Aviation BS and Photo Thread

Awesome Matt!

 

Headed to San Francisco from Tucson on Sunday and then up to Oregon in Ellie my new 206

 

Nice, weather in this part of the country is pretty nasty until Sunday it looks like

 

Indeed... keeping an eye on it

 

Flying in Alaska outside of Anchorage

 

.. ^^^... That just looks cold ...

 

Any Blackhawk crewchiefs in here? Im about to put my packet in for flight school .. been crewing for a while. Learning all the rules, terminology, etc

 

Just a little bit of a headwind.

 

For those of us that don't know what were looking at can you elaborate what were seeing here?

 

TAS is true airspeed, or how fast the plane is going through the air.
GS is the speed over the ground, or how fast the plane is actually going.
The difference between the two gives you an idea of what the wind is doing. If TAS is higher than GS then you have a headwind (about 130 knots in this case). If GS is higher than TAS then you have a tailwind.

 

From the primary flight display, that is the time in UTC format, temp, and wind reading. It is -58c at that altitude which is -1 degree colder than a standard atmosphere. If the temperature is too warm, performance may suffer and have to descend or if is too cold there is a point when a descent to warmer air is necessary due to bulk fuel temperatures being too cold. 453 knots true airspeed (indicated is about 210 for that profile), 318 over the ground due to a large headwind. 10 knots of headwind in a Cessna 172 is a bummer but over a 130 knots headwind makes for a long day.

Here’s one from another day but going the opposite direction.

 

This what I was trying to figure out. I kind of made sense of the others ........

 

It's been a while since I've been on here, so here's a bit of a photo dump of some of my recent flying

If you've ever wandered what the empty main deck of a 747-400f looks like...



This is from a tech stop (fueling only) in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Those mountains in the background go up to about 16,000 feet. Pretty impressive, even for a guy who lives in Anchorage.



Big beautiful fan on the GENX engine on the 747-8f



Two 747-8 freighters on the ramp in Hong Kong. The one in the foreground is company plane painted in the Polar/DHL livery. The one in the background is a Cathay Pacific plane.



Here is a very roundabout flightplan from Hahn, Germany to Kabul, Afghanistan. Our cargo was munitions in support of the US military and we were not able to fly a number of countries because of the sensitive cargo.



An American Airlines 737-800 takes off behind us in Miami



There's a number of others I was going to try to share, but photobucket is acting up on me.

 

130kt headwind... I usually only go 130kts!

BADASS! Just give up on Photobucket, it went to trash. I heard that a lot of freighters are hiring air force reserve pilots right out of training to fly the 747's all over the world (source: C-5 reserve pilot friend). I would love to do that! How cool would it be to be flying a 747 and a military aircraft within a couple years of graduation? Count me IN!

 

Pilots n Paws mission #2

Two dogs with leg injuries getting transported from a shelter in Memphis to a rehab facility in Denver. I flew the middle leg from Springdale, AR to Pratt, KS. One of the dogs slept the whole flight in my step ladder... and the other was super excited and was looking out all the windows and watching me the majority of the flight

 

Considering how happy most dogs are to be looking out the car window, I can't image the amount of mind-exploding awesomeness aviation must be for dogs.

 

If only they could stick their head out into the air...

 

Nice! I have a dog/airplane story to share. I don't have to type it now, so remind me.

 

Hey glad I found this thread. Been a while since I flown, but its fun to live in the past. Try to post some photos soon. I always carried a camera.