I just saw this video and had to share it. Apparently, a Cessna 150 landed on a highway in Florida after one of it’s cylinder’s seized up. After making repairs, the owner got FAA permission to take off on the highway! The owner told police that he would need 600 feet for takeoff. I bet some instructor his proud of his short field takeoff instruction!

Here is the link to the story: http://www.wesh.com/news/16634189/detail.html

As reported in this month’s Flying Magazine, the National Weather Association (NWA) is offering a free online weather theory course.   It is designed to help general aviation pilots understand how weather theory affects flying.
When you go to their website (see links below) you will find they currently offer two “modules”  An introduction module and an aircraft performance module.  To begin you download each module to your computer.  You are actually downloading a zip file which contains an executable file that will launch a  Macromedia Shockwave presentation.  Each download is roughly 22 megabytes.  The introduction module goes over:

• Moisture
• Vertical Motion
• Stability

The aircraft performance module goes over…well, how weather affect aircraft performance.

I found both tutorials and courses to be extremely informative and highly educational.   The aircraft performance is very through and goes through many different aircraft performance scenarios and how weather would affect that situation.    I also learned from their website that they are planning on releasing two more courses Aviation Weather Forecasts and Application of Weather Theory.  I look forward to both additional courses.

My only complaints about this course would be that it is advertised as online and really you download the course which makes a “offline” course and also the menu and navigation were a little bit clumsy.  Once you start a section, you can’t stop it.   I actually had to use CTL-ALT-DEL and the task manager to end it when I had to stop it mid course.

You can check it out and review it for yourself at http://www.nwas.org/committees/aviation/WeatherTheory/

Enjoy.  I look forward to hearing your comments about the course.

I was “stumbling” tonight and found a great website that I thought you would enjoy. But first, maybe I should explain what I meant by “stumbling” before you call my AME.

Stumble Upon! is a website and application that allows you by simpling clicking a button “stumble upon” new websites. It is kind of like having a “random” button on the internet but with preferences. When you set up your profile you can say what kind of sites you enjoy and has you begin to stumble upon new sites and approve or disapprove them it creates a preference pattern of what kind of sites you like or dislike compared to what other users with your tastes liked as well.

Ok, so the site I stumbled upon tonight is “the oops list” which is basically a collection of links to photographs of “oops”. What I like about this “opps list” was of course, a lot of the pictures were aviation and aircraft related. This picture of an airliner that landed with it’s parking brake on is an example of the kind of photo you will find on “the oops list”.

You can learn more about Stumble Upon here and here is a link to my stumble profile.

Fly Safe (so you don’t end up with a photograph in the oops list!)