilot of some notoriety helped me ferry it home from Montana - more about that in the next entry. But long story short, there's a pretty little yellow airplane all of our own, sitting in its own hangar at Flying Cloud Airport (FCM), awaiting some seriously awesome adventures together! Dawn and I have big plans for trips with Piper (dog) and the Pacer (airplane). Piper the dog has actually already flown in Pacer the airplane twice, and seems to like the back seat rather well!

The Busted Pilots of Instagram

By now I'm sure many of you have seen "The Pilots of Instagram" piece that's been going around the interwebs. I'm choosing not to post a link because the author printed the names and airlines of the pilots involved, even in cases where it's pretty clear that safety was not compromised and not even certain that regulations were violated. Even if the pilots did mess up, viral press like this has the potential to ruin careers where more measured discipline might be more appropriate. You can find the article easily enough if you want to.

That said, the piece was surprisingly accurate and nuanced for a general news source (if that's what you call it; I'd never heard of Quartz before this). The author had a solid grasp on the particulars of the new FAR 121.542 regulation and how it interfaces with the more established sterile cockpit rule. I dare say the author has much better knowledge of the legalities of in-flight photo-taking than most airline pilots do. I wrote about the new regulations back in June, when I learned about them several months after they took effect. Since then most airline pilots to whom I've mentioned the new 121.542 were either unaware it existed or had an inaccurate idea of its provisions (erroneously thinking that only laptops were banned, that phones are ok in airplane mode, etc). Most airlines, it seems, did little to educate their pilots about the new law.

In some cases, such as my airline, many personal electronic devices were already prohibited by the Flight Operations Manual (FOM). Though it contains airline policy, the FOM is approved by the FAA and technically has the full force of the FARs (and even supersedes them, where there is conflicting guidance). Despite this, it is my experience that pilots tend to be less heedful of FOM rules than the FARs, and in many cases the FOM has considerable grey areas open to interpretation, whereas the FAA's stance on most major regs is well known. Here's a good example. In my June post, I wrote that my airline's FOM already prohibited any camera with electronic functions, which would rule out nearly every modern example. Later, a check airman pointed out that my interpretation hinged on the meaning of a single word, and that based on the use of that word elsewhere in the FOM and the FARs, this provision would not appear to prohibit cameras that were otherwise permitted by FAR 121.542 (that is, cameras with no wireless capability). So my new understanding is that in a non-sterile phase of flight, I can take a photo with my Nikon D5000 SLR, as it has no capability that would render it a "personal wireless communications device." I could then, after the flight is over, insert the SD card into my laptop and upload the photo to Instagram, or Facebook, or use it for one of my Flying articles, all without being in technical violation of the regulation.

There's another loophole mentioned in my previous piece that very well may have been at play with some of the photos and videos referenced in this article. The FAA specifically said in the final ruling that 121.542 does not apply to jumpseaters. When I see a photo or a video that appears to be taken from near aircraft centerline rather than the left or right side of the cockpit, I tend to suspect it was taken by a jumpseater. For that matter, what of a first-generation GoPro with no wireless capability that is set up on a suction mount in non-sterile flight and then allowed to run through landing and all the way to the gate? Depending on the provisions of that airline's FOM, I can see one arguing that this meets the letter of the regs. In most cases, it's very difficult to tell just from the photo or video whether it was taken legally. Even in seemingly egregious case, such as a photo on short final, it can be difficult to tell whether safety was compromised. What if it was a still from a video shot by the aforementioned mounted camera? If mounted out of the way, I find it hard to accept that any lives put in danger.


Here's the thing though. It's one thing to take a photo or video in the privacy of your own cockpit under circumstances that are arguably safe and legal. It is another thing to put that photo or footage, with identifying information, on a website that allows anyone to view it (or in the case of Instagram, encourages maximizing public views). I myself have had to become a lot more careful about this over the years. I once took a picture at PHL while parked on a taxiway with engines shut down on an extended ground hold, and later posted it to this blog. The FOM of the airline I was with at the time made clear this was a non-sterile period, and allowed us to open the cockpit door under these circumstances. I was immediately lambasted by a commenter for violating sterile cockpit, and why not? I certainly couldn't prove that we weren't in a sterile phase of ground operations. Likewise, the outed pilots of Instagram that posted landing footage taken from aircraft centerline can't prove that a jumpseater was holding that camera. When it comes to the court of public opinion, the concept of innocent until proven guilty definitely does not apply; nor does it hold much weight when facing company discipline.

Honestly, I really dislike that my job has come to this, that recording the neat things that I do and see on a daily basis and sharing them with my friends would put my livelihood at risk. It is what it is; going against the grain and posting this stuff online is almost inevitably going to end up with someone trying to destroy you. I'll certainly continue to share inflight pics and vids with you, my friends...but they're generally going to be taken from a single-engine airplane flying under FAR 91. For the past few years that's been my flying club Cub. As of today, however, you're going to start seeing another pretty yellow airplane cropping up in my multimedia offerings. More on that in my next post!

Sixteen Again

At my new airline, as at Horizon, many of the captains I am flying with are my parents' age or a little younger. Most of these have adult children and part of the standard "getting to know you chit-chat" is inquiring how many kids they have, what they do for work, what their marital status is, and whether any grandkids are on the way. Most of these children's lives were spent while their father (or mother) worked at a major airline. Which is to say: most had an upper-middle-class upbringing, often involving private schools and world travel and the chance to attend a good university. They tend to fall in either the brilliant-and-going-places category or else good-for-nothing-and-probably-moving-home, at least in their parent's retelling. What I not yet heard is even a single example of a child who is now an airline pilot. This makes sense, in a way. Most captains in this age bracket have offspring that came of age around or just after 9/11, when the airlines were in full economic free-fall and pilot group after pilot group was facing bankruptcy or liquidation. Nobody in this situation would encourage their kids to follow in their footsteps. Many have said as much.

Lately, though, I've also flown with quite a few newer captains who've been with the airline for "only" 14 or 15 years. These pilots suffered the effects of 9/11 much more acutely than their senior brethren; many spent months or years on furlough, and they've stagnated in the right seat since. However, their kids were young at the time and are just now getting to the age where they have to pick a career field. Surprisingly, I've flown with three or four younger captains whose kids are actively pursing being an airline pilot. They're either taking flight lessons, are planning to, or are a Private Pilot already, and are selecting an aviation college for their advanced training. All have their parents' enthusiastic support despite the formidable costs involved. Some of this is probably attributable to the upbeat attitude around my airline at the moment. There's a lot of hiring and upgrading going on, the company is making a lot of money, the profit-sharing checks are handsome, and the pilot contract has been slowly inching up towards pre-9/11 levels. My friends at other major airlines report that morale there is considerably worse, understandable since they're all still working through the merger glitches that my airline had to deal with five years ago.

It's made me wonder what I would do if I was sixteen again and looking for a career to pursue, knowing what I know now. When I was sixteen in 1997, the major airline bankruptcies and furloughs were starting to fade from memory, profits and hiring were on the upswing, and Kit Darby was declaring that the biggest pilot shortage in history was right around the corner. I loved flying and thought I was good at it. The idea of flying heavy iron across the world fascinated me. Flight training was a lot of money even then, but I figured the eventual payoff justified it. Had I been able to predict 9/11 and its fallout, had I known that payrates would be gutted and retirements stolen and huge swaths of the domestic networks outsourced to lowest-bidding regional airlines and flown for inferior pay with zero job stability, I'm not sure my decision would have been the same. Had I foreseen it would take 15 years of hard work and low pay and cross-country moves and occasionally dangerous flying to get to the majors, I might not have taken the leap. If my gift of prophecy had included insight into the runaway executive pay in this country coupled with the continuous shrinking of the middle class, I might have gone to business school.

It's probably good I didn't know the future, because I've enjoyed life and flying over the last fifteen years despite the career bumps along the way, and I seem to have arrived at the majors at a good time. But what would I tell a sixteen-year-old version of myself starting out right now? That consolidation has ensured continued profitability and stability at the remaining major carriers for years to come? That the mandatory retirement numbers are incontrovertible and the pilot shortage is real this time? That the upheaval in the regional sector will have played itself out by the time he's qualified and he can expect a more defined, secure career path? Or would I say that the inexorable march of automation has ensured the continual decline of the airline pilot's worth, or that the capacity discipline exhibited by the major airlines of late will attract new entrants and fresh upheaval, or that cabotage is inevitable and the US airline industry will go the way of the US maritime industry? Hell, for all I know airliners could be pilotless in 30 years. By the same token medicine could be automated by then, tort reform may put thousands of lawyers out of work, or the revolution could come and MBAs will swing from every lamppost. I don't know what's going to happen.

I do know this: Aviation has been an unstable, irrational industry since the day Wilbur cracked up on Flight Four and will likely continue to be thus for a long time to come, consolidation be damned. Even in the salad days airline pilots were known to bitch about pay and working conditions, and will continue to do so until they're finally replaced by robots. Very few pilots will have smooth careers from beginning to end. Most of those getting into aviation for money, lifestyle, prestige, or excitement will find one or all of those things lacking at some point in their career, and it may be enough to kill whatever love of flying they had in the first place. For those who love to fly, though, and can't imagine doing else, the joy of flight transcends what's going on in the industry at any given moment. If you are that sort of person, and you can be happy despite low income, birthdays and holidays spent away from family, and uncertainty about the future, you are probably well-suited for a career in aviation. The good news is that at some point along the way, there's a good chance that you'll happen into a sweet well-paid gig that affords a decent lifestyle. As long as those things are considered side benefits, and the flying is the main goal, it's still a pretty decent way to make a living. Of course, if you're an airplane-mad sixteen-year-old like I was, you probably don't need some old codger to tell you that.

Kick It Out?

The following video has been making the rounds on the interwebs, showing a landing on runway 27L at Chicago O'Hare on a windy day last week:

I initially thought the plane was an AA 737, but closer inspection shows it to be a JungleBus operated for AA by Republic Airways. I have about 5000 hours in the airplane and have made my share of crosswind landings up to and including the published demonstrated crosswind limit of 38 knots (one of which was on 27L at ORD, actually). At NewCo this was considered a hard limit inclusive of gusts, and our FAA principal inspector later lowered our limit to 28 knots steady with gusts to 38. The airplane handled crosswinds very well, with more than enough rudder authority even at 38 knots crosswind component, and enough nacelle and wingtip clearance to use proper wing-low crosswind technique. In big wind, you'd start to kick out the crab and establish the aileron input just before beginning the flare, at about 50 feet.

The technique shown in the video has been criticized by some pilots, and it's definitely not ideal (especially considering the crosswind component was only 15-20 knots), but I don't think the landing was nearly as hairy as the video shows. This was shot from a long ways off using a very high-zoom lens, which greatly exaggerates angular differences (note that 27L looks about 4000' long and 400' wide!). I would guess they landed with somewhere around 5-10 degrees of crab - again, not ideal, but likely within design limits for JungleBus' robust landing gear. Looking at the video, it appears that the pilot attempted to kick out the crab late in the landing flare and didn't put in a corresponding aileron input, which rolled the plane a bit left, where the wind caught the upwind wing, so they touched down on the downwind gear while still crabbed.

I think most airlines would prefer the occasional sideloaded landing to a wingtip or nacelle strike, and for this reason many actually teach a wings-level crosswind technique. The idea is to wait until late in the flare and then kick out as much crab as possible just before touchdown; if you time it right, the plane will be aligned with centerline but on the ground before any side drift develops. You still use some upwind aileron, but only enough to hold wings level. This is a commonly taught technique on the 747 and 737 due to low nacelle clearance, on Airbus products due to the flight control software making cross-controlling difficult, and on the CRJ-200 and JungleBus' little brother JungleJet due to low wingtip clearance. I do not know whether Republic teaches the "kick it out" method on the JungleBus or the JungleJets operated by sister company Chautauqua.

In the JungleBus you have 16 degrees of bank before striking a wingtip or a nacelle. The former requires an unusually high pitch and the latter a nose-low attitude. When landing in 38 knots of crosswind, the most bank I ever saw was about 6-7 degrees. You're typically using Flaps 5 with a lot of wind additive, so you're looking at approach speeds of 140-160 knots depending on weight. There's no reason to use the "kick it out" method; the plane sideslips and lands beautifully on the upwind main wheel with perhaps 3/4 rudder deflection and 1/3 aileron deflection on touchdown, and increasing the aileron deflection throughout the landing roll greatly aids in keeping the plane tracking down centerline. It's not very different to how I land the Cub.

The Mad Dog absolutely hates being landed with any crab at all; doing so nearly always results in a nasty bounce and dramatic gyrations as the tires skip across the runway. For this reason my airline teaches a very similar wing-low technique to the one I used in JungleBus, with cross-control inputs made somewhat lower but still fairly early in the landing flare. There is less wingtip clearance on the Mad Dog than JungleBus, and the ailerons are far less effective (they're manually controlled via cables to servo tabs); the control wheel is close to full deflection on touchdown at the crosswind limit of 30 knots. I know this because a few days before the above video, I landed in Atlanta with winds 310 at 38 knots (twice in one day, actually).

It's easy to pile on the pilots in the video above, but I can say that over the course of thousands of landings I've made some real doozies and was just fortunate that no cameras were rolling. The same goes for any professional pilot flying. The pilot may have well been planning on using a wing-low technique but got a last minute sinker and he was just trying to save it from a hard touchdown. The last few seconds before landing get really busy when the winds are howling, and not just because of the crosswind - it's because your airspeed is often bouncing around +/- 10 knots, and you're making fairly dramatic pitch & power changes in response to floaters and sinkers. At the end of the day, this guy landed on centerline, in the touchdown zone, at what looked like a fairly low sink rate, and the plane appeared to handle the sideload fairly well. This was one of the first windy days since last spring, everyone's knocking the rust off, and no doubt we'll all refine our technique considerably as winter approaches.

Almost Home

Besides the better pay, work rules, and benefits, one of the reasons that so many young pilots aspire to fly for one of the remaining legacy network airlines is the variety of flying available to its pilots over the course of their careers. The "Big Three" have large networks covering the US, North America, and the entire world, with a large number of different aircraft types of various sizes, capabilities, makes, and levels of automation. Once the new American Airlines is fully integrated, for example, a newhire may find themselves flying an old-school MD83, a Boeing 737, an Airbus 320/319/321, or an Embraer 190. Moving up, they might fly internationally in a Boeing 757/767, A330, 777, or 787 - or they might stay on domestic narrowbody equipment for better seniority. They might delay upgrade for a better schedule, or they might chase the highest-paying left-seat position available. They might give up a pay raise to hold a base they live in or which features an easier commute. The options are many, and few pilots will make the exact same choices over the course of their career.

Personally I enjoy variety in my flying, which is one of the main things that made me wait out a class date at a legacy carrier rather than trying to get hired at an airline like jetBlue, Southwest, or Alaska. Those are fine companies that treat their pilots well, but they are also (for now) single-fleet operators with narrowbody equipment confined to North America. That's what I'm doing now and that's just fine for a few years, but I can't see doing it my entire career. My current airline has even greater fleet variety than American. Assuming that both my health and the state of the economy and my employer stays strong, I'll hopefully bid to widebody international equipment in a few years, do that until I upgrade on the Mad Dog or similar domestic narrowbody, and eventually go back to international in the left seat. Changing it up will help keep the flying from getting stale over the next 32 years to mandatory retirement (I hope to retire sooner...said every 33-year old pilot ever).

For now I'm just hoping to get home to Minneapolis as soon as possible. There is a Mad Dog base there and it's not really that senior, but there is a huge glut of newhires who happen to be from the Twin Cities who are trying to get home. Among the 2010 hires, I have a several friends who have been trying to get back ever since; they've been commuting to reserve in New York for much of the last four years. Considering this, I was thinking it would be a year or better before I could hold Minneapolis, but nevertheless kept it active in my online vacancy bid. Imagine my surprise when, several months ago, a vacancy award was published that had my name and "MSP Mad Dog FO" on it! Some 19 pilots senior to me and 8 junior to me got back to MSP in the same bid. I talked to a chief pilot shortly afterwards, and he showed me slated for a December 1st "conversion date." I was a bit doubtful; letting 20+ pilots go all at once would decimate the New York base. But as time went on and the December 1st date held firm, I allowed myself a glimmer of hope.

The December category lists were just published - and disappointingly, I'm still in New York, along with most of the senior pilots awarded MSP. The contract gives the company wide discretion on when they chose to convert vacancy awards, and they apparently realized that short-staffing New York immediately before the holidays and the return of winter weather was not in their best interests. That's ok. I know plenty of people forced to commute their entire careers. I'll likely commute again at some point in mine. For now, it's good to know that I'm coming home, and I only have to wait a few more months. For December, I'll be over 50% seniority in the New York Mad Dog base, raising the possibility of holding Christmas off in my very first year. I got Thanksgiving off in November. Minneapolis, like widebody international flying, will be there for me down the road. In the meantime I'm enjoying much better seniority than a probationary pilot would usually dare to hope for.

Out of Touch

I just got back from 10 days of sailing in the British Virgin Islands, attending the 33rd Annual Interline Regatta. It's my third year at the regatta, and was a blast as usual. It had an interesting beginning in that I and several teammates just barely beat Hurricane Gonzalo to the islands, flying to St Thomas on Oct 13th on one of the last flights and then catching the second-to-last ferry between St Thomas and Tortola. We rode out the storm on our charter boats in The Moorings' well-protected base in Road Town, and there it was actually a non-event with a bit of wind and very little rain. It turns out that although the hurricane rapidly intensified to Category II+ on Monday night, it also veered about 60 miles north of its predicted track, and so the BVI were spared though islands further east suffered damage. In St Martin, 37 boats were destroyed at anchor and one mariner aboard was killed.

The last rain bands passed by Tuesday afternoon, and after that it was beautiful weather for the remainder of the regatta, though unusual northwesterly winds prevailed in the storm's wake and faded to light air for the first few days of racing before the southeasterly trades resumed. Our group had three charter boats this year, and I alternated skippering a 41' Beneteau and our 50' Beneteau race boat. This is the third yacht charter I've skippered this year, my sixth sailing excursion since last September totaling some 43 days spent afloat. I'm getting more comfortable with big-boat handling as I gain experience, and have been able to get some of my closest friends and family members hooked on it too. For me, the real attraction of the Interline Regatta is not just the beautiful tropical surroundings or excellent sailing, it is the chance to spend ten days enjoying the company of some of my favorite people in the world, free of the hustle and bustle of everyday life.

It was time exceptionally free of outside distractions this year as my phone steadfastedly refused to connect to BVI voice and data networks, and most wifi connections proved similarly unusable. I'm not sure if it was post-hurricane network snafus or a problem with my phone. I've never had those issues in the BVI before. It didn't bother me much, except that Dawn stayed home this year and our only contact was nightly text messages and one phone call when within range of USVI cell towers on St John. I was also out of contact with Flying's editorial office during a critical stage of the publishing process, which resulted in my December column going to the printer before I had a chance to offer input on proposed changes. My editors will attest that I'm an obsessive perfectionist where the column is concerned - much more than I ever have been with the blog - and so while nobody will ever notice the difference but me, it was a bit frustrating. Lastly, the Yellow Cub Club's president was unsuccessfully trying to get ahold of me. I'll write more about this soon, but we recently sold Cub N77532 as it needed a restoration and few club members were willing to be without a plane to fly for a year or more. We bought a nice 1940 J-3C that was restored in the late 90s with the proceeds, but the club needed someone to fly it back from CVG. I had volunteered, but October proved to be a very bad month considering nearly all my off time was devoted to the regatta. Oh well; another club member is bringing it back in the next few days.

Since coming back from my ten days spent out of touch in the BVI, I've been unusually aware of how many people I see with their faces stuck to their smartphones, oblivious to the people around them. It's the world we live in and it's completely useless to go off on a screed about it. But maybe, just maybe, I'll make the extra effort to leave the phone in my pocket the next few weeks and engage with the real live persons around me. The electronic contacts will be there when I get back to them. But you never know when a potential life-long friend is sitting three feet away from you, just waiting to connect over a shared passion for sailing, motorcycles, travel, or flying.